Give me a pencil. I'll toon up the world!

We were a motley crowd, some really young students, a fashion designer, an art teacher, some development wallahs from Darpana and a few college students. We were at the cartoon workshop at Darpana, advertised as the grassroots cartoon workshop. The school kids, especially the boys, came with expectations of learning how to draw superheroes.

The two ten-year-old girls, both kids of our colleagues here, came as they love drawing and school hadn’t started. Some had done serious drawing, some loved to sketch. And then there were three of us who have never been able to draw anything that looks like anything and came with a huge challenge for the trainer, Sharad Sharma, who claimed he could make anyone into a cartoon communicator in four days.

 “Can you draw a zero?” Well yes, even I could do that. “Then do lots of them, without thinking, different sizes; don’t think just go at it.” My paper was full of somewhat wonky zeroes or Os. “Can you write a T?” Why, yes we could manage that. “Break it up, the top bar and the bottom”. And the magic began. Slashing circles with Ts of different sizes, slightly skewed, some at an angle and a host of expressive faces appeared as though by miracle-grouchy ones, questioning ones, quizzical and depressed ones, those looking up and down in askance and skywards. And thus began what for me became a magical mystery tour.

Sharad doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t draw. Fairly young, his talent was spotted and no teacher told him to stop drawing and to concentrate on his studies. As a young man, his talent for taking hard news and converting it into a pithy cartoon was discovered by a local newspaper in Alwar, and he was on his way. He spent several years with various newspapers and became involved with social and political issues. When his newspaper shut down in the mid-90s, he moved to Delhi. He started understanding what was news for mainstream newspapers and all the important things that didn’t get reported.

Sharad found a particular lacuna in the reporting from the northeast and so set off to discover the truth himself. Spending several months there, working with NGOs, meeting militants, he started teaching them how to tell their own stories through cartoons. It was like a river with its dam broken. Stories poured out. At last the people could communicate.

He had discovered the power of the cartoon to tell personal stories. After a few more years working with the earliest news channel, he quit and began teaching cartoons as a form of visual communication and truth telling.

Soon he was teaching ghunghat-covered women in Rajasthan to talk about the plight of women, Adivasis in the Naxal areas, homeless people in cities, school and college students and more. He founded World Comics India. Word spread and he started teaching in Brazil and Thailand, Finland (getting the stories of the Sami, the original reindeer people) and more. And at each workshop, he taught people to train others.

Today, there is a community of over 40,000 people using this tool to communicate ideas, to fight prejudice, to share concerns, to draw attention and also to have fun. Campaigns have ranged from raising a hue and cry about falling sex ratios, to the need for housing for the homeless in Delhi, to the need for the army to lay off civilians in disturbed areas and to raise issues of violence against women. And the work is copyright free, for the use of the good of the many.

In three days, we had produced wall posters. Yes, all of us. On issues of discrimination, RTI, personal stories of grief and courage, things seen or heard. And the two youngest members, the girls both created moving posters on the discrimination faced all around by the girl child. What a liberating and exhilarating tool for communication. Ahmedabad, keep watching for the posters to appear on your wall or nearest tea shop!

The writer is a noted danseuse and social activist.