Comic Relief

“Stories make the world worth living. They might not always have an effect in bringing about empirical change in this world but they keep us going, especially in these sustained periods of crisis. Without the storytellers, authors, filmmakers, artists, we might have lost our sanity during this prolonged quarantine.

My love for stories or narratives developed at an early age. It was inculcated in me by my grandmother and mother. I was so inclined to read, that I would often snatch my mother’s library card to procure books from her membership account! Whether Bengali or English, language didn’t really matter, and I would read anything that I could lay my hands on.

I was quite young when I decided to take up literature as a career avenue in future, in some capacity. But the idea of enrolling in a PhD programme had not crystallized, until I went for my Master’s at Centre for English Studies, JNU, New Delhi. And here is a personal anecdote which I would like to share, as it helped channelize my research interests. We had to choose a topic for our term papers at the end of the semester, as required by the MA curriculum. Therein, I had expressed my interest in writing about manga (graphic narratives of Japanese origin) to my professor, who eventually became my PhD supervisor. Back in those days, not many were familiar with manga in India. The fandom was still at its nascent stage in the subcontinent…