Click to play videoBarmer (Rajasthan: Gabbu studies in Class VIII. Till now, she had no way of expressing her anguish at being singled out for being a girl.
That’s when comic power stepped in and now she illustrates her feelings with a comic strip
Across the country, from the Northeast to Bihar to Rajashtan, one man is on a mission to give a voice to the stories of common people, through comics.
Sharad Sharma was a successful professional cartoonist in Delhi. That’s until he got disillusioned with the “pointlessness of the work” he was doing and decided to give it all up.
That’s when the idea of a cartoon workshop was born. Sharad started off with a five-day workshop in Mizoram, the first of its kind in the Northeast.
He then trained women panchayat functionaries in Rajasthan, activists in Bhopal and even took his workshop to Pakistan.
"I was amazed at the reaction. People were skeptical earlier but not any more," he says.
Sharad has a name for what he does. He calls it, simply, Grassroot Comics.
"Grassroot comics because it reaches out to the locals and helps localisation of the issues,” he explains.
Thanks to Sharad's belief in comic power, Gabbo in Barmer is dreaming big.
She wants to be a doctor and is no longer ashamed of being a girl any more.
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