Remembering the hero: Bollywood mourns Pran's death

Bollywood celebrities paid rich tributes to their favourite cartoonist, Pran Kumar Sharma, who died on Wednesday. Sharma is the creator of the iconic Chacha Chaudhary.
Pran died due to cancer early this morning at a hospital in Gurgaon. He was 75.
Actor-singer Celina Jaitly, director Vivek Agnihotri, Madhur Bhandarkar, funnyman Vir Das among others took to Twitter to express their grief over the passing away of the cartoonist. 

Goodbye Pran: an entire generation will miss the iconic cartoonist

The first time I met him, I was probably six, or even younger. It was the summer vacations — those long, interminable days in the pre-internet era where every kid’s constant refrain was ‘mom, I am bored’. Exasperated, my mother would respond by handing out her thick literary tomes. I responded by handing them right back (I was six, remember!).

And that’s when I met him. It was love at first sight, a romance that survived the test of time and is very much alive even today. When I see him today – decades later, I just have to find a quiet corner and I am lost to the world for some time. But today, on August 6, it is time to bid the final goodbye to my favourite cartoonist. 

Thanks Pran for livening up all our lives with those colourful pages and tales of Chacha Chaudhry, Sabu, Billu, Pinki, Channi Chachi and rest of the gang. Thanks for providing us desi superheroes, for telling us tales of mischievous kids who were our mirror images. Thanks for making those summer afternoons so full of action and fun.
After the diet of Archie, Peanuts, Tintin, Spider-man and the rest of ‘phirang’ superheroes, you gave us characters who ate matar-pulao and used scooters and dilapidated trucks (Chacha Chaudhry’s Dug-dug) to travel. 

Those characters could have been living in any middle-class locality in India; they could have been your neighbours. They had the same problems that we all faced everyday (Saboo ‘helping’ perennially-delayed people reach offices/railway stations/bus stations anyone?).
Who needed computers (most of us couldn’t have afforded them then, anyway) when we had our very own mustachioed superhero Chacha Chaudhri, who could think faster than any computer (brains over brawn, take that you Marvel-minted superheroes)?  When the situation called for some muscle power, he had a trusted ally Sabu who had landed straight from Jupiter and was 15-feet tall. You mess with this guy and volcanoes started going off.

All great heroes need great villains and Pran gave us one in Raka. He was immortal but did that scare away over indomitable duo? Not at all. They instead sent him to space. That didn’t work, so they dispatched him off into an ocean. When even that failed to stop Raka, they made sure he ended up on an icy mountain top. And so, they kept us entertained over the years 

Chachaji and his parivaar may have been the most famous creations of the prolific writer but Pran also gave us the naughty Billu who was quite the neighbourhood menace, Pinki whose only intention in life is to help her neighbour Jhapatji, and the everyman Raman. 

Long before Hollywood told us anyone can be a hero, Pran showed it to us in his regimented cartoon strip space. You may have left us today but your spirit will live on in those brightly-coloured panels. RIP Pran.

From the ‘computer se bhi tez’ Chacha Chaudhary to the obese Channie Chachi, or the tales of the naughty Billoo and the adventures of Raman, all these characters became an integral part of our childhood. Every comic book fan in India would anxiously await the next edition of these series.

Of all of these works, Chacha Chaudhary remains Pran’s most renowned comic characters till date. The comic series was also made into a television show! You definitely remember that Sabu was an alien but do you remember his favourite dish? What was Chacha Chaudhary’s dog’s name? Here’s a series of tweets by Chacha Chaudhary’s avid fan @GabbbarSingh with trivia every fan must know.