Sanjay
Madnani
Design Consultant
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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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Design and Direction for Puppet Show- Step by Step
Aimed at improving communication methodologies between knowledge generators and knowledge seekers in the Greater Himalayan region, the project was to examine and promote the use of traditional media for passing on relevant agriculture and livelihood-related information to grassroots communities. Indigenous Media being a pilot project, Sanjay needed to exercise careful judgement in selecting project sites and partners that could provide representative samples of the regions of the Greater Himalayan region. Cultural attitudes, languages, currently used Indigenous Media and capabilities of local NGOs and institutions, were the basis for selecting partners and sites.
To showcase the effective use of indigenous media to disseminate complex scientific processes and matters about soil erosion prevention, Sanjay built a team of young local talented college students, and wrote, designed, storyboarded, and choreographed a theatre performance ‘Step-by-Step’.
Sanjay trained the team in acting, puppet playing and puppet making. Emphasis was given to the fact that these productions were also to be replicated in impassable villages of the Greater Himalayan region; thus, producing these with minimal use of props and ensuring that the props were to be easily sourced locally. The production was designed such that each member of the team got to play each role on a rotation basis, i.e., the lead actor became the director the next day and the accountant the next day and so on. This ensured total focus of the team and ensured the smooth running of the production in case of any member’s absence.
This creative technique also trained each member to go to several villages and be able to reproduce the theatre all by themselves with the help of local talent and resources.
The theatrical production was also forerunner in the magic of puppets being intricately woven with a theatre (humans acting). The shadow puppet brought in the huge advantage of time-lapse and possibility to visually present the technique of formation of a step farm.
Similar Projects:
A Ford Foundation Project at ICIMOD
Kathmandu, Nepal
2003
