Last week was Mother's Day.

Last week was Mother's Day. Like most people, I thought about my own mother — her sacrifices, her quiet strength, the things she gave up without ever naming them. And then I thought about all the mothers we've forgotten.

Not just mothers of children. Mothers of nations. Of devotions. Of revolutions. Of art forms.

That's why I built this. The Indian Avatars Deck is a 52-card playing deck reimagining the four suits through the lens of Indian womanhood — 52 women, one for every week of the year, so we never run out of women worth remembering.

Each suit honours a different kind of sacrifice:

🪷 Lotus — Devis & Celestial Beings, who held the cosmos together

🦚 Peacock — Poets, Dancers & Artists, who kept culture alive through their bodies and voices

🔱 Trishul — Fierce Goddesses & Mahavidyas, who burned so others could be reborn

🪔 Diya — Warrior Queens & Ranis, who gave up their thrones, their safety, and their lives Link to Project: https://app.melius.com/projects/6244900a-b6a4-4d2e-ba93-43ef3646ba89/canvas/58d5b51e-2d73-4396-abd6-bcc0e4b24730

My Process:

Concept & Research: My own research and Claude.

Design System — Built a unified visual grammar in Melius: each suit has its own fixed palette, border motif, symbolic objects, and lighting mood — so the deck reads as one cohesive object, not 52 separate images.

My Experience with Melius:

I came to Melius as a first-time user with an ambitious idea — 52 cards, four visual systems, historical women spanning 2,000 years of India. On any other platform, the sheer coordination of that would have broken the project before it began.

What Melius gave me was a canvas where the whole thing could live at once. I could see the deck as a system, not just card by card. The agent handled the parts that would have taken days — brief generation, visual consistency checks, prompt iteration — so I could stay focused on the parts only I could do: the curation, the storytelling, the choice of which moment in a woman's life deserved to be frozen forever.

This deck exists because Melius made it possible in an afternoon. That still surprises me.