Andrew Prashanth

Andrew Prashanth, aka C G Salamander, is a writer, editor, and comic journalist who has published over 30 comics in India and abroad. His work has appeared in The Nib, The Mint, Buzzfeed, Indian Quarterly, and Scroll to name a few publications. His comics have made their way into the ICSE and CBSE syllabus and he has published over 12 books with Scholastic, Penguin, and Speaking Tiger among others. He has also worked as a consultant commissioning editor with Pearson Publishers as well as Pratham Books. Through this grant, he, along with the illustrator Samidha Gunjal, will create a non-fiction comic in 25 panels on the evolution of the internet in India.

The comic will follow the life of a 90s kid as he grows up with the internet. A creative nonfiction arc will be used to visit the most important milestones of the history of the internet in India. It will contain factual information like VSNL introducing public internet access in 1995, the first cybercafe to open in Mumbai in 1996, and the prevalence of Orkut in 2005, among others. These events will be interspersed with nostalgic events from the protagonist’s life – him using a dial-up modem for the first time, his first after school visit to a cyber cafe, his first email account etc.

The acceleration of the speed of the internet in these 25 years will be visualised in these 25 panels. Technological markers like the neighbourhood phone used by everyone in a locality, a time when it took two minutes to load an image over the dial-up network, WhatsApp video calls and HD videos on Netflix, etc would be the array of images that will narrate the story. The makers of this comic, as a generation that grew up with the internet, would use biographical elements, as a history tethered in their memories.

The objective is to produce an easy to understand comic that can be shared with ease across social media and traditional media outlets. It is important for IFA to support this project that will try to consolidate some of the sketchy memories associated with the internet as sequential art in vivid pictures. The outcome of the project will be the non-fiction comic in 25 panels. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be the digital files of the 25 comic panels, two copies of the manuscript of the comic and a detailed documentation of the process.

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.