(Published In Kindle Magazine on MARCH 11, 2015)
Nineties. India. We were late at the
party. By the time we arrived, most of the big guys had either left office or
were waiting for the cab back home. Kutty, Shankar and Vijayan were gone. Neelabh, Ninan, Suraiya and Tailang were the
fresher lot, they would persist a little while longer. But by and large, all we
could see were silhouettes, back profiles, and distant faces blurring away in
the torrential influx of a whole different set of images – Television serials,
animation movies, video games.
Among all these receding and
advancing images, however, there was this one chap in an old checked coat,
frayed dhoti, ooljalool hair, and Gandhi-like (or, for a newer audience,
Potter-like) spectacles, who was everywhere. Mostly by mistake and largely
unrepentant. I was told his name was R K Laxman. And he would remain thus
identified, this mute spectator old man in a dhoti, till 2005. In 2005, at an
inter-school talent show, a new old man would try taking up his mantle. No, I did not
win anything. Nor was he on the stage giving away prizes. Rather, he sat in the
front row, silently smiling or frowning through the performances, and left
quite early. Only, curiously, people would keep pointing at this new old man
and call him “R K Laxman”. The incident seemed so peculiar, it was easy to
dismiss it as a misunderstanding, a mistake made by five hundred odd students
and teachers. And that is exactly what I
did. Years later, when on Republic Day 2015, they kept flashing the face of
this new old man on TV, and declared with long sorrowful faces, “R K Laxman is
no more”, I still dismiss it as a national mistake.
Laxman was, and will remain, for me,
pretty much a myth – the golden king of a golden past. He reigned over the Indian
populace at a time when our leadership were too busy with other, substantial
chores, to get hurt and bleed curses at the minutest of pin pricks. This was before Ramjanmabhumi and Godhra,
before the rise of the radical right, before ‘terror’ became a socio-political
phenomenon. This was when newspaper owners took notes from their editors and
the advertisement guy was a silent clerk working away at one corner of the office.
In this era, my Laxman, generally known today as the Common Man, could
silently glide through scandalous parliamentary revelations, blasphemous
backstage conversations and the greatest out-in-the-open secrets which
everybody knew of, but could never acknowledge. There was no bypassing the Common
Man’s silent gaze, he would be at the right time right place, putting the
magnifying glass at exact cracks and fissures. He was the urban wayfarer
peeking around drainage pipes and beggars, and also the rural peep happily
spraying a banned pesticide. He would be there at parliamentarian meets,
university protests, trade union rallies and dressing room discussions. He was
neither metropolitan nor small town, northern nor southern. He was the
common man. A black and white, omnipresent image of humour and critique, which
neither offered nor needed a definition, a categorisation, or an origin story.
Above all, however, what
characterised the king and his era was the lightness of humour itself. One
would let float little bombs of hilarity and expect nothing more than little
chuckles, wide smiles. It was all to keep people and their leaders grounded –
to assert that to err is human, and our leaders, no matter how large their vote
share was, were no gods and susceptible both to faults and to critique. It was
a good way of keeping the house open to debates and discussions. That’s
it. Sitting pretty on the first page,
you did not expect the pocket rockets to stir revolutions, topple governments, bring
ideological shifts. You did not expect them to convert sinners into saints. No
expectations, no fear. The necessity of being politically correct was much less
arduous, much less oppressive and all-consuming than it is today. Cartoonists
weren’t battling as many varied, contrasting image functions as they do today.
Today, we have an almost unreasonable
abandon of images and information. And also a wide variety of measures to
quantify response and calculate ideas. Our jokers and our jesters (read
politicians and cartoonists/satirists/stand-up-comics) have both become slaves
to the number of shares, likes, tweets, TRPs, votes. They become tools for both
garnering social identity as well as creating unwritten social codes which can
go on to dictate opinions like never before. As we transcend from the text to
the hypertext, both the critic and the criticised have become unprecedentedly
embroiled within the process of opinion formation. Each new emerging episteme
and issue is seamlessly gobbled up into the market of ideas, and resurrected time
and again as opinion maker or opinion breaker, depending on the use and
intention. At such a time one cannot, and must not let afloat anything
as light comic asides. Responsibilities have increased, so has intolerance for
mistakes. Charlie Hebdo being the hot example.
Eras end. One does not replicate
them. We might mourn their passing, we might not. Fact remains, it is gone.
Only things left behind are crumbling facades, fading legacies, which like the
mathematical limit, always tend to zero but never quite meet the bottom-line.
There are always those few post-decimals which keep the apocalypse away. Returning
to where we began, Rasipuram Krishnaswami Laxman, the little known new old man,
might have passed. But the R K Laxman we all know and identify as such, still
stands with his potli, one of the many (several of whom are new and
upcoming) post decimals who stand gate keeping our conscience. And that is hope
enough. For it is in this ever decreasing space before a complete annihilation
that miracle revolution resurgence rebirth happen.
And by Jove the Indian humour
industry needs a miracle revolution resurgence rebirth today!
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