There are politicians who love cartoons and there are those who hate them. Nehru liked them and he was a cartoonist’s delight.
So was K Karunakaran.
But another prominent leader in Kerala was so cut up with a well-known cartoonist that he made an issue of it. This was many years ago.
Toms, the cartoonist, says: “I turned to social satire after Mahakavi G chided me for making Boben and Molly anti-social miscreants. Karunakaran liked them. Actor Jairam visited me for the sheer love of them. I sent him a whole bunch of my comics. But KM Mani was angry that I made him a laughable figure in my cartoons,” Karunakaran had a sense of humour and he himself was a good cartoonist. I used to lampoon politicians and Mani was the best politician I liked to make a symbol of his likes. But he was so annoyed that he called on my editor to make an issue of it.
But the editor simply laughed it off.
Toms, who has completed 50 years of cartooning and ‘comic’ing, claims that Peter, his elder brother, was greater than him. In fact, he learnt the art by experimenting with the ink and brush left by Peter when he went to Malaya to work as a chemist.
Peter Thomas, 88, had almost ten years of cartooning with Shankar’s Weekly and his younger brother Toms, 82, bumped into Boben and Molly, two irrepressible pranksters in his neighbourhood, and made them one of the most loved cartoon-duos in the world, after Dennis the Menace, Archie or Charlie Brown. Toms, who is still at it in Kottayam, came visiting his brother at their ancestral home in Veliyanad on the Alappuzha-Changanassery Road, recounting the tales of the great characters he met while spending most of his school days on the lap of Kuttanad.
Most of his characters, Boben, Molly, Ittunnan, Appi Hippy, Asan and Avira Tharakan all belong to Kuttanad.
In the company of his brother he paddled his ‘kothumbu vallam’ to bring bags of rice and cereals to be distributed among the farmers suffering from floods.
Their father Vadakkal Kunjomachan was a great farmer who was jailed during the State Congress agitation.
He built a large house at Veliyanad on a raised ground so large that it could accommodate a hundred people ravaged by the yearly floods. The wooden structure put up 90 years ago at a cost of Rs 5,000, a very large some in 1912, is still around in good shape.
There we saw Peter, whom Toms calls Peter the Great, a widower huddled on his laid back chair, drawing and redrawing his not-forgotten political characters right from Nehru, Sardar Patel and Indira Gandhi.
Toms, who waged court battles to win his case of intellectual property rights as a cartoonist, says his fight was historic.
He bares it all in his 60- part autobio now running in a popular Malayalam weekly.
Boben and Molly were made into films also. However, his pious wife Thresiakutty and sons Boben, Bose, Peter and daughters Molly, Rani and Princy did not relish much of his diatribes at the Church.
He has been voting all through the past and will vote again this time. He will vote for the Congress once led by Mahatma Gandhi, not because it is good, but he finds no alternative.
(The writer can be contacted at kurianpampadi@ gmail.com