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Journalism of Courage
Found in the blogosphere: a new desi bunch who would rather draw than rant. Enter the world of visual blogs.
No content restriction and an infinite canvas. What more can an artist ask for but a good idea? Making most of the space of the Internet is the worldwide community of bloggers. Some, though, aren8217;t interested in ranting or comment. They would rather draw.
Like Saad Akhtar, a National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad alumni, who works at a software company in Delhi as a design manager and the owner of flyyoufools.com, one among a handful of sketch blogs created by Indians. 8220;flyyoufools.com is a three month old venture. The idea struck me five months ago. It has a general focus, a look at the irritants of life, as the tagline says. There is no fixed topic of discussion,8221; he says. Saad uses photographs of family, friends or complete strangers that he has taken and opens a bubble over their heads and pours out his thoughts.
There is one post which uses a man8217;s thoughtful face. 8220;The photo of the man thinking, was of a guy at a dhaba. I don8217;t even know who that guy is I just used his photograph. And I have been using it over and over, since it is funny. And goes with the captions.8221; Saad says a lot through that single photograph. With over 1,000 clicks per day, flyyoufools.com is fairly popular.
The address for most of these graphics is publishing systems like Blogger or WordPress. Free publishing is the only saviour for this budding talent. Though many have gotten themselves a website, maintaining it is not everyone8217;s cup of tea.
Another blog is a very Dilbertish cartoon panel made by Anshul Maheshwari from Delhi. On brainstuck.com, Anshul gives his own sketchy version of office water cooler conversations and bored boardroom meetings. Though not rib-tickling funny, Anshul is still trying to get a character fixed for his cartoon posts. He claims he can draw around six to seven cartoons in half an hour. 8220;I am consistent with the characters I draw. There is no influence of Dilbert. I read over 100 comics and I guess there are some similarities there, but I am primarily inspired by insanity,8221; he says.
Speaking of which, how does this grab you? 8220;He is a non-regular guy who turned 25 in late July this year. Before he started working as a consultant, he used to dig pits in IIT Madras, along the roads of the hostel zone. He was kicked out of the place, with a B.Tech in Civil and an M. Tech in Infrastructural Civil Engineering.8221; This is the description of the owner of vatsap.com, a site run by ex-IITian Amrit Vatsa, who along with his regular blog entries also posts what he calls, 8216;Shitoons8217;. Eggs talk to each other, a ventriloquist uses a doll to abuse people.
Vatsa is based in Bhubaneshwar as a consultant with Price Waterhouse Coopers and has been posting since November last year. 8220;Bloggers tend to rant and keep talking about their problems non-stop on their blogs. I take a rant and an observation and make a cartoon out of it. So it is not personal anymore and it is also funny. It is a nice way of telling a joke, just a graphic representation of a thought.8221;
Vatsa says he has stopped counting the number of views he gets for his website since it 8216;took up too much time8217; and is addictive too. 8220; The cartoons are purely for my satisfaction. I am a dull, boring engineer and this is what I do on the side.8221; The reason he calls them 8216;shitoons8217; is because 8220;after that, any thing else said about the toons is just praise8221;. Vatsa8217;s tools are a simple paint application and basic Photoshop on his PC though he plans to get a Tablet PC to draw his toons.
But it is not all random doodles. Ramkrishna Bellur from Bangalore likes to keep politics as a focal point for the cartoons that he posts on bellurramki18.wordpress.com/category/cartoons/. This 32-year-old advertising professional has been drawing cartoons and posting them online on his WordPress blog for the last year. 8220;The response has been amazing. I get around 1,200 hits per day. I do this just for kicks. It is not for commercial purposes. After my father passed away, when I was a child, my mother insisted I keep drawing after she saw I was interested in it.8221;
Bellur8217;s are single-panel sketches. One shows Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush with the words nuclear deal on top, jumbled up to form 8220;UNCLEAR deal8221;. Another shows Ram asking Laxman to get someone to blog about the Setu being built between India and Sri Lanka, 8220;lest someone thinks it8217;s a farce!8221;
The world of Indian sketch blogs is still young. But as Vatsa says, 8220;In a few years, a lot of such blogs or even webcomics will come up from India. It is not the lack of ideas, but the lack of skill that8217;s the problem. Most don8217;t know how to make their websites snazzy or give their illustrations a push. But we will see more sites like ours.8221;
