The 3 Mad Bongs — artists and visualisers Charbak Dipta and Harsho Mohan Chattoraj and former journalist Sourav Dutta — have taken on an assignment to marry food, specifically Kolkata food, with art.
“We, as a team, got together very recently and the common bond we share is that we create comics. We love the idea of telling stories through pictures and some words,” Chattoraj said. “We are trying to do different kinds of work in the field of comics and also trying our best to link it to food. That is why when we learned about the presence of a group that dealt with food and the research of food we felt that we should collaborate.”
An artwork of Harsho Mohan Chattoraj
Chattoraj was speaking at a recent event hosted by Rakhi Purnima Dasgupta of Kewpie’s to resurrect the foodie group The Calcutta Gastronomes and to showcase the work of 3 Mad Bongs.
Charbak described Kolkata as the food capital. “Being outright foodies helped us merge food and illustration. That was how the 3 Mad Bongs came into being. It is quite clear that the people of Bengal are still stuck in the era of Batul the Great and Handa Bhoda and are unaware of the developments in the world of comics across the world. Our basic idea is to hold up all that’s new in the comic world through a popular medium, in this case Bengali food. The graphic novel that we envision on food of Kolkata will feature different food items and how they are intertwined with our Kolkata ethos and palate. The birth of different food, the places from where they originated, the processes of industrialisation of certain food items — these are what we seek to present in a comic format.”
An adda in progress at Kewpie
Sourav Dutta, the writer among the three, said being foodies was a prime factor in forming 3 Mad Bongs.
The adda session was attended by restaurateur Prachi Saraogi of The Salt House; Shahanshah Mirza, great great grandson of Nawab Wajed Ali Shah; blogger Aerica Sardar; Preeyam Budhia of Cafe I Can Flyy; and Sanjay Roy Chowdhury and Shilpa Chakraborty of Tribe Cafe.