Google Doodle celebrates Uncle Anant Pai’s birthday
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Yesterday it was Albert Szent Gyorgyi’s Birthday (who discovered Vitamin C) and today its Anant Pai’s 82th birthday. Anant Pai is also very famous by “Uncle Pai”. Anant Pai was an Indian educationalist and creator of Indian comics, in particular the Amar Chitra Katha series in 1967, along with the India Book House publishers, and which retold traditional Indian folk tales, mythological stories, and biographies of historical characters.
I remember I used to love an Indian comics called “Tinkle”. And I got surprised to know that Uncle Pai is the only person who launched Tinkle in 1980.
The most popular comics by Pai is no doubt Amar Chitra Katha. At the height of its popularity, in the mid-eighties, it had been translated into Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Sanskrit and Urdu and selling half a million copies a month. Some titles were also translated into French, Spanish, German, Swahili, Fijian, Indonesian, and Serbo-Croat.
Today, Amar Chitra Katha, sells about three million comic books a year, in English and more than 20 Indian languages, and has sold about 100 million copies since its inception in 1967 by Anant Pai, and in 2007 was taken over by ACK Media.
Ramu and Shamu, Kapish, Little Raji, Rekha, Fact Fantasy, Funland and Funtime are some of the comic strips created by Pai, most of which continue to appear in newspapers and magazines. He has written and produced two video films, Ekam Sat (the Vedic Concept of God) and The Secret of Success, in English and Hindi.
Have a look at some of his comics-
Image Credit : Image 1 | Image 2 | Image 3 | Image 4
