The Origin Story

It started with a walk.

A heritage walk along Mowbray’s Road, which ended at my old school, The Grove. Standing on the campus I once knew as my second home, my perception shifted. My own memories felt like a single thread in a much larger, older story that this place had been holding long before I arrived.

When you revisit a place with that kind of historical weight, your memories rearrange themselves.

I started seeing the life and times of people from a bygone era, the stranger-than-fiction stories of state-making and political thought that were played out on the very ground I was standing on.

The idea of us living in and amongst history opened a realm of possibility. I wanted to understand where I live, not as haphazardly placed sticky notes of information, but as things have evolved over time.

So I began arranging events as they happened, in search of the story I wanted to tell. I was scribbling on various chits of paper, losing them, finding them and constantly rearranging.

And then it clicked – I had a game about history hiding in plain sight. And that’s how Anniki was born.

Since then, we at Anniki have kept our habit of noticing. Every city trip becomes fieldwork and random anecdotes become potential game material. It is mostly exhilarating, and occasionally exasperating.

If you’ve ever walked past an old building and felt the faint pull of a story you couldn’t quite name — this was made for you.

Delightfully, this project on history has made us more present than ever. We’re building it in the hope that it will do the same for you.

Mission : To anchor a shared space for history that is rooted in conversations, observations, and curiosity.

Vision : To revive history for the present day

Sashna Chandrasekharan
(Flounder & Sea Eeyore)

Sashna is an urbanist and researcher who deeply believes in the magic of collaborative approaches to knowledge creation. Her research interests are in identifying and presenting unique stories about places – ones that explore how their social, cultural, historical, economic, geographic particularities intersect with daily realities. On “off-duty” she follows the paws of her first and forever inspiration, Remy from Ratatouille, spending her time in the kitchen crafting unusual flavour combinations. The people around her often become her food lab rats and she enjoys the collective spirit built around the exchange. 

Joel is a Chennai-based data scientist with a background in healthcare and supply chain management, guitarist, and creative. Having felt estranged from his Tamil identity as a child, his journey with Anniki has been a personal one – a process of rediscovering and reclaiming that part of himself while sharing the experience with others. In his free time, he enjoys hooping, watching anime, and jamming with friends. 

Vibha Ramprakash
(Keeper of Historical Vibes)

Vibha is a marketer, designer, and history nerd who treats the past like a very elaborate story. After studying English lit and art history at Ashoka, she developed a permanent case of “historical FOMO”—an itch to experience what people ate, wore, built, and gossiped about a few centuries ago.

Outside work, she’s usually somewhere between a fantasy novel, a batch of brownies, a long walk, and a fresh to-do list. Her happiest place is a library on a rainy night, with pastries on the side and green tea in hand. For Vibha, history is not a list of dates; it’s a collection of stories we haven’t yet lived. This game is her way of making those stories feel fun, accessible, and just a little bit magical again.

Heera Lilian Selvakumar
(Algorithm Whisperer) 

Heera is a writer and content strategist with a background in English lit. 

Growing up outside India, she rarely engaged with Indian or Tamil history and often felt a fractured sense of identity. She is now excited to delve into her heritage whilst brainstorming ideas & creating content for Anniki. 

In her downtime, she loves doing puzzles, playing cosy video games and listening to spooky podcasts that inevitably keep her up at night.

FRIENDS OF ANNIKI

Inara

Annikum Innikum, fashion, art and history pudikum.

Dhruv

Dhruv is a delulu Pisces sun. While trained as a historian and a city planner, his primary occupation is as a coffee aficionado (read: snob). A marathon / long-distance runner, Dhruv is a masochistic glutton for punishment who doubles down on this identity by listening to 2000’s emo music, carnatic rock, and Taylor Swift besides a wide range of podcasts and audiobooks in his “free time”.