"Did you take a bath today?", asks mom. April, 2013.
It all began as small tidbits of conversation I had with my mother. For about 5 years, I stayed in a hostel (IIT Bombay), and used to spend a considerable of time talking to my parents on phone every night, as a post-dinner ritual. The phone almost drenched in sweat, and there were only a number of things you can ask about before you run out of things to say. Yet the ritual was performed with sanctity everyday, pretty consistently.
By the time I was in my 2rd year in college (this would be around 2013), I had joined the Facebook page IIT Chronicles (started by Jim Matthew in 2010), and was getting comfortable making minimal cartoons about IITians, engineers, bachelors and the Indian education system. I would start making something that would directly stem from personal experiences. The one above would be the first one to be made. I would draw the character probably as a slimmer version of me, hanging around the hostel wing in plain vest (something that my wing-mate pointed out to me). I drew a basic pen and ink drawing of a lady cooking, and a front & profile of a teenager, which I cleaned up in Photoshop and re-used a ridiculous number of times.
The initial topics were, as expected, the basic issues, the basic amenities - hostel food, grades and the petty issues of what parents wilfully expect college life is about. And the audience seem to have connected, with a steady growth in the number of likes. The format of the cartoon, a 3 panel strip (and one title card in white over black), in a strict structure, proved to be quite effective for me, who was lazy in regards to drawing and executing from scratch. The structure would roughly be as follows -
1) A typical mom-like question (What Mom Says),
2) internal sarcastic answers to the question (What I Say to Myself), and finally
3) a faith-affirming inconsequential reply to the question (What I Say to Mom).
As I grew more confident after receiving a positive response to the series (the first of its kind on the page), I could make longer ones, with repetition in panels, and tackling slightly more emotional topics, especially those around the mother-son bonding (say, wishing Mother's Day).
I added a paper texture to the background later, to brighten up the posts from the drab white background of the Facebook timeline, and had a slightly better understanding of readability of text within the panels.
Eventually, as commonplace subjects started getting exhausted, and the limitation of the structure was becoming evident, the posts started to get fewer in number. But the nature of the relationship depicted and the format of the conversation, had (and still has) quite immense possibilities and a certain emotional connect. And when tragedies strike, there are only a few people left to talk with.
As I went into my later college years, and eventually graduated and moved towards a job, the subject matter started reflecting my surroundings.
And as I entered a job, and eventually went for higher studies again, I developed a considerable distance from the IIT structure, and there is a certain distance, an unwanted maturity that enters your relationship with your parents and friends that doesn't allow you to ask such mundane questions again.
Facebook readership has also become considerably inorganic, and thus it doesn't seem to be the best platform for the occasional cartoonist/humorist. But, time and again, a small spark of a conversation would happen to me, or I would come across something that happened to a friend of a friend, which would we still get me back to make one more post.
I hope this continues for a considerable time to come.
Do visit the page IIT Chronicles, whenever you get time to do so. Feel free to ping with any such conversations you have had, or anything funny about life in general.
You can see the entire series upto now below.
