How a Droplet Became a Mascot
Stormwater is invisible. It rushes through Bengaluru’s streets, slips into drains, and quietly determines how resilient our city really is. Yet most of us never think about it—until it floods.
When we began the Building a Resilient Bengaluru campaign, we knew we couldn’t lead with technical drawings and stormwater cross-sections (tempting as that was). We needed a way to talk about water without sounding like a lecture. So we created a character.
Her name is Hani—which means “droplet” in Kannada. A little drop of resilience. Instantly local. Instantly relatable.
Hani began as a neon blue droplet with oversized cartoon eyes and a gentle smile. But getting there wasn’t simple. There were weeks of debates over the exact shade of blue, whether she should be 2D or 3D, how much her stream should twirl—and yes, a surprisingly intense argument about whether water is grammatically feminine. (It is.)
What started as a single droplet soon evolved. Hani began to have moods—fluffy clouds, falling rain, gloomy puddles, flowing streams. Each mood represented a different stage of the water cycle, giving her multiple ways to tell the story of how water moves through our city.
She wasn’t just a drop. She was the cycle.
From Sketchbook to Storyboard
Once Hani’s form felt right, we turned to her voice—both metaphorically and literally. Hani doesn’t represent just one droplet. She represents how many droplets together create rivers, lakes, floods, recharge, resilience. Through her, we wanted to explore our relationship with water:
- How we manage it
- How we neglect it
- How we expect it to behave
- And how little we understand it
We brought her to life the old-school way: pencil to paper. Sketches. Doodles. Storyboards. Scribbled dialogue bubbles.
The storyboards slowly turned into scripts. We kept the language simple—curious, playful, never preachy. Hani asks questions instead of giving answers. She observes instead of being a know-it-all (no one likes a know-it-all :)).
What began as a plan to simply place her cutout onto background images spiralled (as creative projects do) into a full animation experiment. After a crash course in tutorials, edits, and a few technical meltdowns, Hani could now walk, fly, swim, and drift across Bengaluru.
She was no longer an idea. She was moving.
Finding Hani’s Voice (Literally)
Hani’s personality emerged naturally from her form. She is adventurous. She floats in the sky, tumbles as rain, flows as rivers. She is innocent—but often finds herself in trouble, especially when she meets clogged drains and encroached lakes.
We imagined her voice as childlike, curious, and slightly dramatic. The youngest team member was chosen to voice her—which happened to be me. It took several recordings to strike the right balance: high, cutesy, but (hopefully) not annoying. The real challenge? Emotional range.
Should panic sound like: “Oh no!!!” or “NOOOoooooo?!”
We tested both. A few days—and many edits—later, everything finally synced: animation, doodles, voice, music, timing. When the layers aligned, Hani felt real. And that’s how The Hani Diaries began.
From a simple problem—stormwater being invisible—came a neon-blue droplet determined to make the city notice.
-By Namoshi Basu, Edited by Nidhi Bhatnagar
