Sunday Editorial
Why we need cartoonists more than Lokpals in India!
By Ratnakar Tripathy
Growing up to laugh!
The interesting thing about the tug of war over corruption in our country is, there is no one holding the other end of the rope. So why are our foreheads perpetually creased with anxiety, oozing away the pious sweat of goodness ? The trouble is we are all staring forever at our own shimmery goodness in the mirror, admiring our own goodness, our clean and framed images and faces. Voyeurs unto ourselves and victims of our own sneaky eyes!
What starts as a search for a minimal self-respect in the mirror in adolescence turns into obsessive self-admiration as the retina get brittler, drier and inflexible with age and struggle. The mirror in front of me seems the only clean area in the universe. Everywhere else is just too dirty and laden with soot and garbage, seems to be the message. This is not the common man of R K Laxman, any more. This is a common man bloated into unmanageable corpulence and on a maniacal binge of judging others, never including himself, of course, and his mirror-home among the common humanity.
The end result is, the common man turns into a Mamata Banerjee or a Narendra Modi who begins to take herself too seriously as the centre of the universe. This is a universe where laughter is equated with AK 47s and bazookas. Laughter stinks viscerally, morally, legally and gets you in the gut. A joke makes you want to puke and punish and kill.
Intellectuals like me work oh so hard at critiquing, digging up facts and figures and burning up the brains to attain the nirvana of objective accuracy and moral equipoise. But a cartoonist friend of mine like Pawan [of Hindustan fame who kindly lets bihardays carry some of his creations for free], and many others like Unni [from The Express], or Telang [formerly from HT], whom I got to know briefly way back while making a docu-series on cartoonists of India, seem to me the real Lokpals of the nation.
[courtesy: Hindustan]
I sincerely feel that my intellect will never equal the evil of a Narendra Modi or the hawai chappal brand of vanity of Mamata Di. I will of course keep trying with all the desperation I can muster, but these are all bad synonyms for hope, and not the real thing, I know.
The real thing will be a cartoonist who places himself deep inside the mirror and every time, a Narendra Modi or a Mamata Di take a quick peek at the mirror, they would see themselves for what they really are. And run for life!
There is too much goodness in India that goes with clenched teeth and tight jaws and the body language of a born loser, as if goodness stood no chance in this country.
Every time my faith in democracy and the wisdom of the voter seems shaken, I feel I have yet another rock bottom to trust – laughter!
Over to Pawan ji now, as above, since I tend to talk too much, too far and too wastefully, too libelously, with too many footnotes and too much bibliography …