Cartooning
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R.K. Laxman
The writer recollects from his memory his teacher’s
appearance, a stereotypical image. He smoked beedis. Whenever the urge came on
him, he would appoint a monitor and go away. The boy’s stale stories would
irritate the other students. He would write down the names of the suspects and
would submit the list to the teacher.
One day the teacher set the students a task of drawing the picture of a
leaf. All set about it enthusiastically. One fellow drew a banana leaf that
went out of the wooden frame of the slate. Another boy went out to draw an
elephant instead!
The teacher then started to examine the students one by one.
When Laxman’s turn came, he asked, “Did you draw it yourself, Laxman?” He then
said, “You will be an artist one day.” He gave ten marks out of ten. He was
very impressed by the perfect shape of Laxman’s peepal leaf and the details of
the veins. The author was inspired by this unexpected encouragement. He once
sketched his father on the floor with chalk. His father saw it and got very
angry.
R.K. Laxman was very weak in Arithmetic but good in history.
He enjoyed reading prose and poetry with morals. The two most powerful poems
that impacted him were Punyakoti song and another was about a woodcutter. He
disliked arithmetic as much as he liked to read about moral stories. Even more
dreadful was his arithmetic teacher whose vertical white-red-white caste mark
on his forehead gave him a permanent frown. He looked like a tiger cub. Once, while the class was busy solving a problem, Laxman was doing a doodle like a
tiger cub. The teacher saw it and got so annoyed that he slapped him. Though it
was an unpleasant incident, the author remembers it as part of his
experimentation with the art of caricature. He says that for an ordinary
observer, doodles look crazy, but for a sharp cartoonist, a distorted face
holds the essence of humour.
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