Stand Up, Comics!
The graphic book genre has taken interesting baby steps in India in the past decade
Given that my brothers and I were even as young children heavily into reading, it's difficult to fathom what may have prompted my father – a reasonably typical Bengali middle-class man, a government servant – to start plying us with Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), Classics Illustrated and Tintin comics. The most likely explanation was that they were meant as sources of inspiration for my brother Orijit (at the time still spelt the 'official' way, Arijit), who had shown a prodigious talent for art at a very young age. Whatever it was, it paved a path of exploration for us that we have continued to travel on into our adulthood. If anything, Orijit has even been something of a trailblazer, as far as India is concern...