Author: Deeya Nambiar

I believe in taking every day as a learning phase, and exploring my writing skills. I have enjoyed the challenges as a journalist, content writer and college lecturer, and at the moment am living life analysing the extraordinary in the ordinary!

T&J: Cat and Mouse Game

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Tom and Jerry have won the most Oscars for cartoon characters.         By Deeya Nayar-Nambiar

“It’s the Tom and Jerry Show”. The moment you hear the tune being aired on television, everybody irrespective of their age, gets glued to the show. Though it is more than 60 years since the first cartoon was made, the cat and mouse duo continue to steal the show. Endowed with human characteristics, the quick tempered and thin-skinned bluish grey housecat Tom is no match for the brains and wit of the independent and opportunist mouse Jerry. But the story which was once referred to as ‘yet another cat and mouse story’ gradually grew to become a big hit.

When Joseph Barbera, a storyman and character designer, was paired with William Hanna, an experienced director, to start directing films for the Rudolf Ising unit of MGM’s animation studio, a cat-and-mouse cartoon called Puss Gets the Boot released in theatres on February 10, 1940. It was the story of Jasper, a grey tabby cat trying to catch an unnamed rodent. Jasper was always threatened by the African-American housemaid Mammy that he’d be thrown out if he broke one more thing in the house. “O-U-W-T, out!” she screams. Though its release did not see much enthusiasm, this cartoon became a favourite with theatre owners and was even nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons of 1941. Later, producer Fred Quimby commissioned Hanna and Barbera for a series featuring a cat and mouse. They felt a need to name the cat and the rodent and so held an intra-studio contest. And thus was born Tom and Jerry.

The basic theme of each shot is virtually the same – Tom makes frustrated attempts to catch Jerry and in the process destructs and creates havoc everywhere. Yet Hanna and Barbera found endless variations on that theme. No doubt there were thirteen entries in the Tom and Jerry series (including Puss Gets The Boot) nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons. While seven of them went on to win the Academy Award, it broke the record of Disney studio’s winning streak in that category. In fact Tom and Jerry has won the most Academy Awards than any other character-based theatrical animated series.

In 1957 when the MGM animation department shut down, the cartoon series was outsourced. Though Tom and Jerry changed hands and production houses, nothing could create the magic of Hanna-Barbera. The 1980s witnessed the ‘babyfication’ of classic cartoon stars cat and mouse in the Tom and Jerry Kids Show, produced by Hanna-Barbera with Tuner Entertainment. In 2000 they came up with a new series entitled The Mansion Cat and later The Karateguard. Of course The Mansion Cat saw Jerry in a new light. The mouse was a house pet like Tom and their owner reminded Tom to not “blame everything on the mouse.” In spite of the years, even today the series and their re-runs keep the TRPs of cartoon channels running. The chase has not and will never end.

Published in November 2006, btw of Chitralekha Group

Swapna Dutta In Children’s World

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Swapna Dutta loves writing more than anything else. An established Bangalore-based freelance writer who has travelled around the world, Swapna never ran short of resources or the medium for conveying it to the readers. She has written extensively on travel, nature, historical legends, folktales, biography, cookery, interviews and poems, and also indulged in translation. But writing for children, the field she has become synonymous with, came by chance.

“I was fresh out of the university (post grad in literature) and spending time writing literary criticism and academic articles; I got an opportunity to visit the International Dolls’ Museum in Delhi and to meet K Shankar Pillai, the famous cartoonist who started this museum in 1954 as a personal collection. He asked me about myself and, suddenly, asked me if I had ever thought of writing for children,” recalls Swapna. Shankar was observant about the deprived stage of children’s writing in India and was keen to have more Indian writers in English. “He asked me to give it a thought,” remembers Swapna.

Shankar made a great impression on Swapna and she went back to write her first children’s story in English based on an incident from her own school life. Soon she found herself writing for Children’s World, a magazine for children he started.

“I realised that it took very little time and was a really enjoyable experience. As I was quite close to my own student life, I had no problem finding themes and telling the stories in language children could relate to. The same year Shankar asked me to write the story of Raja Harishchandra for children; that was my first book ( 1968 ) for children. Having once started, I just continued to write for them,” says Swapna, recalling her literary journey that somewhere connects to her childhood spent with her grandparents in Hazaribagh.

Little wonder, she is quick to say it was her grandfather who introduced her to the Book of Knowledge that retold stories from the classics when she was only nine years old. “I still retain a special love for the classics,” she says with a smile. Probably, it is her love for history and the classics that saw her writing supplementary readers for Orient Longman, Ratnasagar and Hemkunt.

Her children’s books are diverse- Stories For A Winte’s Night (1996), Teddy Comes To Stay (1992) and her popular Juneli series – stories about a girl called Juneli set in an Indian boarding school. Along with writing for newspapers and magazines in India and abroad, Swapna, who was has been a part of the Limca Book Of Records editorial team, has translated stories from Bengali to English for Indian Literature, The Little Magazine for the National Book Trust, to name a few.

“It is this variety in my writing which keeps me going as a writer. I would hate to do just one kind of writing! I write what I feel like and send them across for consideration. Sometimes, they are accepted and sometimes they are not; it’s all part of the game,” says Swapna who is currently working on a youth-centric novel.

However, she strongly resent being called a ‘woman writer’. “All writers are creative beings and portray the world from his/her point of view, whether it is a man or a woman. The question of being a man or woman does not arise when one is discussing a doctor, engineer, lawyer or an IT person; why should it be any different for a writer?” questions Swapna, a recipient of several awards including the National Fellowship for Literature and a National Award for Creative Writing in Hindi.

Defining herself as a simple person with simple tastes, someone who is perfectly happy as long as she has a book of her choice and something to scribble, friendship holds an important place in her life. And when not writing and catching up with friends, she loves to read, listen to music, especially Rabindra Sangeet, or travel and explore places.

As a former civil servant’s wife, Swapna has always been on the move, packing and unpacking bags. But post retirement life in Bangalore has given her the pleasure of enjoying books, reading and writing. Letters from her young fans (she specifies small towns) keeps her enthusiasm alive. Indeed, Swapna is happy in her world, writing to bring a smile on her reader’s face and does not want to be part of the rat race.

“I feel that I’ve reached a stage where I write just because it is what I love to do the most; I feel and understand the language of children and want to continue writing for them. I hope to go on writing as long as I live, whether everything I write is published or not,” she confesses.

The original link to the article published in BTW – Women’s Day Special
BTW – Swapna Dutta