Sanjay

Madnani

Design Consultant

elephant moving in
elephant moving out

Sanjay Madnani is a Communication Strategist and Designer by profession, an Animation Film Designer, an illustrator, a cartoonist, a satirist, and a storyteller by passion.

From a cartoonist in Hindi newspapers, to a design student, to a commercial sector professional, to an educator, to a Development Communication professional, his journey has had dramatic turns. None, however, felt alien to him.

Being a development sector insider for twenty odd years, Sanjay weighs heavily on the fact that development and governance still has a enormous void to be filled by design, design thinking and design process. Focused on Communication for Development (C4D), Social and Behavioral Change Communication (SBCC), Indigenous media and new media, he has multiple crosscutting projects across the globe to his credit.

Sanjay resides in Nepal, calls India his home, then again, he travels around a lot for work.

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Satirical Cartoons, Satirical Editorial

Life offers you more drama than any fiction can.

Sanjay, barely out of school, was supervising a screen-printing unit his cousin owned. He had had no formal training in any kind of art. However, his keen interest remained in reading, drawing, painting, creating toys and in sociopolitical issues. As luck would have it, he encountered a newspaper owner. Looking at Sanjay’s drawings, the newspaper owner offered Sanjay the role of a cartoonist for the newspaper that was to launch a week later.

A little apprehensive, albeit excited and curious, Sanjay worked for the week to develop a cartoon style for the newspaper. He brushed up his knowledge of politics and society in India at large. On the eighth day, the newspaper came out, the cartoon pinched the people and quickly became a favorite. The cartoon column Tazurba was set, Sanjay’s satire and illustration style started to mature and was delivered to people daily. The central character of the column was Tazurba, an educated bagger, top naked, wearing torn pyjamas, who made sharp comments about contemporary socio-political situations with the passersby. Bursting with sarcasm, humor and ideas, Sanjay soon started his handwritten weekly satirical editorial Gutargun.

Unique to this situation, the inherent need to quickly gather knowledge daily and to think on his feet made Sanjay a quick thinker, good planner, and a diligent worker. Over time, his cartoons were delivered to people in three daily newspapers. He had a successful three years of political cartoons with the newspapers, yet life was to take another turn.

Daily Hindi Newspapers- Lokgatha, Dainik Bhaskar, Sandhya Samachar

Gwalior, India

1990 - 93