To draw or not to draw- that is the question

Cartoons are a great thing. Mom is always giggling away at the daily cartoons like B.C, Garfield, Snoopy [ who is far more funny if you ask me, but I may be biased?]. They sometimes accurately portray what we think or feel and laughter is the best medicine anyway.

Now there is a new breed of cartoonists, I think, carefully cultivated, nurtured, and trained by devious politicians and other persons in power only to create disturbance, panic, uproar, affront, and shock value for their own personal or political gains. I hear Mr. A.T is one such homegrown  cartoonist. His recent attempts at being funny didn’t go down well with the powers that be and the fellow was jailed only to be let out shortly after. What exactly are his credentials that have rocketed him from total anonymity to extreme fame in just over a year, when truly great artists like R.K. Lakshman, Sudhir Dar, and Ninan have taken years of creativity and understanding the Indian psyche to attain their status among the Gods of cartoons today? Beats me.

My point is this, or rather I have several if you have the patience….

One, why do the people in power give so much mileage to such people. With due respect to Mr. T, his cartoons are neither terribly clever nor roll-on-the-floor funny, so why is a mountain made out a molehill?  Getting righteous about insulting an emblem whilst quoting a pointless law ‘State Emblem of India- Prohibition of Improper use act 2005’ is just attracting more attention to something that would have been otherwise ignored and forgotten as quickly as the paper on which it was printed.

Two, why do we Indians have such ridiculous laws which stop us from simply laughing at ourselves? Most other free nations today have no such impositions on speech or other forms of expression and it hasn’t especially harmed them or their culture or their governance in any way that I know. I’ve seen foreign models walking the ramp with colours of their national flags painted on their bodies and nothing else, but if we Indians even as much dare to use our tricolor in any manner except flying on a post, we will be prosecuted. And I can give you so many more examples to illustrate this point. But you get the picture.

Three, if the powers that be focused on important matters like a clean governance, above all, rather than spend time debating on whether the image with the ‘loo’ was worse than the one with the ‘three wolves’ or the other equally forgettable drawing, then it would only bring back the spotlight on themselves and their shortcomings and their total disregard for taking the nation forward. From their point of view, I guess its easier deflecting that spot on some poor fellow and breathing easy for those few moments before the dirt is aimed back at them.

And lastly but never in the least, these archaic laws against sedition were made for people who “do not respect their elders”. That simply means the government thinks of  people as errant children who should be punished for raising their voices or questioning wrongdoings rather than treat them as grown-up citizens. And they get their knickers all knotted up when cartoons appear in the press, which poke innocent fun at them!

At the end of the day, its all politics, isn’t it?