Metrotopia, Tweet-Man

Had to document this before I forgot all about it.


Metrotopia last year, 2009 - the superhero contest.


All credit for the art to Nali. And most of script to MadHatter. Well, only most. And that's only 'coz he is too finicky to acknowledge when someone else has written better than he has (the comfort of knowing he'll never visit this place to refute this :D).


Well, happy reading. It is a tad sarcastic. And a lot more than just wee caustic. But it is fun! Yenjai fellas!

By:

Team ‘Bodhi Dharma and the Third Patriarch’

Super Hero ‘Tweet-Man’ - Fights his enemies by posting passive aggressive messages on Twitter.

USP:  In comics, the "major" strips are tiny black and white gag strips crammed together in your daily paper that dish up the same cat or doodled office, day after week after year. By contrast, web comics are like the Sunday weekend strips year round, with full colour, original ideas, and expansive illustrations that sprawl beyond the frame of your monitor.

Web 2.0 has captured a new zeitgeist: it has an enraptured demographic with its own role models, opinion makers and heroes. 

We are capturing on this very essence by caricaturing one of their biggest heroes – Shashi Tharoor or Tweet-Man, a man synonymous with the reach and influence of Web 2.0.

In Tweet-Man we have created a subversive, tongue in cheek comic strip that can stay relevant for as long as the Web stays relevant.

Super Powers:
· Mastery over the fine art of passive-aggression.
· Perfectly coiffed hair maintained by using a centuries old potion of the oldest herbs, coconut oil, and radioactive tuna. Uses his luxuriant hair growth to awe his enemies into submission.

Weaponry – BlackBerry, broadband internet connection

Sidekick: Special Officer Kutty

Location: New York/Delhi

Attire: Tweet-Man’s attire is marked by its simplicity: he stalks the streets of Delhi in his deceptively conformist garb of a mundu and kurta - conforming to the strict guidelines of his organization, ‘The Aam Ungli’. But alone in his room, with his Blackberry strapped on, and his Twitter account signed into, he picks from his many Liberace costumes and types away; fighting injustice, confronting allegations, and masking his intentions with denial, dissonance, and passive resistance.

Background Story: Born with a silver spoon and perfect hair, Tweet-man spent his formative years with the Jesuits, imbibing their colonial hangover. His stint with the Jesuits helps him perfect his skills with the pen and the alien tongue - skills requisite in his quest for passive-aggressive supremacy. He used his new found powers to pen down allegorical accounts of his resentment toward The Queen Witch which earned him her ire. The Queen Witch puts an immediate curb on Tweet's shenanigans, banishing him to the land of Happy Meals and Cherry Flavoured Colas. However, she did not anticipate that our superhero's path in exile would lead him straight to the nurturing ground of diplomacy; the ultimate school of passive aggression- United Inertia.  Here, Tweet-Man learns the tricks of the trade from the very best and quickly moves up the ranks to be the second in command to the head of United Inertia – Token Black. Unable to replace Token Black23w as the head of United Inertia Tweet-Man indulges in the last of his passive aggressive behaviour in New York by moving to India. Permanently.

Received with the usual brouhaha reserved for uncles with Toblerones and Marks and Spencer sweaters, Tweet-Man uses his perfect diction and a deceptively casual "foreign returned uncle" charm to win over the land of the Gods.

Tweet-Man is soon dispatched by God's own people to manage their affairs in Delhi where his troubles were to soon begin.

Tweet-Man’s face off with THE Holy Cow

 In the hallowed portals of power Tweet-Man comes across the Holy Cow, soon to be his arch nemesis. The Holy Cow with his austere hair growth finds Tweet-Man’s luxuriant hair despicable and decides to shear him to size.

 The holy cow gets ready to attack our hero. He unleashes his most potent weapon, the SPIN. The world is soon inundated with anti Tweet-Man propaganda, some even questioning the authenticity of what has to be Tweet-Man’s most prized possession – his hair. At the seat of power; in the hallowed portals of legislation; with nary a friend; our hero finds his cadence – Twitter.

 Tweet-Man decides to fight back the only way he knows how: 140 characters at a time. Tweet-Man inundates The Holy Cow with the most prolific of passive aggressive behaviour, and Twitter’s reach punctures The Holy Cow’s spin, and the bovine overlord’s put to pasture.

**Coming Attraction: How Tweet-Man’s perfectly coiffed hair accidentally saves the world!

Fairy Tales

It's a competitive world. And Prince Charming doesn't have it so easy these days.
Nor do the Cindrellas, brought up on Barbies and fairy tales. So the Cindrellas grow up fixated with size zero and a Prince who can just not do enough to prove himself to be the one.


Holding the glass slipper right and gazing romantically into Cindrella's eyes is just not enough. She would want him to say a snarky line or two and sweep her off her feet with his ready wit and just before she completes the dizzying fall, twirl her by waist and the glass slipper slides into her foot. Oh, and Calvin and Hobbes would not hurt. Nor would some Mozart and Michael Jackson, and if you could moonwalk, wouldn't that be so awesome too. Of course, the Prince is tall, dark/fair (as per the modern day Cindrella) and handsome. His ready repartee just witty enough to bring out her feminine wiles.

You know what the fairy Godmother forgot to tell Cindrella? She gave her the carriage and the dress. She just forgot to tell her how to find the Prince in the ball attended by all the princes and princesses of the neighboring kingdoms. How is she to know who is Prince right?

You think the wicked wolf of the fairy tales comes with foot-long fangs and smelly fur? Sheep skin is passe! Someone tell the modern Cindrellas that the wolves now come in the suave garb of the "supposed" fairy tale man - humor, wit, looks all in tow. And later then unsurprisingly, heartbreak.

Can someone tell little girls as they grow up, that sterling men come with lesser flash and more substance? Can someone tell them that they won't floor you instantly with chemistry and endorphins but slowly and steadily with rock-solid character that'll give you a life long kick dopamine would never in a split second moment!

Will the real Prince Charming please stand up? Nyaah, Cindrella, you'll have to learn that all that glitters is not gold. And all those who stand up at the call are simply pompous asses. Prince Charming was never so self congratulatory.

Un Anno

one year
Thank you.
You turn my world around and make it bearable by just being you.
I see around me depravity and turmoil, you give me strength and clarity. I am learning to cope.
You do so  much being so far away, am I wrong in wondering what magic your presence will weave?
Near or far, you are my key to sanity; my key to a world of love and trust. A world whose existence I was learning to doubt. A world I saw falling to pieces all around me.
Thank you for restoring my belief in all that I valued and held so dear.
Thank you, for being you.

To many more years of togetherness.

Judgement Day

Let your guilt be your redemption

For all the judgementalism

For all the hate without a reason

For presuming without knowing

Using your insecurity to bracket

Slotting, categorizing and not giving a chance

Lest all assumptions fall apart

Do not psychoanalyse last words

It’s demeaning to the means and the end

Were it that simple to decrypt -

That straightforward and in your face

It would not be ever written

If nothing else, grant the last respect

Of continuing enigma -

Unsullied by mundane interpretations

Martyrs of Suffering

How proud are we of our Suffering?

Do we wear it with a flourish?

Hoist high the crown of thorns

And place it venerably on our heads.

Does our chest swell with pride?

As we neither flinch nor wince

And hear the sighs of wonder

At our valour and stoic ness

Do we compare the thorns?

And see if mine prick harder

And compete in a pageant of pain

To see who emerges stronger?

Do we silently mock?

As we wipe others’ tears

Scoffing at their softness

While whispering soothing ayes?

Ek Haazari

Ek haazari ki mohtaaj hai jannat,

Jannat ka bhi kya kasoor?

Mizaaz hi hon jahaan par rookhe,

Hawa ke rukh ka kya kasoor?

Khud ki chod aaye dehleez par jaan,

To kaatil ka bhi kya kasoor?

Fitrat hi ho jab mezbaan,

Raat ka bhi kya kassor?

Betakkaluf hain sannata jahaan,

Wahaan lafzon ka bhi kya kasoor?

De chaahein daleelein bekasoori,

Behaazari ki hai sazaa!

Ilzaam ka jab ho muqaddar,

Wakeel ka bhi kya kasoor?

Partition

Scrambled to finish the term end paper for 'Imagining India' and managed just in the nick of time as the clock struck 9am. Here's a peek into what burning the midnight oil till dawn produced - an excerpt from my paper titled "A History of Bloodshed, A Future Without? :Partition and Riots in Free India"....

"The Partition lives on

“Vomited out of their native soil years ago in carnage, and dumped hundreds of miles away, they had no anger left. Their only passion was memory… damned to a hell of longing.”

-Amitav Ghosh, ‘The Circle of Reason’

And this memory was a legacy passed from generation to generation, like a sacred family heirloom - not actively or vociferously, but silently, till the pain and longing was almost something congenital that one felt deep inside ones flesh and blood.

Thus, I found myself – fascinated and enchanted by the Partition even as a child; surrounded by my Great grandparents and grandparents who had lived through history; understanding childishly, its import, but not its impact. As a ten year old, Partition was a bedtime story I tried to extract from my Great grandmother at all times of the day - “Tell me the story of Partition”, I begged and pleaded till my persistence bulldozed over her reticence. With a child’s innocent, yet myopic insensitivity, I resurrected a myriad demons for her everyday – ghosts of the past that she had painstakingly laid to rest. The tales of gory escape, mere adventure for me, were a throbbing part of her daily existence; more unnatural, more alive for the silence it was wrapped in, lived and relived through the images of a homeland lost.

Stories of leaving a child behind as two parents could not carry five children in their arms to safety, and then retracing their path back through the depraved, deathly streets to find the child again, as a mother’s conscience and heart would not let her leave her child behind. Stories of overnight penury, being stripped and deprived of all possessions that you’d taken a lifetime to gain – of life as refugees, of honour and pride. Stories of hope and resilience and starting anew. Movingly romantic narratives of budding love in Chandni Chowk, hurried, sidelong, forbidden glances in that crowded, bustling market and then my grandparents’ wedding.

“There are no full stops in India”, says a character in Mark Tully’s 1991 collection of contemporary Indian parables. In a land better known for continuities and commas, partition and secession were not simply laid to rest in 1947. They continue in the bloodline, a trauma waiting to find utterance, bewildering the subsequent generations who have never been through it, but feel an unease, and an inability to react passively to even the word ‘Partition”. Growing up with it as a part of one’s consciousness, not simply saying that we “know people” who have been through it, but that these very people happen to be ones closest friends and relatives who had to leave everything behind, struggle, undergo unimaginable hardships, witness bestial, inhuman brutality and bloodshed, and still find temperance to build anew, leaves an indelible mark on the new generations.

Are we more fanatical, more vitriolic for all this? Is it simply a part of the charmed past, that we can detach from our persona and existence at our will or is it so intrinsic that we still go through with a sense of loss that finds expression sometimes in extreme animosity and anti-Pakistan sentiment, and then sometimes gets tinged with curiosity and a longing to discover ones roots."