Chota Bheem and Junior

The gang of Dholakpur has well and truly invaded our space. Junior is so much smitten by Chota Bheem that, he refuses to wear shirt after having food and insists on wearing full trousers ala his favorite superhero. For a person who has seldom tasted any form of sweet, he would mimic chota Bheem’s action of eating laddu with both hands, do a fist pump like him and proclaim that he has become strong (“naan chota bheem aatam strong aaiten). Then begins the actual role play. Everyone else, except his mom, becomes Rakshasaas. He would ask us to “fight” with him and even otherwise, he would declare war on the “rakshasaas” and would begin punching with full vigour. The cartoon has various forms of Bheem aligning with little Krishna, Ganapati to fight super villains and also there is a full-fledged Bheemayanam, where the Dholakpur fellows enact Ramayanam. Junior is so impressed by Bheem that anything and everything he imitates that character. In Youtube, there are songs for each of the character from Bheem’s gang – be it Chutki the cute girl, jaggu the monkey, Kaalia the wrestler or even for the Golu twins. There are song videos for each occasion, be it Diwali or holi and all of those songs are so hum worthy and nice on the ears. Junior has memorized every single one of them and would be singing them non-stop. He talks to his soft toys and has named them after these characters.
The reason behind the post is to give credit to those amazingly creative team behind the Chota Bheem story board. They are doing an excellent job of retaining local flavor yet coming up with a cartoon that is on par with any other toon in the world. It retains the sense of simplicity and good morals along with creative story telling that is interesting to watch for anyone who can spare some time. I had often wished for some team to come up with jataka tales, Panchatantra, Birbal, Aesop stories in toon format. Of course there are quite few of them on the net. But I am not sure how many of them have such super hit cult franchise level fame of Chota Bheem. Now that I could actually see the craze it sets on kids, every kids shop that I see has some or other merchandise of Chota Bheem. Hope we get all of Amar Chitra katha in this format. If it’s already there would dig in deep for such videos. Really a treasure trove worth preserving.