New Delhi, June 1 -- The covid-19 pandemic pushed us to the brink of an abyss-and the abyss stared back with a multitude of answers. Some discovered a lifeline in baking sourdough bread. Others found solace in rustling up dalgona coffee. Siddharth Nair, lawyer-turned-artist, found his refuge in creating a series of profound yet funny ink-and-watercolour sketches and posting them on his Instagram handle @asiddababa.

A selection of these 500-odd images has just been published as a book, Existential Ants (Hachette India, 112 pages, Rs.599), complete with pithy captions that work across multiple registers-philosophical, political, and often deeply personal. Like the animals in Aesop's Fables, the crows, cows, bugs, bears and other creatures ...