Those who commute by the Delhi Metro everyday, can narrate tales about the banality of travelling by it. Even if majority of Delhiites are accustomed to hearing the oft-repeated announcements about the safety precautions that begin to irritate after a point or braving the maddening rush like a Spartan, it’s the boredom of the hour-long journeys that gets everyone’s goat. While some seek solace in a kindle or hardbound books, others prefer to listen to music or watch videos. Samar Khan, a 23-year-old south Delhi boy, however, doodles! Using unsuspecting co-travellers as his subject, he creates aliens, super-villains and other caricatures to create dramatic artworks, which have now begun to be circulated over the social media. We speak to the young man, who likes to keep a low profile and lets his doodles speak for him.
Samar, a fresh graduate, joined a job recently that required him to travel from Saket to Noida and he thought of making doodles to kill his time. “I’d read books or listen to music sometimes but then I got bored of it but doodling hooked me. I began doing it for my entertainment and now it has become a source of entertainment for others. I took the inspiration from New York-based guy who runs the page ‘Subway Doodle’, but we have very different style,” he says.
He adds, “Being engaged with art has been my hobby but I never made it my profession.”
He goes on, “From learning to like sketching on paper to photoshop, video editing skills, animation, special effects, etc. I have tried my hands at everything. I am a software developer and my job requires me to do coding, which is not remotely related to doodling.” Samar makes doodle on his smartphone and it has taken him a couple of years to get really comfortable sketching on it. “Sometimes my doodles are pre-planned — where I have imagined something previously but sometimes, it is impromptu. I keep clicking scenes from the metro and then later when something pops up in my head, I draw it,” says Samar who is yet to tell his family, his closest friends and his colleagues that he is the one making the interesting doodles.
“Even co-passengers keep seeing me making doodles but they don’t know that I run the page yet. I want everyone to know about the page by themselves instead of me telling everyone to check my work,” he says. He doesn’t click close-up pictures as he feels some may not find it right (about being clicked without permission).
Samar Khan
But why restrict oneself only to the Delhi Metro? “Though it can be done anywhere, I do it in the Metro because that is where I spend my maximum free time. It is about observing people and see how other elements can interact with them. Also, you won’t find so many different characters in an office cab. So, in a way, Metro gives me a huge canvas,” says Samar, who has posted about 40-odd doodles on his page.
