The cartoon I loved most as a child was Doraemon, a Japanese animated series about a blue robot cat from the future. I grew up in Dhaka, and it was dubbed into Hindi and shown on a children's channel, so I watched it every afternoon after school.
I must have been about seven when I started watching it, and I carried on until I was eleven or twelve. My younger brother Arif and I would rush home, throw our school bags on the floor and fight over the best spot on the sofa. My mother had a strict rule that we could only watch one episode before homework, which we always tried to stretch into two.
The story is about a lazy, clumsy schoolboy called Nobita, who's always getting bad marks and being bullied. Doraemon is sent back in time to help him, and he has a magic pocket on his stomach full of amazing gadgets. My favourites were the door that takes you anywhere in the world and the bamboo propeller you stick on your head to fly. In most episodes, Nobita uses a gadget to solve a problem, but then misuses it and causes chaos.
I loved it for a few reasons. The gadgets fired my imagination. Arif and I spent hours inventing our own, drawing them in old notebooks. I also related to Nobita, because I wasn't the best student either, and it was comforting that the main character wasn't perfect. And underneath the jokes, it had a message that you can't solve everything with shortcuts. I'm an electrical engineer now, and I sometimes wonder if those gadgets were where my interest started.