If a picture is worth a thousand words, a cartoon would be worth a lot more. But much like the movies at the Oscars, cartoons or caricatures too are hard to judge when it comes to the best.
The best form of appreciation can only come from competition––and that is exactly what the Maya Kamath Memorial Awards seek to do.
Mumbai-born Kamath began her career as a cartoonist way back in 1985 with The Evening Herald, a publication of the Deccan Herald group. She would later go on to make cartoons for popular Indian newspapers such as The Indian Express, The Asian Age and Times of India.
One of Kamath’s significant contributions was a series of environmental cartoons, in a German collection called ‘Third World’. She has also been awarded on several occasions; in October 1998, in fact, the Karnataka Cartoonists’ Association conferred an award on her on the occasion of the 7th Cartoonists’ Conference.
Maya Kamath may have passed away in 2001, but her family––in association with the Indian Institute of Cartoonists in Bangalore––has sought to keep her memory alive. Thus began the Maya Kamath Memorial Awards, meeting-ground and centre for budding cartoonists across the globe to pit their talents against one another. This is the fifth edition of the awards.
Following is the list of all entries which won awards and accolades. Interestingly, some of them paint quite a vivid picture of incidents that made headlines in the past year.
1st – Satish Acharya, Kundapur, Karnataka
2nd – Kantesh Badiger, Bangalore
3rd – Rohan Chakravarty, Nagpur
1st – Gajanan Ghongde, Akola
2nd – Sahil Bhatia, Delhi
3rd – Tanmay Tyagi, Delhi
1st – Paolo Dalponts, Italy
2nd -Behzad Ghafari, Canada
1st – Luc Descheemaekar, Belgium
2nd – Jovan Prokopijevic, Serbia
3rd – Georgievski Miro, Macedonia
Miss Leeza John, Pottamkulam, Kerala