A cartoon by Pradeep Srivastava shows a haggard man in soiled clothes being reprimanded by his wife for the stink emanating from him.
He has been wearing the same pair for days on end. It so turns out he had forgotten to carry an extra pair of clothes, nano clothes to be precise, which he could have worn for days at a stretch without the stink.
The ‘scientoon’, as Dr. Srivastava calls such caricatures, explains scientific principles, information, data and phenomenon in a way that communicates well even to the common man. “I have a pair of nano clothes that doesn’t get dirty. Since, you can wear it for a month without washing, it prevents staining and saves water and detergent, too. And, what better way to explain such things than through cartoons!” exclaims Dr. Srivastava, former deputy director at the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow and the proponent of ‘scientoons’.
“I draw rather well and have found that they convey the most complex things in a manner understood by everyone,” he explains.
Dr. Srivastava says his scientoons on garbage management and ground water depletion in Uttar Pradesh have moved the authorities to take necessary actions. “When conveyed with a tinge of humour it strikes a chord with the listener/viewer. And, it also gets rid of the feeling that science communication and education is boring.”
In Kerala to give lectures in colleges, Dr. Srivastava also speaks on bionics – learning science from nature. How the faculties of organisms and creatures and the processes they adopt to easily do things could be copied scientifically to better human life is something that interests him, he says, with examples.
