Addicted to cartoons, I never skip any I come across and usually end up chuckling over its wit. Sometimes I wonder why political cartoons aren’t given the prominence they enjoyed earlier when they were front-paged by most newspapers.Cartoons, of course, are mood-uplifters and mirth-generators. My favourite Indian cartoonists—the inimitable R K Laxman and the irrepressible Mario Miranda—were consummate craftsmen and entertainers in their own right. I recall one of Mario’s rib-tickling creations in particular: an emaciated, anaemic-looking man waiting to donate blood and being told by an official, “In appreciation of your public-spirited service, we’ve decided to give you a free blood transfusion instead!”
Mario’s eye-catching cartoons usually focused on the social scenario in Bombay, featuring pot-bellied, cigar-chomping executives partying with their buxom and haughty-looking spouses. On the other hand Laxman’s incisive pocket cartoons tellingly portrayed his ‘Common Man’ who looks as bewildered as ever by all that’s happening around him, enabling one to identify with him. Of course, Laxman’s ever popular political cartoons were in a class of their own.
Interested in cartooning from a young age, I once entered a cartoon contest for amateurs and won a special mention for my entry. It pictured a tug-of-war competition in which the supporters of one team had ingeniously fastened the end of the rope, unnoticed, to a tree. As a so-called ‘connoisseur’ of cartoons, I often recall some of the hilarious ones I’ve come across over the years.
There was one in a British magazine depicting a baby octopus pestering its mother, “All I want to know is which are my hands and which are my feet!” Another portrayed former Egyptian President Abdel Nasser inspecting a new consignment of military tanks supplied by Russia and remarking, “This time I hope the instructions are in Arabic!”
Yet another cartoon illustrates just how much some men—yours truly included—dislike being disturbed when engrossed in a newspaper. It showed a grumpy husband hidden behind a daily with his wife resignedly telling a friend, “We have a code. One grunt means ‘Yes’. Two grunts mean ‘Yes, dear’!”
Perhaps the cartoon that takes the cake is the one I chanced upon in an American magazine. It showed an elderly marriage counsellor climbing into bed with his client-couple and the dismayed husband asking, “Tell me, Dr. Blake, just how far does your marriage counselling service go?”