India, Oct. 17 -- In India in 2014, if you told your parents you wanted to quit engineering to become a doodle artist, you were basically asking for a family intervention. Santanu Hazarika did it anyway. Also read | Abhay Sehgal interview: What's it like being an artist in the age of social media and should you go to art school?

The self-taught artist from Assam had just won the inaugural Red Bull World Doodle Art Championship. Overnight, he went from the guy sketching for fun to the one representing India on a global stage. It was validation. It was freedom. But it also came with a tag that would follow him for the next decade.

For years, everyone introduced him the same way: 'Santanu Hazarika, doodle artist'. Today, if you call him th...