Debi

Here's one of the two comics I drew, coloured and designed for Grouppe Developpement (Sanjog) as a part of their attempt to raise awareness for the girl child in rural Bengal. This one's about a girl called Debi from a tiny village in Midnapore who is taken to Delhi to work as a household help. Things go wrong, she eventually escapes and, miraculously, finds her way back home. Sanjog is, I think, doing some fantastic work in terms of making media like this accessible to kids who'd find it difficult to visualise themselves as characters in a novel exemplifying bravery or empowerment.

Edit: All the pages are up! Sorry about the garishness, converting to jpeg brightened everything up into a thehorrorthehorror kind of situation. The printed version, I assure you, will not strike you blind. I also wish it weren't so text-heavy, but if all you get is ten pages on a tight budget with so much to say on such an important issue, suck it up. No regrets.

Also, they're now being translated into Kannada and Marathi in addition to the originally planned Hindi and Bangla editions. Hopefully I'll be drawing a few more of these in the months to come.

An exercise in rendering the obvious:

Mock book covers for our Macbeth project, which tried to look at the play as a modern-day whodunit with Macduff being called in by Malcolm to investigate Duncan's murder. It's narrated by Macduff's wife, who functions more or less as a Watson figure and remains unseen throughout. The end result was a Max Payne-ish ten-minute film composed of posterised photographs made to look like graphic novel panels. What a mishmash.

Here are some shots I took:

Taken with a Canon 450D then posterised and fiddled around with. We added comicbook-style captions and voiceovers. And when it was all done we went to Arsalan and ate mounds of biryani to celebrate. So all's good.