In December 2025, the Works in Progress team reached out to us, offering an ad slot in their upcoming issue. Now, Alt Carbon is very Progress Studies-coded– we even launched an Indian response to WIP (generously supported by Emergent Ventures). So for us, this was a great opportunity to tell the story of Indian progress.
How do we tell a beautifully illustrated story about progress, & India's role in making it happen. Something that Indians can be proud of. That @WorksInProgMag readers would find novel & thought provoking.
The Room Before the Idea
The first step– conceptualisation. Multiple brainstorming, vibecoding, & pitching sessions with the Climate Studio (our internal brand & comms team) followed. Here are some ideas we considered, but didn't make the cut:
Option 1: The India Tech Stack as a Miniature Painting– Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker as the visual subject was the most obvious choice. The IMF, in its June 2025 report, declared UPI the world's largest retail fast-payment system by transaction volume. UPI recorded 129.3 billion transactions, 49% of global real-time digital transaction volumes. These systems are transformative, and the UPI is a fantastic testament to progress in India — indigenously developed, globally renowned.
India gave a billion people a unique digital ID, then built a free, instant, interoperable payments network on top of it — and in doing so moved more money digitally in a single month than Americans do through Zelle, Venmo, and PayPal combined. A vegetable cart and in Calcutta and a multinational in Bangalore now share the same financial rails. Together they form what's called "India Stack," created in-house by Indians, now being exported to the world.
Option 2: The Bengal Renaissance meets School of Athens failed more because of the platform we were exhibiting on & the narrative target we set out, rather than the idea itself. The original seduction was to invert the School of Athens, a central image of Western intellectual life. By doing so, we could tell the longue duree story of an Indian intellectual renaissance that catalysed Indian independence.
As tempting as this idea was, we decided not to go-ahead with it– we thought its important to make it more contemporary (we still love this idea; watch this space for more).
Option 3: A speculative future, inspired by, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, came from our own field work doing CO2 removal in Darjeeling. It was the pitch that most strongly resembled Alter Magazine’s actual editorial sensibility; speculative, but grounded in science. It was also strange enough to grab a reader’s attention. But was this the best way to introduce the magazine to an alien audience? Hmm, not convinced. For an audience encountering Alter for the first time, it would have read as surrealist ornament rather than encapsulating the Indian progress story. Our advisory board of friends agreed.
A speculative future, inspired by, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, came from our own field work doing CO2 removal in Darjeeling. It was the pitch that most strongly resembled Alter Magazine’s actual editorial sensibility; speculative, but grounded in science. It was also strange enough to grab a reader’s attention. But was this the best way to introduce the magazine to an alien audience? Hmm, not convinced. For an audience encountering Alter for the first time, it would have read as surrealist ornament rather than encapsulating the Indian progress story. Our advisory board of friends agreed.
Reimagined through an Indo-futurist lens, we explore the idea of the Wanderer through a range of visual metaphors, from the silhouette of zero to the rope-and-wood swing, a familiar rhythm of everyday life in India, set against a speculative future.
Several other ideas circulated.
30 different kinds of hands building an India, progress written in 200 languages, an iconic currency note, and each stalled at some version of the same problem: it was missing that je ne sais quoi.
Then, Satyendra Nath Bose happened. We read a newly published essay in Aeon (God bless great magazines), and suddenly our creative juices were on overdrive. But before we got to design, we needed to build our concept thoroughly.
The Man Who Saw Light
In 1924, working as a physics lecturer at the University of Dhaka, SN Bose derived a new mathematical description of how light quanta (photons) behave (more on this shortly). He wrote the paper up and submitted it to the Philosophical Magazine. They rejected it.
He then sent it to Albert Einstein. Recognising its significance, Einstein translated it into German, and arranged for its publication in Zeitschrift für Physik with his own extension of the method to material particles. What Bose had derived independently became, through that publication, the Bose-Einstein statistics.
Bose's key insight was this: photons — particles of light — are indistinguishable from one another. Classical physics had treated particles like people in a crowd, each one individual. Bose said photons aren't like that at all: multiple photons can pile into the exact same quantum state at the same time. And when they do, something entirely new emerges that no single photon could produce alone.
This is why lasers work. In a laser, enormous numbers of photons are coaxed into the same state — same direction, same wavelength, same phase. Photons work by gathering.
Ideas Are Like Bosons
To understand how ideas shape progress, it's worth studying the works of Joel Mokyr– the latest Nobel Laureate for Economics.
Mokyr studied Progress. In his book, The Enlightened Economy, he documents how the entanglement of ideas spurred innovation. From philosophers and engineers, to merchants and manufacturers, ideas were translated into capital, characterised by the intellectual environment of Glasgow and Edinburgh in that period. He argues that the density and diversity of that environment was a precondition for the technological output that followed.
The best example of this is the steam engine. Joseph Black, a scientist at the University of Glasgow, made a breakthrough discovery about heat — specifically, that heat can be absorbed by matter without any change in temperature. James Watt worked in the same building. He got access to Black's idea, and used it to build a far more efficient steam engine. That engine powered the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine didn't come from one lone genius, but the gathering of ideas.
From the Scottish Enlightenment to the Italian Renaissance to the Arab Nahda to the Bengal Renaissance, magazines and pamphlets have provides a space for the gathering of ideas. To make progress. That's what inspired Alter Magazine as well.
https://x.com/SparshAgarwall/status/1991417904332771725/video/1
Bose, Bosons, Beauty
The visual problem was precise: represent Bose, represent the physics of bosons, and hold a register that acknowledges the historical weight of the man without placing him in the past tense.
This last requirement shaped the rejection of five to seven initial concepts. The versions that failed did so because they tipped toward elegy — they made Bose's image beautiful in the way that portraits of historical figures are beautiful, which is to say they made him available for admiration from a distance. Some executed the boson logic correctly but lost the specificity of his face inside the light. Others held his features clearly but rendered the physics as decoration rather than as a description of something real about how his work operated in the world.
Our design language at Alter is built around fine, tight concentric circles; a syntax designed for surrealist nature-based storytelling. We developed it deliberately as a marker of a futuristic, abundance coded-world. The challenge was to showcase that the bosonic condition is not a collection of dots, or particles, but a field of radiating intensity where wavefunctions share a state of particles. The image needed to be felt.
In the version that held, Bose sits forward in a posture of concentration. Through his figure, the light streams move in overlapping regions of colour whose interference is the visual argument. The concentric circles run across his form, giving the image its structural coherence that is our style. The background is deep black: the register of the image is the register of physics at its most fundamental, which happens in conditions of near-total darkness, and is made legible only through the signals that emerge from it.
The headline runs at the base of the frame: Bosons change the world by gathering. So do ideas.
Read more stories about South Asian science, technology, & progress at Alter Magazine.
Thank you to the Works in Progress team.