Food!

 It was World Food Day a couple of days ago. This year's focus is water as an important resource for food production. We take a lot of it for granted - whether it is water or food. Even in a country like India where a huge part of the population goes hungry every day, those who are blessed with plenty tend to forget that we need to ensure everyone gets to eat. After all, food is one of the great pleasures of life - something we need as well as want. It could be a big unifying force in this broken world. If only we all took the time to have a meal with people. My extended family can talk about food A LOT - and it does seem like we often live to eat.

Which is why it surprised me that I hardly had any posts about food. I have 3 old ones - all done during covid-19. So I suddenly decided to do one with food from my part of the world. When people abroad think Indian food, unfortunately most of them only seem to know "naan bread" and "chicken tikka masala" or "curry" and "biryani". South Indian food is in a league of its own. South Indian breakfast is comfort food. Sambar is life. I wanted to do a bunch of my favourites from these regions - like parotta and beef, idiyappam, etc but finally decided on a simple idli dosa vada combo.

The Shark Podcast: Episode 2

 

Bob does not think it is right to complain about masks being an inconvenience. There are people actually struggling to breathe because there isn't any oxygen in many hospitals in India. So when people outside are still taking things lightly, it makes us wonder if our apathy deserves a wake-up call. 

When it rains, it pours.

 

It's been a rough few months since I last posted. It's hard to draw when the situation in my country is heartbreaking. The covid-19 pandemic has taken an extreme turn with this new wave - you need to turn on the news (preferably not Indian media) to get a picture of the suffering and despair. And it's getting closer and closer. 

My good friend at Sharktopia encouraged me to draw something to resonate with that pain. So I took a drawing I did at Christmas and made a sort of "how it's going" drawing. It seems like a bleak drawing but we've always found ways to see hope in the midst of storms, rain and floods. As much as people are disillusioned and apathetic, there's something about human suffering that brings out the humanity in us (except for the ruling regime). Blessings come in showers and mercies come in a downpour. I hope we see much of that soon. Pray for India. 

The Real Jewels of India

I've been wanting to draw more of Indian animals for a while because a) they're spectacular, b) they're rare, c) they're fun to draw.
I pushed myself to attempt a collage of all the animals at once. After a month of prep, reading up on all the animals unique to India and studying various sources, I tried this. It came out better than I thought considering that I have no experience in this sort of art. It also inspired me to get a bit serious about wildlife and natural history illustration.
The animals focused on in this artwork are (see if you can spot them):
1. Nilgris Tahr
2. Indian Bison/ Gaur
3. Nilgai/ Blue Bull
4. Swamp deer/ Barasingha
5. Indian Rhino
6. Great Indian Hornbill
7. Lion-tailed Macaque
8. Malabar Squirrel
9. Indian Elephant (also found in other places but didn't want to leave it out)
10. Civet cat (I was going for the Malabar Civet which is believed to be extinct)
11. Malabar Whistling Thrush
12. Brown Palm Civet Cat
13. Nilgris Flycatcher
14. Indian Pangolin
15. Four-horned antelope
16. Spotted deer/ Chital
17. Black Ibis
18. Emerald Pigeon
19. Royal Bengal Tiger
20. Crimson-backed sunbird
21. Dhole/ Wild dog/ Chen nai
22. Indian Pitta
23. Nilgris Marten
24. Sloth Bear
25. Indian Peacock
26. Black Buck
27. Gharial
28. Great Indian Bustard
29. Asiatic Lion
30. Black langur
31. Hoolock Gibbon
32. Sambar deer
33. Ganges river dolphin
34. Malabar grey hornbill
35. Sparrow hawk

Chennai will rise again!

Some of you may not have heard much about the Chennai (Madras) Floods. I was mercifully spared from the worst of it because I had to leave the city a couple of days before the rains started. I heard from friends that the water levels were rising. Something like this happened in 2005 and we didn't have power for 2 days. But it wasn't as bad as this one. People had water levels reaching up to the first floor of their houses. Many of them didn't have power, food, medicines, transport or drinking water. There was no way to get out of their houses and soon communication devices died. This would have been a hopeless and miserable situation. Then something amazing happened. Everyone reached out to each other. Homes were opened up. Food shared. Amazing people braved the flooded roads to get people out. Stories after stories poured in about how every available resource for used for the victims. The 'victims' became volunteers themselves. When disaster strikes, the beauty of humanity gets the chance to shine through. And the people of Chennai grabbed that chance with both hands. I'm so proud of them. Chennai will rise from the waters.
I hope the cause for such destruction will be discovered and if man-made, they will fix it. I also hope that once the city is restored, the people will continue to strengthen the bonds that were built and that they will make the city even better.

International Day Of The Girl 2014

I just got an email from "It's a Girl" telling me that 11th October is the International Day Of The Girl. I had an idea of having the cutout paper doll and the original sketch had the shark smiling. But the truth about is not something to smile about. Too many young girls are missing all over the world and it's time this atrocity ended.
Also see "The Invisible Girl" Project.

Girl Arise: Safety Ideas #1

This was done for the "Girl Arise" safety campaign by Women of Worth. It's not fair that we need to take so many safety measures but sadly there are twisted people out there. And safety should never be an inconvenience. Do your best to stay safe and keep thinking up new ways to stay safe because the sick people out there keep thinking of new ways to make the world unsafe.

Raise the bar on safety today!

Redefining Beauty

People shouldn't have the right to dictate what’s “good” when it comes to beauty because they get bored with anything they call beautiful today and set new standards and everyone is expected to keep up with it. And it’s not fair when the expectations are unrealistic. Everyone’s different. Some claim to be “differenter” or want to be “differenter”. But at the end of the day most people want to fit in or belong and if they’re given vain criteria to do so, it ends up hurting them on so many levels.

It's sad that the idea of beauty has been distorted so much. It’s not surprising though – humans have a great knack of taking any good thing and warping it into an “anti” version. Then they crib about how awful everything is and come up with other warped up ideas as attempts to make things better. Like the whole system of dark skinned people not being as good as lighter skinned people – now they’re actually coming with products to “help” the darker skinned people become lighter skinned so that, you know, everything can be better.
So, which is easier to change - The Heart or The Skin? They’re both organs. They both are prone to disease. But in some way, the heart seems to make people behave a certain way or help convince the brain that certain things are right or wrong. It could be the heart that convinces people that its fellow organ, the skin, doesn’t define a person as much as the heart does. It’s the deceptive heart that tells you otherwise. Which brings us back to the question – do some people really have to change their skin just so that the rest of them need not have a change of heart?

Cartoon and post done for Women of Worth (WOW) as part of their "Redefining Beauty" campaign. 

International Whale Shark Day!

The Wildlife Trust of India told me about International Whale Shark day (August 30th) and asked if I could do a couple of sketches for them. They have a Whale shark conservation project in Gujarat (I need to go check it out someday) and I did these as part of a "Whale Sharks in Gujarat" idea.

Say 'No' to stupidity and colourism!

Even though we don't like to admit it and like to keep pretending that we're a country of mosaic culture united in diversity, India is one of the biggest practitioners of apartheid in the world. There will be a multitude of people who will get all "offended" or "angered" by my statement and may get all hostile but that's how we tend to avoid issues. We get angry at those who point out the issue than at the issue itself. Whoever established this mindset has very conveniently allowed things like discrimination, low self-esteem and exploitation to go unchecked.
How else can a country with one billion skin tones continue to be the largest market for skin whitening creams? And a country where people actually believe these products work! You cannot change your skin colour from a deeper shade of brown to a paler version of pink. It just cannot happen. No cosmetic product can do that. Maybe if you tried acid?
There are people with actual skin problems who are in need of proper skin care; and in India, sun screen is probably a better product to sell. I'm shocked that they could package a mix of sun screen and bleach and sell it as a "fairness cream" - how blatantly offensive is that? Whatever happened to respect and allowing people to succeed based on skill rather than skin? At what point does skin colour go from being "successful" to not? Is there some logical cutoff shade with a pantone code perhaps?
"Dark is beautiful" is a campaign that talks about this discrimination against skin colour. They are currently campaigning against irresponsible advertising and propaganda that promote the idea that your skin colour determines how successful you are to be. Please sign the petition here if you believe that India needs to get over this so-called hangover we're still suffering from after The Raj. It's been over 60 years. Move forward.

To view the commercial click here - it's sad when such influential celebrities promote such an idea. This ad agency needs some real creativity and some integrity.

The trouble with arranged marriages

So, I did it again. I entered another contest - wrote an actual blog post and even did this comic for it and everything! This time it wasn't really for the prizes but I've written so much about a related topic that I felt I simply had to.

It's an interesting and tricky subject because while "arranged" marriages seem to work oftentimes and end up disastrous at other times (as do "love" marriages) people see it as the opposite of choice. People are being set up with other people by other people all over the world but nobody refers to that as being "arranged", do they? I guess it's gotten the reputation of being forcibly set up by two families who see it as if it's like a profitable breeding of livestock.
If you ask me for the link to the article the shark is reading, I'll probably be vague about it.

Independent, are we?

Yes, we Indians sincerely love flattering other people's ideas (read: imitating). Today is our Independence Day and I wasn't really going to do a post but then I was reminded to pray for my country and thought "hmm, what needs to change?". I'm probably too much of a coward to say everything in the politically incorrect terms I thought them in but here are some of them. I feel that a country that fought so hard to win freedom and has the kind of resources it has, ought to be a super-power by now. But it seems far from it and our biggest obstacle is ourselves.
We simply don't care probably because we don't see change overnight and then get discouraged. We may not see change in our lifetime but we're still supposed to do everything that is right for each other and for the land we call ours. Then we can extend it across the globe and we'll be one united world fit for war against the aliens.

Colourful Chennai Stories

I did these sketches for a friend to help with her non-profit project. I was asked to portray India (Chennai, in particular) in my own creative way. I had no idea where to start but luckily my friend mentioned the heat, the autorickshaws and the monsoon season. I'm not a particularly patriotic (I would rather not spit/piss on my country than protest evil culture-destroying things like coca-cola) person but I felt a tiny bit fonder of this city by the end of my post.

It is crazier than usual in Madras (that's how some still refer to Chennai) during the rains. I ventured out once on a particularly bad night praying I don't drive my car into one of our giant man-holes or open sewers. Turns out, I only do that when it isn't raining and everything is perfectly visible.

The Autorickshaw experience in Madras is not entirely fun because bargaining with the driver usually changes your mood from excited to foul. There's something that resembles a fare meter in all autos but don't be fooled - they're just ornamental. Most auto drivers drive like they're in "Whacky races". The day we watched "Herbie fully loaded", we suspected that our driver had watched it too because he was like Speed Racer on Redbull.

Then there's the summer heat. I spent every summer while growing up in Madras. It was never as bad as it is these past few years. The tall apartment buildings probably block the sea breeze and the excess use of air-conditioners & refrigerators probably add to the heat - it can only get worse. It doesn't stop anyone from being out and about - I'm starting to think nothing can stop people from being out and crowding up every single spot in the city.

Having said all that, Madras is my favourite city in India. Many will roll their eyes and be like "Chennai?? it's not as cool as Bombay or Bangalore! Nothing good ever comes to Chennai!". They should all just move to the above said cities, right? I think Madras has a great balance of tradition, modernity and uniqueness. It's safe (compared to most cities in North India or so I've heard) and I suppose we have many resources that we take for granted.
Despite my angst at autodrivers, I've come across my share of honest ones who drive back all the way to return forgotten mobile phones or laptops. The monsoon rains are awesome to watch while sitting in your veranda and drinking tea. And the heat...well, it just makes cool things a lot cooler.

And the #1 cause for over-population is...

There are some "auspicious" months in a year when most households get flooded with wedding invites. People bring them with an odd sort of apologetic smugness with the compulsive need to ask us when it's our turn. And every time we get a new invite, my mother sighs because she probably feels that we're like some sort of rebels or freaks of society refusing to pay wedding dues or something, wondering when the revolution will end so that we too can shove these cards in people's faces. 

I, on the other hand, look at the sheer quantity of them and think "If there's ever a society in the world that probably needs to NOT get married and procreate, it's this one". 

Everyone seems almost confounded to see a zillion people at the cinema, malls, parks, beaches but they still continue to play out the above dialogues regularly in their lives!  [okay, so I may have exaggerated a teensy bit on the above scenarios]. 

I'm sorry if this offends anyone (I don't think The Shark cares though). 

Maybe this ought to be taught alongside Physics.

I'd done this one some time before Women's day - I think Dowry's still an issue in India despite the laws against it. It takes more than laws to change the minds of people. I've heard school boys saying it's okay if they bum around because eventually they can just live off their dowry income. I've heard people saying they want brides from certain communities because the parents of girls from there compete with each other to give more money to whoever will take their daughter. Yeah, it's simply amazing how so many things have been manipulated from being beneficial to women to being against them.
Anyway, I'd helped out at a Women's day event with the Women of Worth and they had this "Wall of Change" where anyone could write about things women have accomplished or things that needed to change. There were several notes about getting rid of the dowry system. I know that more and more people find it disgusting (yay!) but we still have a long way to go.

Public message #2: Driving & Road rules

There are a lot of things that annoy me about the way we treat our country. Like the lack of respect for public property, other people, natural beauty and resources. It's as if we Indians have started settling for less than what we ought to be. I was on the train recently and there were cockroaches everywhere and no one seemed to be bothered. People piss on our roads and spit everywhere as if they are unaware that people usually spit on something they are disgusted with. 

Does India come with a big sign that says "Spit here"? (I need to do a doodle for that!)

How did we reach that state of mind where we allow our quality of life to be this pathetic?

Anyway, as I was saying, a lot of things about our attitudes annoy me. One of them is the absolutely stupid and unbelievably disrespectful way we treat our roads and driving.  I mean, some of them actually are in a hurry to be organ donors! (Not an original line - stole it from my dad). Since I use my comic to vent, here goes. 

I'm not insulting India, just us Indians. We need to stop insulting India. How's this for a belated Republic day message?

ps - I don't know how the shark suddenly got to teach as if in a classroom. I thought the glasses would make it look smart!