Journalism of Courage
After the Cool Japan festival in Mumbai and Comic Con in Delhi,cosplay in India is picking up as a trend
Mumbai-based Reetam Majumder,a 25-year-old,spent all of July,bent over plans for the perfect costume. He began by first researching the character,looking at images of the character from different angles,designing the costume and finally finding all the materials and a tailor willing to take on the challenge of recreating a Japanese costume. After a month of slaving over his designs,Majumder is finally satisfied with the result a faultless replica of the character,Kurosaki Isshin from the Japanese manga and anime series,Bleach. Earlier this year,Pune’s IT professional Daniel Victor spent a week figuring out his costume for the character Monkey D Dragon,from another hit manga series,One Piece.
It all exploded when the Cool Japan festival was organised in Mumbai in March this year. Fans like me have always waited for a chance to go all out in a cosplay event. The scale of the event was mind-boggling. Not only were there hundreds of people attending,they were all very serious about their cosplay and had put a lot of thought into their costumes, says Victor.
Visual media like comics,cartoons,video games,Japanese manga and anime art and even regular television shows and movies – all have characters which fascinate fans and are often larger than life. Take Superman,the flying hero from the eponymously titled comic series. Or the Mad Hatter from the movie Alice in Wonderland or Ichigo Kurosaki,from the manga Bleach. Fans all over the world have found a novel way to pay homage to their idols costume playing. Fans buy,order or create costumes that help them bring these characters to life and wear these costumes at costume play or cosplay events. While this trend has been around in Japan and the West for quite some time,India too is catching up.
Costumes for cosplay are notoriously difficult to procure and can be an expensive and time consuming process. This explains why Akanksha Sachan,a second year design student in Kolkata,has been inundated by calls from friends begging her to make them costumes for the approaching Comic Con Express events,on September 8 9 in Mumbai and October 20 21. So many people are asking me to make costumes for them and it is all at such short notice that it’s not really possible to humour all of them. However,I’d love to do this professionally later on, she says.
