Morning Raaga with Raaga (sounds cheesy, sorry!)

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Raaga Katta is an illustrator based out of Anantapur. Her page Grey Brains is fun and witty and I found it endearing that it is bilingual: Telugu and English. I recently ordered a calendar from her and it sits on cutely on my grey desk. 

Here’s a quick interview with Raaga via email! She is equally perky on email too.

 Why Grey Brains? When did you conceptualise it? Spill it all out :) 

This was back in 2017 (while I was pursuing my MBA), YouTube videos and content creation was a rage. I quite liked the idea of saying quirky things on social media and calling it content. I also wanted to do something like that, but I was and still am a little camera shy (for recording, I love getting photographed) so I thought I will draw and say what I want, I can make characters and make them do any thing that human beings would not be open to do. 

It's a different thing that I later learnt this is an actual thing and it is called Illustration (cos like any other Andhra kid I only knew of Engineering and Medicine). That’s why and how grey brains started.
In the beginning I used to just make comics for myself and then later slowly started showing them to family and friends and to my surprise they found them funny. Then it is slowly become what it is today.


 

What kind of responses have you got? Any interesting anecdotes? 

Any kind of response gets me excited. I started from zero so reaching 0.1 is also success for me. But then a few people have actually told me that they are a fan of my work and they wait for my posts. It felt surreal! One person has even said my comics are therapeutic! Another person has said she is a student and have saved up to buy my calendar, then she got very happy to know that it is not expensive. Things like these have made me more confident.

How did you come up with the name: Grey Brains? 

After I decided to put my comics up on Instagram I kept procrastinating it for a while in the fear of giving my page a name. I was not very comfortable with such a long-time commitment. All I knew was I wanted to make characters which are like us, not good, not bad. Good and Bad are two extremes of the spectrum, we are not at the ends but in the middle, we are all grey.

So like stating the obvious I named it Grey Brains - Characters with Grey Brains.

 



Why did you think of bilingual cartoons? (it is a great idea, btw!) 

So in the beginning I used to make comics in English, it was going fine, I always thought I was funnier in Telugu but didn't think of making comics in Telugu. Normally we talk in English but think in our mother tongue right! So this one thought I had was in Telugu but it didn't fit well when I translated it into English. So I thought I would make just this one comic in Telugu, as a one time thingy, but the response was overwhelming. So I decided to make one every week, then slowly all of them became Telugu. Then I got scared of narrowing down my audience to only one language and when I had started there was no one making comics in Telugu so I thought to keep my reach wide I would make them both in English and Telugu. That's how bilingual comics started but I don't force it, few things are very cultural they'll loose their essence when you try to translate. So such pieces I make only in one language.

Your writing routine and your future plans?

In the beginning I used to draw inspiration from people I used to meet everyday, I was a recruiter then so I had an opportunity to meet all kinds of people, I used to take Uber pool everyday to office and I would see behaviour of people from all walks of life. That was my source of inspiration and research. Eventually after I decided to give illustrations a shot as a full-time career, I quite my job I came back home and there is no much going out happening (I am in my room 24X7) so now to keep myself relevant I watch a lot of TV shows, movies, YouTube videos and listen to crazy amounts of podcasts. Basically be on TV and phone all day and call it research for work :P!

My only wish is to reach more houses with my work/products and one day randomly spot my piece on road.

 












Happy Sankranti, everyone!

 

 Raaga is here and at greybrains9 at gmail

 

                                              

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