When eminent speakers were exchanging thought-provoking ideas on the stage of The Hindu Huddle, the team of Naadan Comics, an AI-based storytelling company, was also at work. In real time, Karnataka Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, Chinese ambassador to India Xu Feihong, Kashmir CM Omar Abdullah and senior journalists of The Hindu appeared as characters alongside T Rex, the dino mascot of Naadan Comics on the social media handles of Naadan Comics. As the conversations engaged the audience who gathered at the event, the comics took it to an online audience, conveying the important moments from the sessions with a comical twist in real time. “We call it live comic journalism,” says Kamalakkannan Durairaju, who goes by Kamal.
The company, which experiments with innovative storytelling, blending AI, creativity and realtime storytelling, dedicated two panels for each session, with one of them focusing on the session topic and the other on its future possibilities. The team also ensured to include an elephant mascot alongside T Rex in each comic, in a hat tip to the elephant which appears in The Hindu logo. While the mascots appear to be passive spectators in some comics, they could be seen passing active opinions in a few others.
