THE PERFECT MATCH

What do a film poster, a coconut tree, and a tractor have in common? For collector Asif Kureshi, they're not just pop culture icons—they're tiny portraits of India, printed on the country's most disposable canvas: the matchbox

- By Sharan Sanil

The dissection of Asif Kureshi's collection doesn't begin with gods, tigers or lightbulbs—the usual suspects on Indian matchboxes—but with three stark letters: CID. Printed on a small cardboard sleeve sometime in the 1950s, likely to ride the wave of B R Chopra's noir thriller of the same name, the box carried not just a name but a mystery. A random numerical code ran along one edge, possibly a printer's leftover, possibly a hidden clue. For Asif, it was proof that matchboxes in India have always been more than firestarters. They were cultural snapshots—cheap, anonymous, and yet deeply expressive of their time.

He grew up in Talaja, a small town near Bhavnagar in Gujarat, where his affection for these little boxes began not in a shop but on a playground. On hot afternoons, when the weather made cricket impossible, the children played card-style games with matchbox covers. “Whoever matched the visuals won the pile,” he remembers. The game turned into an obsession; he began rescuing discarded boxes off the street, drawn to their miniature worlds of colour and type. Like many collectors, he lost his first stash to a well-meaning parent. “My mother thought it was junk,” he laughs. “When I left for college, she threw them all away.”

But the habit refused to die. Studying visual arts at MSU and later design at NID, Asif found himself returning to matchboxes again and again, now with a designer's eye. What began as a childhood fixation quietly turned into a lifelong pursuit.

India's Most Ubiquitous Canvas