As with a first kiss, one never forgets the first rejection letter. Mine came as a handwritten yellow postcard with small closely packed le...
As with a first kiss, one never forgets the first rejection letter. Mine came as a handwritten yellow postcard with small closely packed letters in black ink. I was eleven years old and had made two story submissions to the popular comic series Tinkle published by Anant Pai. It was the first time I had fancied myself a writer destined for the public eye, and as much as the rejection stung, I was dazzled that no other than Uncle Pai (as Anant Pai was popularly known) had taken the trouble to write an entire letter addressed to me.
It was one of the kindest letters I have ever received. Uncle Pai wrote that even though it pained him to write the rejection, “It will pain me more, however, if you stop writing […] just because of one rejection letter.” The first issue of Tinkle had appeared in 1980 when I was six and my mother had made sure I acquired every single issue as soon as it came to the bookstore, a collection we kept up for years.
More than a decade before my encounter with Tinkle, in 1967, Anant Pai started working on comics based on Indian mythology under the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) label....
