Cartooning concerns

toon scape

Can you imagine a world without cartoons? I sure can’t! The first thing many of us invariably reach out to in the morning is the cartoon section of the newspaper. More urgent than the hot news of the day is the curiosity to know what trouble our favourite cartoon characters have gotten themselves into. There is an unexplainable attachment to the strange squiggly characters who make us laugh out loud with their blunt one-liners. A perfect start to the day, comics are coffee for the soul.

Satires have always been the ones that pack the most punch. What better way to look at our foolhardy ways than with humour-tinted glasses? But, for the longest time, the focus has been mostly on us. The protagonists have always been the ‘victimised’ humans. In a refreshing approach that uses cartoons as a campaigning tool to create awareness on the conservation of environment and wildlife, ‘Toon guy’ Rohan Chakravarthy has been running a promising series of cartoons on his blog titled Green Humour.

Sarcastic, witty humour infused with a young, fresh satirical take on current environment issues, Green Humour strikes just the right note.

I first stumbled upon Rohan’s blog when a friend shared one of his cartoons on Facebook. It had two big white polar bears balancing themselves precariously on a tiny piece of ice floating in the middle of a vast ocean, quivering, and one of them goes: “For the first time in my life I’m feeling I should’ve done something about my weight.” Amused, I visited his blog to find more such funny cartoons and spent the next 20 minutes having a good laugh by myself.

The appeal of Green Humour lies in the cheeky, insightful yet funny manner in which current complex issues plaguing environment and wildlife — thanks to human greed — have been depicted. His protagonists are self-deprecating animals coping with one human blunder after another. You can’t help but smile, if not laugh out loud, at the sorry plight of animals that resort to hilarious ways to adapt to the changing environment. Rohan’s strength is his whacky imagination and endearing style.

On the occasion of World Animal Day, celebrated on October 4, Sunday Herald spoke to the cartoon campaigner.

“Cartooning in its purest form is just about making mischief on paper,” says Rohan. In this case, the mischief is for a good cause. An avid birder and a wildlife enthusiast, Rohan started his blog in 2009. “I had dabbled in a lot of areas as a cartoonist, but drawing on wildlife gave a sense of contentment and creative satisfaction I had never experienced before… it helped present facts about animal behaviour and conservation to readers.

In 2009, my brother, who is a wildlife biologist in the making, suggested that I start a website for these cartoons, and that’s how Green Humour began,” he says.

“I have been associating with a lot of journalists and NGOs working on conservation. A lot of my work has been used for educational endeavors and for spreading awareness about conservation issues, right from the role of the Gharial in the Chambal river basin to industrial pollution in the Amazon. Recently, a cartoon I made on the tragic deaths of elephants resulting from train accidents was a part of the UK-based NGO Elephant Family’s successful signature campaign.”

Comedy is serious business and being a gag cartoonist isn’t easy, but the 26-year-old has made a “fairly good start”. His cartoons are currently a part of India’s wildlife magazines Sanctuary Asia and Saevus, a magazine on corporate sustainability SustaiNuance, journals such as Current Conservation and Tigerlink, and children’s magazine Tinkle.

Rohan is two exhibitions old and has received four awards including the first prize in the UNDP and French Ministry’s Cartoon Contest on Climate Change in the Asia-Pacific, and Sanctuary Asia’s Young Naturalist Award 2012. This month, his cartoons will be a part of Get Eco Creative, an event to promote sustainable living, being held in Melbourne.

Like many interesting journeys, Rohan’s too started young. His first cartoon was published when he was a 13-year-old lad studying in Nagpur where he hails from. A dentist by training, Rohan changed careers to become a full-time cartoonist.

He currently works as an illustrator and animation designer with a multimedia firm in Bangalore. Rohan’s interest in cartoons blossomed on a steady diet of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. “I think I developed the ‘think-like-a-cartoon’ ability watching Hanna-Barbera’s and Genndy Tartakovsky’s shows on Cartoon Network at a very young age,” he says, while also giving credit to his muse and late pet dog, Naughty.

Rohan draws other cartoons too, but Green Humour challenges and excites him the most. One dream, however, of making his campaign mainstream, remains to be fulfilled.
“Cartoons on conservation haven’t received mainstream attention yet, but the current state of affairs demands it… making Green Humour a daily column remains to be accomplished, which I hope to do soon,” he says.