Dear SciWri,
First of all, a heartfelt thanks for bringing back my work to people. Cartoon strips, unlike other forms of fine arts, needs a context, and at least a minimal audience who follow it, identify with it. Thanks for giving this to my old cartoon strips which had been slumbering for a number of years now.
It was really gratifying to see how my cartoons were accepted by IISc crowd, now more than a decade back. It’s heartening to see that they still have takers. Given this excellent opportunity, I promise you that I will try my best to offer fresh work at an acceptable frequency. Let’s see!
Laapataa, by design, is a lost soul. That’s how I was when I was a young PhD student. I didn’t find it a challenge to identify with him back then. Fortunately or unfortunately, I feel, I have found some semblance of direction in my professional and personal life now. My perspectives have changed (hopefully broadened). I am hopeful that as and when I am able to draw new cartoons, they will reflect this evolution. May be Laapataa has evolved too, in the intervening years. May be, he no more looks so cutely lost, which was his USP during his PhD years. We may also see a slight shift in the attention: may be there are other issues than just those of a groggy PhD student which need to be discussed; may be there are characters other than Laapataa who desire and deserve attention.
As I said, let’s see!
Thank you all once again!
About the cartoonist: Sujit did his PhD from CSA (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) and joined Philips. After few years in the industry he joined IIIT Bangalore as an Assistant Professor and continues to teach there. Creator of ” Lapataa”- A fictional IISCian as he dodges through the reality of PhD. It is one of the fantastic piece of art which SciWri thought needs to preserved and showed to the world and other alumni. The clips connect all of us whether it is an IIScian or a non-IIScian who did his PhD in India.
©Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti
This work by ClubSciWri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
