 Good afternoon, everyone. I think we're going to get started now. We'll probably have a few people filter in as we get going. That's great. I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Libraries, and I'd like to welcome you to our second Talking in the Library event for this spring semester, featuring the cartoonist, Playwright, and children's book author, Manjula Padmanabhan. Our Dean of Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation, Steve White, is going to introduce her in a moment. But I'd like to tell you a little bit about this space that we're in and the endowed series that accompanies it. We're meeting this afternoon in the Mary Tuft White Center's Instant Theater. And Mary Tuft, or Happy White, as she was fondly known, was a dedicated alumna of the university who earned her bachelor's degree late in life. I think she was in her 80s. It was her generous endowed gift to Roger Williams University Library over a decade ago that made both this space and the lecture series possible. Her hope was that by introducing our students to accomplished individuals who would share their personal and professional stories, that our students would be inspired towards the selection of their own career paths. We are also grateful to John Hazen White Jr., who is Mary Tuft's son, for continuing his mother's legacy by supporting the transformation of the cultural center into this instant theater. And the instant theater can actually transform from a student's study space, which is largely how it's used during the day, into a presentation space such as this, although our facilities department got a little confused about the arrangement of things today. So I apologize for that. We have one final talking in the library event this semester. On Monday, April 3rd, as part of our Vermont Writers Fellowship, another endowed fellowship on campus for creative writing students, we will host the author Rick Moody as our distinguished visiting writer. Rick is best known for his novel, The Ice Storm. That was made into a motion picture. And his latest novel is called, Hotels of North America. And if you haven't read it, it's hilarious. Please read it. I'm laughing out loud reading it. Comes from the perspective of a blog poster who is a reviewer of hotels across the world. That's really, really interesting. This event will take place Monday at Rogers Free Library in Bristol at 7 p.m., so please come. And finally, please stay tuned for our events for the fall, which will be published soon on our library website. And now I'd like to introduce Steve. So thanks for coming and thanks for having me introduce Manjula Padmanaban. There's a PowerPoint loop on the screens of some of Manjula's work, some of her drawings and illustrations from 1970 to about 2008. And including when it comes around again, her first published drawing is the one with the guy that says bus on his t-shirt from Italy has 1970 on it. And Manjula is gonna talk mostly about her work as with a cartoon called Suki that she's done in a couple of incarnations. And so I'll give some overview of her career so far and also some sort of personal thoughts in knowing her over a fair amount of time. It's great to be here with you all and with Manjula at Roger Williams. And it's amazing to say that actually we, my wife and Mary and I have known Manjula now for 30 years, which is amazing that anybody can say that or that I can be in a body that could say that. But I guess it happens and she's also known our daughters all their lives. Manjula will talk about her work as a writer and artist in several formats. And there's also a display case out just outside the glass walls that's full of all kinds of things that Manjula has transformed by her artistry or the things that she brings to stories, plays, illustrations, artwork, bowls, cups. There's a scarf that is very cool, the latest thing that I, but it's not in the case, but you'll have to just hang around some. So some basic things about Manjula. She's a writer, artist and playwright who grew up in Europe and in South Asia and returned to India as a teenager in the late 1960s. She was educated in economics and history in Bombay and she now shares her time between Newport, Rhode Island and New Delhi, India. She's actually thought to be India's first female cartoonist. During the 80s and 90s, her comic strip character, Suki, appeared in the leading newspapers, The Sunday Observer in Bombay. Now Mumbai and The Pioneer in New Delhi. And now Suki appears again on Saturdays in a strip called Suki Yaki. In 1997, her play Harvest was recognized as the best new international play by Greece's Onassis Prize for Theater, which is similar in award funds and in reputation to the U.S. MacArthur grants. The play about selling organs, souls and human dignity in a global marketplace has been performed in Asia, the U.K. and the U.S. at many college campuses and other venues. Since then, she's published a number of books including Hot Death, Cold Soup, Getting There, Hidden Fires and Other Monologues, Escape, Three Virgins and Other Stories, one of my favorites, Astronauts and Intergalactic Comedy. And she's also published a series of books for children as an author illustrator, including A Visit to the City Market, Mouse Attack and Mouse Invaders and a series of picture puzzle books including We Are Different. Her most recent book is a science fiction novel The Island of Lost Girls, which is a sequel to Escape, set in the not-so-distant future when men and women struggle against one another in a gender battle. I'd like to share a few other things from my perspective and from my wife's perspective, sort of blended together. She wasn't able to be here today, hopefully without going on too long, which unfortunately those of you that know me, I can do sometimes. Some things that I think in a few points that I think are really important about Manjula and who she is and that illustrate her work. She's always projected a sense of belonging throughout the world. I think she's never wanted necessarily to be seen as Indian or Asian or American or anything else, but just kind of being a person is a nice idea. And also I think at the same time with that common sense of humanity, she's also felt separate, even alien. Or as she says it sometimes, she actually has a blog called Margin Alien, which I call her sometimes and with affection of course. And one of the things I've always liked about Margin Alien is I've wondered if it was Manjula's way to make it easier for people from our part of the world, sort of the equivalent of Padmanaban, which we sort of can't say. And so Margin Alien maybe it's a little bit like a name we can't pronounce, I don't know. I laugh to myself about how clever I think I am on that sometimes. With all of her sense about what is marginal or who may be marginal or who may be unimportant, I think her work always shows that we are all very real. There's an incredible specificity and finesse about so many things that she does. And we're all worthy of being in the story, either in specific or in an allegory, now and in the future. Margin Aliens, who are all of us perhaps, she certainly makes me want to be one, find themselves at the center of things in many of her works. Manjula uses the power of imagining, of creating fictions and writing and drama and drawing to make us all there and visible, when the routine news of the front pages would seem to say otherwise. All of the people on the trip to the city market, all the women of the world on the mugs, or the international travel book for children, where children from every country are running around visiting all kinds of monuments altogether. We're all there, the characters in all of her scarier stories, we are all there as well. Much of her work, her novels and plays can be seen as a kind of warning as well. Revealing or forecasting what happens or may happen if we take advantage of each other through assertions of power. Whether developed over developing countries, whatever that is, male versus female, this or that sectarian group. She wrote the following introduction to a work she wrote called Hidden Fires, which is a response to riots in a state called Gujarat, which a lot of us may not know where that is, but it's in central India, where there was some rioting between Hindus and Muslims in the early 2000s that I think really scared a lot of people for the nature of it. And so she wrote the following about what she was doing, which I think says enormous amounts about the work that she won't be showing today, mostly in what she covers, so I thought it was important to cover here. The following monologues were written during the time of the Gujarat riots in 2002. I began with the intention of making a record of what was happening, but by the time I finished, I realized that it was pointless to tie them down to a specific date or personalities or governments. There is a sameness about violent mobs that transcends nations, communities, religions and politics. We go to war because of imagined differences between ourselves and our enemies, but we are all much more the same than we are different. It was in the name of sameness that I wrote the piece. Finally, there's the thing about gifts. They keep coming. Manjula's stories, plays, novels, drawings, introductions, mugs, plates, tablecloths, scarves. Those she knows and spends time with and those things and people she creates, we are all very real and unique to her. Perhaps like most artists, giving without measure is just what she does. Her gifts always expand the circle where we can belong, where we build connections between ourselves and worlds we inhabit. Even when these are challenged by the horrors, we seem to be able to visit or threaten each other with. Innocence and delicacy and vulnerability that Manjula creates and her heroines and her heroes are worth fostering and protecting and sharing. Thank you, Steve, for that extraordinary introduction. I'm not sure that I can possibly live up to what Steve said about me, but I will go with what I've written and stop with just saying thank you, Steve. As must surely be obvious, we have a very, very warm and longstanding friendship and I'm not going to try and cover it in this session. I'd also very much like to thank Adam Braver and Betsy Learned for making this event possible. And I've visited RWU over the years with Steve in the company of Steve, but to be given an opportunity to talk to the students here is a great privilege and I always consider it a privilege. It's an extraordinary thing to be given the chance to talk not as a teacher, but as a person. So today, well, I've been living in the US on and off since 2002, and specifically in Newport since 2010. And of course, part of the reason that I chose Newport from the various other options in the country is of course because Steve and Marion live here and it helps to have a friendly family to live close to. But I've often been invited to colleges to talk over these years, nearly always. In fact, I should say always, it's been in connection with the play Harvest that Steve mentioned. And Harvest, I wrote it in 1996. In 1997, it won this big prize. And it's received more attention than anything else I've done. And it of course also hugely changed the direction of my life. So I'm very grateful to Harvest. And I'm nearly always, again, nearly always asked to talk about my process as a playwright and as an author of novels and short stories. But I call myself an author and an artist. And I very rarely talk about being an artist because as I said, I'm nearly always invited to talk specifically about Harvest. And it's because theater groups have discovered Harvest in various collections. And again, I suspect whatever other qualities Harvest may or may not have, I'm sure it makes a difference that as a woman playwright from the developing world, I fit a certain slot. And it becomes kind of interesting to invite me for that reason. I'm not presuming here, I think. I think that's just how things happen. And I'm grateful to Harvest, so I'm not putting it down. But this is really the first time that I'm going to be talking about my artwork. And specifically, I'm going to be talking about my cartoon character, Suki. And in a sense, I owe Suki and my artwork more than I usually talk about because when I was in Bombay in college, it was a moment of, I mean, it was a period of great crisis for me in one sense because as Steve explained, I grew up outside India and at the time that my parents retired, I returned to India at that very crucial period in my life, that is in my mid teens. And suddenly I felt, to some extent, imprisoned in a country that I didn't know at all. And in an identity that was unfamiliar to me, that is of being an Indian citizen. And as soon as I could possibly stop thinking that way, I wanted to escape the confines of my family. And I had grown up in an extremely protected environment, so I had very little idea how very difficult it is to finance one's own life. I didn't know. And therefore, when I said to my parents at 21 that I didn't want any financial assistance and I wanted to live away from them, I couldn't know what exactly I was risking. And in a sense, it was a good thing because had I known, I don't think I would have had the nerve to do it, but I didn't know. And the reason I believed I could finance myself was because I had been selling artwork and I figured I thought I was wrong, but I thought it would be enough. That in a short while, I would make enough money to earn a living, and I did not. So when I say I'd left my parents support at 21, I would say I struggled for the 23 years all the way till harvest. I did marry in between. I married the friend who makes my connection with Steve. But as a longstanding and old school feminist, I do not now call myself a feminist, but in my 20s and 30s, I did. And as an old school feminist, I would certainly never accept being dependent on a man. So I have always supported myself. I've always been independent financially, and I believe that that is the ultimate freedom if you can pay for yourself. And all of this in a very great sense is because of my cartoon strip, because unlike other types of art, cartoons, if you can get a slot in a newspaper, cartoons are a repeating form of payment. It usually is not very much, it's very little, I would say in fact, in my case, but it is regular money. And in that sense, I am very indebted to Suki because this odd character, Fuzzy Haired, 20 years, she's about 25 and she doesn't age, she remains 25, she doesn't have a job. I mean, she says she's a journalist, but we very rarely see her producing any work. She sometimes interviews people, but she lives a very shiftless life. She doesn't have, she doesn't, I mean, she has once or twice had a boyfriend or two, but they don't last long and her best friend is a frog. And she's, I'm nearly always told or asked whether she's my alter ego, I don't think so. She started off as someone based on me and I used to think of her as me, but there was a period when I broke off and she became, she, she became a self. So what I'm going to do, since this is going to be about Suki, I'm going to take us on a brief trip through her life. And one of the things that I think you might notice, the early drawings, so this is the very first published Suki strip. And when I look at it now, I'm very conscious that the drawing style is very, very much more scrappy and less, I mean, the lines are kind of irregular and more than anything else, the script is kind of unreadable. You're seeing it up big on a screen, but this appeared in a newspaper and it was not easy to read. So one of the first things that happened was the way that I find myself having to clarify the script and to ease up on the drawing so that my lines were clearer and better formed. And I found myself always having to play a game with space because one of the issues with doing a comic strip is that you need to be able to draw characters who are easy to repeat over a series of frames because it's fairly, in an illustration, some of the work that you saw prior to this PowerPoint, that earlier work is nearly always illustrations and it's easy enough, well, it takes time, but you can do a drawing with a lot of detail once. But I very quickly stopped drawing any decoration onto the clothes of my characters because I would have to repeat them in the frames. And so here's the frog. The frog became, this was his appearance on the strip. He became Suki's most constant companion. He's really grown in character and his ability to say interesting things. This was when the strip became a daily. It appeared six days a week in the pioneer. And it gave me, people used to ask me whether it wasn't a huge effort to do a daily strip, but in actual fact, I delivered the strips once a week. That is, I delivered six days at the same time every week. So in a sense, it isn't more effort because you get the dialogue to flow across six days rather than six frames. And it's not really that much of a stretch, but the weekly strip gave me a tremendous freedom to explore ideas that would normally not be expressible in any other form. My, this character in the Burka, she was one of my favorite characters in part because she was so easy to draw. Another favorite character was a Python, but I'm not sure that I've included the Python in this series. So I really found myself using my strip as a way of expressing ideas that are not big enough to be short stories or to be articles, but as a way of talking about issues which are just almost little more than a feeling, just a little tickle in the brain. I don't think I produce cartoons that are laugh worthy, but I aim for a little tickle in the mind. And in the course of the years that I produced, Tsuki, that is the 1980s and 1990s, I found myself gradually, like this one is for instance, it refers to feminism. In the course of the time that I worked on Tsuki because I was aging, I found myself becoming less interested in specifically feminist themes. And I don't know whether that's just a feature that's just personal to me, but Tsuki remained a feminist and she continues to call herself a feminist whereas I call myself post-feminist or genderist, but I don't really call myself a feminist anymore. So she gives me the opportunity to, oh, in this series, I did a few strips which appeared only on my blog, they didn't appear in print. I'm going to show you them as separate frames because I liked the dogs so much. I particularly liked the pink poodle. And I have to admit, I do think it's very sad that female animals are nearly always used as a way of being critical of human beings like there's the bitches and shrews. I don't know what do we have against shrews. So I tried for a while to run Tsuki on my, in just as an internet medium on that medium, but I found I couldn't, I just didn't enjoy not being actually in print. And I did this for a little while and then stopped and then Tsuki went into hiding for several years. I'm going to do this fast because it's just, I want to get to the current strip because when a piece of writing or a drawing doesn't appear in print, as far as I'm concerned, it's not engaging with the real world in the way that a weekly or day, daily appearance in print does. And I really missed having Tsuki appear in a newspaper. So this early last year when one of my editor friends said to me that she was interested in a column, I just tried it out and I said, do you think I could revive Tsuki in a business newspaper? And she said, well, we'll just ask the editor and see how it goes and to my amazement, they said, yes, so this strip, this is the current strip and it appears in a business newspaper on the edit page. I have absolutely no idea what Indian businessmen make of this strip. I don't hear from readers. I post it on Facebook, and my friends respond to Facebook, but I really have absolutely no idea what the businessmen who are supposed to be the target audience actually think of this strip. So there's my Python. The Python used to be a very familiar character on this strip. Amongst, this is the last one. I'm going to return us, oh, it's not going to return, so we leave it there. Amongst the issues that I found myself routinely dealing with is the representation of an ordinary person. That is, Tsuki is a very middle of the road person. She's not special in it. She doesn't have any special gifts or she doesn't have any superpowers. She's not pretty. She's not ugly. She doesn't have any handicaps or any special qualities. And I enjoy giving her the space to just be and now I realize when in Steve's introduction, I imagine that's what he picked up on is something that is very familiar to me. That is, I'm constantly looking at what is ordinary because as someone said, it's much more useful to like everyday things like toast and butter, which is something I adore, because you can get a lot of it. If the things you like are very special and rare, you won't have access to them easily, whereas if you like ordinary things, you just like breathing or you like walking on a road, you're likely to have more opportunities to enjoy them. And in a sense, I would say that I have been celebrating that kind of ordinariness all my life. I mean, I'm often told that I'm unusual, but I don't think that's the point. I think I enjoy ordinary things, and it's not difficult, and yet we are routinely encouraged to aim only for the pinnacles or the peaks, the success points that are hard to achieve, whereas I reach for the things that are easy because then I can succeed on a daily basis. And I'm lazy and not very hard working, and I go for that. So the last point I want to make is, again, very often asked by young journalists how I make the connection between my artwork and my writing, because like I said in the beginning, I'm nearly always invited as an author, not as an artist. And in my experience, especially writing plays, being a cartoonist has been a great asset because as you might have noticed from the first frame that we saw to this last one, I have really altered the kind of dialogue that I include in my frames. It has, doing a cartoon strip has been an incredible exercise in learning and brevity in speech because most people think, everyone thinks of a cartoon and a cartoonist as someone who draws, but if the cartoonist does the script as well, that person has to be able to write. And it's one of the things that I have most discovered in being a cartoonist is the very powerful verbal element in any comic strip. Every comic strip has a very powerful verbal content and we usually, you know, we don't think about it. We don't think about the text that is an integral part of most comic strips. And I would say that this has been an extraordinary training ground for being specifically a playwright because it's dialogue. It's just pure dialogue. And so in that sense, I truly owe Suki a great debt. And I'm going to stop here because I'm hoping that we'll have questions. And anyway, to stop, I'd like to say thank you again. It's been a wonderful privilege. Thank you. Yes, go ahead. I would say that writing has been more rewarding in just one sense. I think society pays a higher regard to writers. And in that sense, if you say you're a writer, I mean, when I'm on a train or a bus and someone turns to me and says, what do you do? And I say I'm a writer. They all say, oh, ooh. If I say I'm an artist, you know, that's kind of very different. So I don't say that. I think the idea comes ahead of anything else but I've often been at pains to explain that the first task is to draw the frame lines. And in the years before Universal Home Printers, to draw the frame lines was a great burden. I used to try and find all kinds of ways of going around that. I used to, initially I didn't, I just traced the lines out because I didn't like the flat straight line. I liked a slightly less rigid line. But the effort of drawing the frame lines, you would think it's nothing. It doesn't take any mental effort but it's boring and I can't explain how I used to hate setting up the frame lines. And some part of my early efforts with Tsuki were all about working out the method of drawing the frame lines on a large sheet of paper and then working out the reduction and getting them delivered to the newspaper office because in the days before email, of course I would physically deliver them. And I didn't like to leave the originals at the newspapers because newspapers have absolutely no respect for physical bits of paper because they, you know, I mean, I remember one of my editors saying sheepishly, oh dear, I've been crossing, excuse me, crossing off the used strips, you know, that thing crossing over them. So of course I stopped giving him originals. I first went, stopped at the photocopier, got them reduced to size and then delivered the photocopy. But of course, in the new version of the strip, I have the frame lines. I don't know in how much detail you want to know, but I have the frame lines which I photocopy on sheets of letter size paper. And I draw in pencil within the frame lines I don't ever do the writing till the drawing is over, but I have the idea before I start to draw. So all week my deadline is usually, it's Friday morning, that is, it has to get to the Madras newspaper before or around Friday morning, their time. So Thursday night is my limit. I need to complete it by Thursday. And I can usually do one of these in about three or four hours, but I think about it, it's a little blinking light in my head all week. And then when I'm ready to draw, then it's quick. So I do the drawing in pencil, I ink it. It's a very simple inking. I scan, upload and finish in Photoshop. So all the coloring is electronic. I mean, it really makes it easier in two ways. One is I don't have to worry about making mistakes because, of course, it's much easier to fix a mistake, but also the colors are then very easy for separation and processing at the other end. So I far prefer to do it that way than to ever work with original artworks, with painted artworks. So I try to avoid doing that. And the text, when I'm drawing, so if anyone here uses Photoshop, then you know that you can work in layers. So the text is a whole separate layer, and I can edit and cut and edit and cut to my heart's content to get it, to get it so that it is easy to read. Otherwise, when text is reduced to newspapers size, and it's about eight inches across in print. So the ink typically spreads a bit. So I had to think of those things. But yeah, they fit on one sheet of US letter. So the print size is eight centimeters, so what I work on is not more than maybe 10 or 12 centimeters across. I do it on one sheet. Yeah. As I said, there's an issue of time. I don't want to spend too long over it. So I work it on one sheet of US letter. I work it out so that my, the effort, the only real effort is the physical drawing. And that, I don't like to spend a lot of time doing that because I know that that takes a certain effort. Everything else is time. So if I spend about 10 minutes in the physical drawing, the next two and a half hours are going to be everything else, the coloring and the fixing the borders so that they are tight. And I often do a certain amount of editing of the drawing on Photoshop and for some reason that it takes me a much longer time to draw electronically than it does by pencil. So I try to make my pencil drawing and the inking as tight as I can so that everything else falls into place easily because however much I might, I really like to produce a cartoon strip but the effort is always tedious. Oh yes, I have a plan to do a graphic novel but that'll be a whole, that'll be a completely different effort. I have, you had a question, Adam. Steve's introduction, he mentioned they were believed to be the first woman in her career. Yes, yes, yes. Which I presume that means a male dominated. Very much so, very much so, yeah. And I have this whole Julia Morgan narrative going into that right now but what was it like to, or was it, did that create barriers for you? No because if you are unique, I certainly was initially and I'm not now, there are lots of illustrators and cartooning has started to, it's become a kind of fuzzy edged definition now. But if you're unique, then you're noticed much more than anyone else and I didn't face a barrier. It's, I would merely be told, I would just be asked, you know, is it unusual? But that's not something you can report on. I mean, you are just what you are and I certainly, as an illustrator, I nearly always got women's issues to draw. If there was an article in the newspapers which was specific to women, then that illustration would be sent my way and I used to say, you know, I can draw men. And so, but I don't think it was, I don't think that if there were barriers, they lay in that direction. It had much to do with class, there were class barriers in the sense that for whatever reason, illustrators and graphic artists of the type who work with ad agencies tend to be young men from somewhat disadvantaged backgrounds in India. And I was, I represented an unusual type for doing that kind of, and I would, if at all I faced discrimination, it was at the level of, oh, you wouldn't know how to draw this. Not because I was a woman, but because I didn't have the common touch. I was told that. And there isn't anything much you can do about that. Yeah. Pardon? Yeah. Steve and Marion had come to India to follow their dreams and to meet a very charismatic and wonderful person who happens to be, happened to be my father-in-law. So we met in the house that I was living in. He was the late Joseph Alenstein exceptional architect. So that's how we met. Go ahead. Another question. Yes. I'm also struck that about a suit he has never aged. Yes. I however have. Well, and that's the interesting question to me because you've talked about how some of your perspectives change vis-a-vis suit he like kept suit he. Yes. Yes. I'm curious, I don't know my question. It strikes me from a narrative perspective how you created a narrative of change with a character who is, who's situation, who is his status, who is external or internal who is reflecting. Yeah. Well, I look at other cartoon characters. Some of them age. I mean, for instance, Calvin and Hobbes doesn't age. And I think his cartoonist decided that he would stop drawing the strip because he felt he had done. He had done the world. But Gary Trudeau's characters age. They grow older, they grow up and have children and change their political affiliations and so on. I think Suki has remained the same just because it's easier. A lot of what I do is because it's easier and I'm lazy. Right. How does Suki have to do that? How do you match Suki with Suki? Well, Suki has, I mean, the strip does nowadays include a lot more political comment. I will confess that I have featured your current president several times. I have kept him out here or here because... I'm sorry. I realized that this can be sensitive. I am still not a citizen and it might be a bit thoughtless, I thought, to just quietly include his cartoons in the series. But of course they have appeared in the newspaper. He is, whatever other qualities he may have, he is wonderful for cartoonists. He is exceptional. I mean, I did try to do at the time of President Obama's second term when he was fighting that election. I did do a couple of campaign cartoons for him in my blog, but I wasn't in print at the time. But I found much as I think he's a wonderful... I think he's incredibly handsome. I found it very hard to make a cartoon out of him. I know that the features are his ears and so on, but I didn't want to cartoon him, whereas the current incumbent is just outstanding. Pretty much at our time. Yeah. At one level, the answer to the longer part of your question is when I was young, I mean 8, 9, 10, and around the age that one is thinking about the whole rest of your life, at least I was, I had so little doubt that I would be an artist and a writer that it was nothing to think about. It was obvious. But I was talking about this the other day. I think as a child, I wasn't particularly... I was not unusual in any way, but I had huge confidence in myself and maybe that's a feature of children. Children are very confident until the world breaks them down. In my case, for whatever reason, I was not broken down and I had every reason to... I failed a great deal and a lot of things went wrong for me, but I just never worried about my abilities, not because I have to keep saying this. It's not because I was wonderful. I have really had to work hard to improve my... Everything that I've done, I mean, if you look at the artwork, you'll see there's a huge change between 1970 and now. And what I can do now and what I could do in 1970 is hugely different. But the confidence... In fact, I would say that as I've grown older, I've become a great deal more humble and I know how little I can do compared to what can be done. But as a young person, I was very confident. And so that answers why did I... Why do I do a range of things? It's because there are many entry points to being an author. There are many entry points. You can be a short story writer or a journalist but writing plays was a whole other thing. I had never planned to be a playwright. And I wrote my first play because a friend with whom... We were having a conversation about nothing in particular and she quite casually... And then with... I mean, when she told me... She told me about an incident that she had been a witness to. A very brutal incident. And it left... It made a huge impact on me. And when I went to my editors and said, you know, I've heard about this incident, it could not be a news story because there were no witnesses that had taken place a year earlier. There was no site to visit. And one thing led to another. And rather than write it as any kind of article or an essay, I chose to write it as a play called Lights Out. And Lights Out is a short play, maybe an hour and a quarter or shorter than that, in which a group of six people are witness to a gang rape and they do nothing. So the point about the play is not the rape. The point about the play is the doing nothing when you see a horrific crime. You don't see... The audience doesn't see anything. They just don't see anything. The audience doesn't see anything. They just hear these people justifying doing nothing. So they did happen. At the end of... I attended a performance of the Reversed Reading. I hadn't been to any of the Reverses. So I was just in the audience for the Reversed Reading. And I had not allowed myself to think about what it would be like to hear it, to respond to it as an audience member. And it was... I was caught up in the events of the performance. But at the end of it, because it's very disturbing, it's a disturbing play, at the end of it I was really quite shocked that everyone turned to me for reassurance and for help with what to do next. And that's... So that sense of being suddenly alone, you're not part of the audience. You are the person who did this, who created this experience. That sense of responsibility was very humbling. The realization that something had been set in motion almost... I had no chance, but with that, I had not considered the effects of words on a whole room of people, because they were badly disturbed. And I realized it's an extraordinary power and a responsibility. So everything, all the plays that I've written have tended to be socially aware that most of my other work, like, for instance, Suki was never socially aware. This current strip is much more so. But I don't think my work before Lights Out was that I was really conscious of being of social issues in quite that way, because I hadn't discovered that particular power that performed art can produce. It doesn't always... It doesn't have to, but it can. And I think I've kind of covered that. Yes. Hi, thank you very much. Is there... Is there, or can you look forward to, Suki's collective work? Yes, there is already one. It's collected. So that's a Penguin publication and Indian publication. But my current publisher is where we're working on a much more extended collection of all Suki. So, yes. Thank you for asking. So shall we wrap this up? Thank you. Thank you.