Scribblings of a Seeker 
I grew up in 1990s India, in an era before infinite choice. There was no cable television with hundreds of channels to scroll through. No internet to swallow entire afternoons. Entertainment was not something you consumed on demand. It was something you waited for, anticipated, protected.
My entire week hinged on a single hour. Every Sunday morning, from 9 to 10 AM, the national broadcaster aired cartoons. That was it. Sixty minutes of animated magic, and then silence for another six days.
I never missed it. I mean that literally. I never missed it. The few times circumstances conspired against me, when a family obligation or some unavoidable interruption pulled me away from that sacred hour, I felt genuine grief. I remember crying, actual tears, mourning those lost minutes of Dexter, Swat Kats, and Johnny Bravo. To a child with limited options, that hour was not just entertainment. It was oxygen.
What I didn’t realize then was that those cartoons were doing something deeper than amusing me. They were teaching me that some worlds operate on different rules. In cartoons, characters do not age. They do not compromise. They do not wake up one morning and realize their childhood dreams are impractical. Dexter remains forever in his laboratory. The Swat Kats never hang up their flight suits. Cartoons exist in a permanent present, and some part of me decided, unconsciously and stubbornly, that I wanted to live there too.
The transition to adulthood felt like a betrayal. In my twenties, faced with the obligation to choose a career, I found myself paralyzed not by lack of ambition but by an excess of it. When Dexter’s Laboratory was airing, I wanted to be a scientist. During Swat Kats, a fighter pilot. I wanted to be a ninja, an archaeologist, a forest ranger, a tomb raider, and a grim reaper’s assistant. On weekends, I was secretly a superhero.
None of these appeared in the classifieds.
So I did what many young people in Bangalore did in the early 2000s. I joined a call center.
I became a Technical Support Representative, one of thousands of night-shift workers helping Americans troubleshoot their Apple computers. Email configuration. iChat setup. iTunes synchronization. Internet connectivity. The same four problems, repeated across eight hours, five nights a week, while the sun rose over India and set over the customers I was assisting.
The work itself was not the worst part. The worst part was the cognitive dissonance. The gap between the advertisements showing smiling call center employees and the reality of fluorescent-lit rooms full of exhausted twenty-somethings counting minutes until break time. The CSAT scores (customer satisfaction metrics) hung over us like swords. My team leader monitored call times with the intensity of an air traffic controller.
Six months in, I stood up, removed my headset, placed it on the desk, and walked out.
Just like that. No dramatic speech. No scene. I simply stopped being able to do it anymore.
My father understood immediately. My parents, bless them, were supportive rather than judgmental. But understanding why I had quit was not the same as knowing what came next. I was twenty-something, unemployed, and still carrying that childish belief that work should mean something.
Then my phone rang.
It was my best friend. He was enrolling in an animation course and he wanted me to join him. He didn’t ask if I was interested. He didn’t pitch the career prospects or the industry growth. He simply said, “You should do this with me.”
Animation.
The word landed like a key turning in a lock I hadn’t realized was there. I could learn to create cartoons. Not watch them. Not consume them. Make them. My own characters, my own stories, my own worlds. The possibility seemed so obvious in retrospect that I actually laughed. All my life, cartoons had shaped my imagination, influenced my sense of humor, taught me about timing and expression and visual storytelling. And it had never once occurred to me that animation was not just entertainment. It was a craft. A profession. A life.
So I enrolled. I learned the principles: squash and stretch, anticipation, follow-through. I spent late nights in computer labs, wrestling with software that crashed at the worst moments, tweaking keyframes until they felt right. And somewhere in that process, I made my first animated short. It was rough, amateur, full of mistakes I can spot immediately now. But it was mine. I had built something that moved, that told a story, that came from my own hands.
Five years after that phone call, I run a small studio in Chennai called missingDNA studios. We are small. We are new. The work is difficult, the hours are irregular, and the industry demands constant adaptation.
I have never been happier.
This is what those five years produced. A reel of character animation work that represents hundreds of hours of practice, failure, learning, and gradual improvement:
There is a particular satisfaction in realizing, decades later, what your ten-year-old self was trying to tell you. That child who cried over missed cartoons was not being dramatic. He was responding to something real. A recognition that animation creates a unique kind of joy, and that creating that joy for others might be the most worthwhile thing a person can do with their working hours.
We live in an era of unprecedented professional possibility. The paths that existed for my parents are no longer the only paths. You can build a life around what genuinely engages you. Not what you think you should want, not what pays the most, not what impresses others, but what actually makes the hours feel like they matter.
If you are reading this and feeling stuck in work that drains you, consider this permission to look elsewhere. The thing that made you light up as a child. That fascination, that obsession, that thing you would have done for free if someone had only shown you the door. It’s still there. Sometimes it just takes a friend to point at the open door and say, “You should come this way.”