Speakers
Your phone is making you miserable. You already know this.
Rachita Taneja, aka Sanitary Panels, wrote a book about it anyway.
Touching Grass is sharp, funny, and quietly furious, examining how algorithmic politics has reshaped our attention, our outrage, and our sense of agency. Without looking away from the forces that feed the machine, the book traces how public discourse is increasingly filtered through platforms, narrowing the space for meaningful citizenship.
Graphic novelist Appupen joins Rachita for a conversation around the harder questions the book raises: how to stay informed without being consumed, how to move beyond cycles of doomscrolling and exhaustion, and what it might mean to be genuinely useful in the world rather than merely outraged by it.
An audience Q&A and book signing will follow.
Speakers
Rachita Taneja aka Sanitary Panels
Sanitary Panels is an Indian political webcomic by Rachita Taneja. An award-winning satirist and artist, Taneja takes a distinct feminist position in her work, commenting on current affairs and issues of social justice. Her signature stick-figure-style comics have garnered a substantial audience on Instagram, Facebook and X, where she posts her work as @sanitarypanels. She is a recipient of the Kofi Annan Courage in Cartooning Award 2024.
Appupen
Appupen’s original multiverse of Halahala has spawned cult graphic novels like Moonward, Aspyrus and The Snake and the Lotus. His 2023 graphic novel Dream Machine, with Laurent Daudet, has been published worldwide in English, French and German.
In 2025 Appupen created the Vaadivaasal graphic novel with Perumal Murugan, now available in Tamil, English, Bangla, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi. The superhero/political satire series Rashtraman and Dystopian Times are regular on various online and print platforms like Frontline. Appupen has been an artist-in-residence at La Maison des Auteurs, Angouleme, France. @appupen is the founder and co-editor of Brainded India.
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