Kashmir Ki Kahani

Kashmir Ki Kahani started taking shape when I first read India after Gandhi.

I was like this standard boy, I had never known who Sheikh Abdullah was and I believed that terrorism  was a part of Kashmir right from the starting.

Than was the question of deciding the narrator of the story, basically an enveloping theme for the comic,
the last comic I did was TV Ki Kahani and in that the narrator is Shammi Narang. So since this was Kashmir Ki Kahani and Shammi matched Shammi, I decided to have Shammi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore from Kashmir Ki Kali tell the Kahani.


First thing I did was draw Shammi Kapoor, in a simplified style, also his mating dance. For Shammi Kapoor I did use an interesting reference.

Then I storyboarded the whole sequence -

The scan is in greyscale, I don't use pencil, only the 5 rupees wala simple ballpoint pen. Then I drew the Drawings in detail.

And then there was the issue of coloring the initial sequence, which I wanted to match with the actual colors of the song - Kashmir Ki Kali.
Suri helped me with this and using the filters in Photoshop he achieved almost similar colors -

The Movie -

The Comic -

 The colors for the other pages were pretty simple.

It was sometimes difficult to find images of Kashmir of 1947, but not that difficult.

The other interesting part of the Comic was drawing Sardar Patel, also Iron Man of India. So we made him the Iron man. Had done this a long time back in Random Magazine, but there it was only a one image gag, whereas here it was a solid character!

Also there were some really mind boggling pages, which used the whole  idea of Vertical Comics superbly -

The Script took a some time too, but as soon as it was ready I jumped on drawing it... it went on for 2 months, before the Comic was ready.

Everybody liked the Comic and it was heavily shared, and read. It was one of the top read items on Newslaundry!

 And there was Andrew Whitehead, pictures from his blog were a key reference for the comic. I gave him credit and he returned the favor by posting about the comic on his blog.

P.S - Didn't know Andrew Whitehead that well, but after he posted the link, I got to know that he's a BBC hot shot. I now show off and mention this everywhere, at the drop or not drop of a hat, wuaah hah hah!

And here's a wallpaper of Iron man patel working in his office if you're interested - 

You can read Kashmir Ki Kahani here -

http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/05/kashmir-ki-kahani-2/

I am writing and drawing the part 2 now.

Update 2013: 

Part 2 and Media coverage.

Update May 2013:

Part 3