Odd "man" out, she is the
face of new Palestine
Hanan Ashrawi: A Passion for Peace by Barbara Victor. Fourth Estate, London. £ 18.99.

Punjab: from canals to
crack in identity
Globalisation and the Region: Explorations in Punjabi Identity edited by Pritam Singh and Shinder S. Thandi. Association for Punjab Studies, Oxford, UK. Pp. 416. Price not stated.

A soldier without a sword
Dimensions of Gandhian Thought by M.S. Dadage. Chhaya Publishing House, Aurangabad.

Rib-tickler of the Times
The Tunnel of Time — An Autobiography by R.K. Laxman. Viking, New Delhi. Pp. 236. Rs 295.

Odd "man" out, she is the face of new Palestine

Hanan Ashrawi: A Passion for Peace by Barbara Victor. Fourth Estate, London. £ 18.99.

BIOGRAPHICAL writing has come under strong attack over the years. As noted by Jon Stallworthy, the biographer has been regarded as a murderer and a grave-snatcher by many writers of this century. James Joyce regarded the biographer as a "biografiend" and Henry James referred to him as a "post-mortem exploiter".

Though biography is undoubtedly a maverick and mongrel art, it most certainly requires the qualities of human understanding and the skills of an intellectual historian, a literary critic, and a psychiatrist. Information on the life of a writer or a great personage given with imaginative sympathy lends depth and colour to what would otherwise remain a fictional and conjectural view of an individual’s life.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Hanan Ashrawi and other prominent Palestinian and Israeli leaders, Barbara Victor, in her book, "Hanan Ashrawi: A Passion for Peace", sets her subject’s life in the context of West Asia’s violent history and tells the moving story of one remarkable woman’s mediation in a world of seemingly irrevocable conflict.

Hanan Ashrawi has changed the public image of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from that of a terrorist outfit into one of a government with political responsibility. An intellectual and leader, wife and mother, a Christian in a mainly Muslim and male-dominated society, Ashrawi is an anomaly among her own people, fighting against odds as an intermediary between the West and the Arab world.

It was in her first appearance on the US television in 1988 that she displaced the Palestinian stereotype image raised by Arafat’s external appearance with her image of an articulate and passionately attractive and witty woman who could speak the language that the West was keen to listen to.

The daughter of a wealthy West Bank physician, Dr Daoud Mikhael Hanan, she had her first taste of political activism as a child living under Jordanian occupation. She experienced the first upsurge of nationalism when King Hussein outlawed the National Socialist Party leading to the arrest of her father who had to spend six long years in a prison located right opposite their house on Radio Street, Hamallah.

Here, as a young teenager, she engaged in many demonstrations, and was often arrested. Later she went to the University of Virginia, USA, from where she did her doctorate in medieval English literature. Returning to her homeland after seven years, she again became involved in student demonstrations and confrontations with the Israeli authorities.

Articulate and politically astute, this Professor at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank gained international prominence in April, 1988, just after the beginning of the Intifada that shook both Israel and the PLO out of their complacency. But there is a complexity to her character which the West only fleetingly glimpsed when she threatened to leave the PLO in August, 1993.

Victor’s biography of Ashrawi seeks to answer all these questions: Is Ashhrawi the media-friendly creation of the US political machine? Is she sold out? Why do so many Palestinian colleagues criticise her so freely? How can Ashrawi truly represent Palestine’s oppressed?

All biography is reclamatory, and political biography more clamorously than most. The concern of the book under review has been and remains complicated in the context of the ongoing turmoil in West Asia and its maze-like history. Barbara Victor’s task, as a result, is complicated as it concerns taking into account changing facts to present their plausibility and coherence. It must be realised that it is impossible to write a definitive book on the region as borders change as rapidly as enemies become allies, or as man, woman or child become either victims or combatants. In this context many have lost their hope, youth, and finally their lives.

Though this is a biography of a very important and remarkable woman embroiled in West Asian politics, and written with the simplicity and clarity it deserves, it inevitably comes out as an absorbing account of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy and the years of political strife of Palestinian warring factions. The conflict that has given rise to inconceivable human brutality on both sides and its inherent harshness is visible in Ashrawi’s personality.

Barbara Victor describes Ashrawi’s difficult relationship with the PLO leadership; it is well known that in her capacity as spokesperson for the organisation she went against direct orders from the Chairman but still managed to resign before being dismissed. She is known to have always exhibited a profound abhorrence for injustice, articulated with incisive prose. She has confronted the Israeli Generals as an academic as well as a private citizen, defending her country and finally giving a voice to her brethren who till recently were known as only "stone-throwers". Through her dignified diplomacy she has succeeded in altering the world’s view of her people from unabashed terrorists to victims of injustice whose one hope in life is to regain their homeland.

In doing so, however, Victor, being an author of four novels, almost romanticises her heroine and sets her up as the President of a future Palestine, an office which I am sure Ashrawi will not be too happy to hold. The author’s grasp of facts is also slipshod: the Lebanese civil war began in 1975 and not in 1978; the Israeli army began to withdraw from Lebanon in 1983 and not in 1982; the Balfour Declaration, she says, was made in 1921 whereas it was published in 1917 and nowhere does it say that the two states of Israel and Palestine will "exist side by side"; the Libyan capital of Tripoli is mistaken for the northern Lebanese city of the same name. It seems that a novelist attempting to write history has ended up fictionalising it.

The book obviously is no model of historical scholarship, but its approach ranges from the most precise narrative renderings to personal prejudices and acts of "memory as truth" that often roams very far from the real, thus adding something warmly human to the story of a woman. It is the quality of the unknown and the unknowable in both the life of a nation and that of a greatly influential woman that both attracts and torments the author and, I think, she has here found her voice as a biographer, if not as a historian.

Victor does not leave out the many dissenting voices within the Palestinian community, which criticise Ashrawi for being stubborn and arrogant, too western and academic to understand the grassroots problems of her people; she has no idea of the hardships within the refugee camps which she rarely visits. The writer is here very objective and fair; praise is very discreetly balanced with the onslaught on her by her own countrymen.

Other critics blame her for not once condemning brutal terrorist attacks on civilians, and especially for legitimising the existence of an Israeli State side by side with the Palestinian State in spite of the terrible atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers. Any yet she is regarded as the most prominent human rights activist in the West Bank.

In Madrid she prevailed upon Israel and the West to speak to the PLO. Yet "when they did so with the Oslo volte-face, she effectively wrote herself out of the script". She remains composed under pressure, very analytical, yet insensitive to others. Ashrawi, argues Victor, is the symbol of a new Palestine, ready to compromise when expediency dictates but d efiant when faced by extremes of terror. She represents the human dimension of a conflict that involves a society that works on "high principle and suffering mixed with deceit, envy and accident".

In spite of the book’s factual inaccuracies and conspicuous bias against the Palestinians who are often termed "terrorists" as compared to the Israelis who are called "soldiers" or "death squads", in the end what appears to be a biography turns out to be a compelling picture of a society within which two mutually suspicious protagonists are destined to coexist in spite of the on-going nature of a long and bloody history of conflict, suffering, and terror.

— Shelley Walia

Punjab: from canals to crack in identity

Globalisation and the Region: Explorations in Punjabi Identity edited by Pritam Singh and Shinder S. Thandi. Association for Punjab Studies, Oxford, UK. Pp. 416. Price not stated.

PUNJAB is one of the few regions in the Indian subcontinent which had acquired a clear-cut regional identity with a powerful secular content. A myriad of Sufis, sants, pirs, yogis, naths, babas, gurus and such other figures emphasised the commonality of human beings irrespective of their caste, creed and religion and, in the process, fostered communal harmony, compassion and love. The evolution of the Punjabi language as a medium of communication for the common man played an important role in sharpening the common regional identity.

Gradually the Punjabi identity (cast on the basis of region) split up into sectarian streams — Hindu, Muslim and Sikh (based on religion). Reform movements such as the Arya Samaj among the Hindus, the Singh Sabha among the Sikhs and the Ahmadiyas among the Muslims played an important role in this change. The book under review, a compilation of papers presented at the first international conference on Punjab Studies at Coventry University in England, examines the evolution, flowering and death of the secular Punjabi identity in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Punjab in the Indian subcontinent and in the Punjab diaspora.

Roger Ballard in his introductory piece emphasises the role of Sufis and other spiritual figures like Baba Farid of Pak Pattan, Datta Ganj Baksh of Lahore and Sheikh Abdul Qadir of Multan and later by Baba Guru Nanak in fostering a sense of common brotherhood and religious tolerance. Nanak said, "khoi na Hindu, khoi na Mussalman". It is reasonable to suppose that he would have added "khoi na Sikh", if the Sikh identity had developed in his time.

The regional Punjabi identity received a severe blow at the hands of ethno-religious polarisation, a product of local contingencies.

One would wholeheartedly agree with Ballard’s conclusion that if "Nanak, Goraknath and Farid could witness what is currently being done in the names of truth, they would all shake their heads at the depth of human folly".

A contributor on pre-colonial Punjab, J.S. Grewal holds that the creation of Punjab as a politico administrative unit under Akbar was a necessary but not a sufficient cause of the Punjabi identity. The development of Punjabi literature from the 17th to the early 19th century played an important role in making people aware of their common culture. Maharaja Ranjit Singh extended patronage to all Punjabis irrespective of their religious beliefs. Thus secular literature and secular politics made for a secular regional identity.

Papers of M. Ather Tahir and Darshan Singh on Quadiryar and Shah Mohammad, respectively, provides examples of remarkable religious catholicity. These two Muslim poets sang in glory of important Sikh and Hindu figures — a Sikh general Hari Singh, a Hindu prince Puran Bhagat and a Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh.

Bhupinder Singh in his paper "Raj karega Khalsa" convincingly argues that the Sikh theory of religion and politics stands for multi-centred, plural and non-totalitarian society.

In the section on colonial Punjab Imran Ali’s paper on agricultural colonisation in West Punjab by the British rulers is a masterly exposition of perhaps the biggest experiment of social and economic engineering carried out by the Raj. Through the development of canal colonies between 1885 and 1947, irrigated by a network of perennial canals, the total cultivated area in the province increased from three million acres to 14 million acres. It involved a massive resettlement of population within the state.

West Punjab, barren and sparsely populated with pastoralists, collectively known as "janglis" (barbarians), were sidelined after perennial irrigation was provided. Instead, agriculturists from central and southern parts of Punjab were given land grants ranging from 50 acres to several thousand acres each. Such grants were made to pensioners and ex-army men who had rendered service to the Raj.

This created a powerful class of beneficiaries who were concerned only with their interests and were always willing to help their munificent masters, the Raj. The benefit of land grants was extended to the plains collaborators of the alien rule — British agents, police informers and subverters of popular struggles like those who worked against the Akali movement during the 1920s.

Imran Ali correctly concludes: "The strengthening of these groups had a pronounced impact on the political economy of Punjab. This was indicated by the relative weakness of nationalism, and the continued vibrancy of the British-supported and landlord-led political formation of the Punjab National Unionist Party." This view is supported by Iftikhar H. Malik in his paper on Sir Fazl-i-Hussain who founded the Unionist Party.

The section on post-colonial Punjab is rather weak and this is surprising. Sucha Singh Gill and Lakhwinder Singh examine some aspects of the changes in Punjab economy. Sucha Singh Gill argues that migration of rural Sikhs to the urban areas in Punjab as a consequence of rapid industrialisation, will erode the existing divide between the rural Sikhs and urban Hindus and this would contribute to the growth of a secular Punjabi identity. This process can also yield contrary results. Much would depend on what kind of politics is in command.

Chaman Lal has ably focussed on the image of the Punjabi community in Hindi literature in the post-1984 phase. He cites the apt examples of Tejinder’s novel "Veh Mera Chehra", Bhisham Sahni’s "Zhutputa" and poems of Kumar Vikal and Laltu.

The agonising question in the context of the secular Punjabi identity still remains to be answered. Why did the powerful stream of the secular Punjabi identity fostered by Sufis, mystic poets, gurus and sant soldiers, ultimately dry up in the sands of religious sectarianism?

An intellectual exercise such as the one under review should have focussed on this central question. But, unfortunately, there has been no worthwhile attempt in this direction. For instance, Indu Banga’s paper on the Arya Samaj and Punjabi identity eminently succeeds in telling us exactly what we know. Anybody who has some idea of the role of the Arya Samaj in Punjab knows about the vicious attack of Swami Dayanand on other religions, especially Islam and Christianity, and the Arya Samaj’s contribution to the communalisation of consciousness and the erosion of the secular regional identity and other related things, expounded so eloquently by Bagga.

What were the objective conditions which helped the Arya Samaj to emerge as a demolition squad of the secular ethos in Punjab? Why did the middle class urban Hindus of Punjab lap up the teachings of Swami Dayanand with much greater alacrity than their counterparts in his native state of Gujrat? The learned historian is silent on such questions. The same is true about similar questions about the growth of Sikh militancy in Punjab over the demand of Khalistan.

Suprisingly enough, there is not a single paper seriously analysing the factors responsible for the rise and decline of Sikh militancy in pursuit of an independent Sikh state (Sukhmani Riar’s piece on Khalistan deals with the pre-independence period). One could expect the Punjabi intellectuals settled abroad to grapple with this problem more objectively, but they too have failed on this account though there are one of two interesting pieces on the sharpening of the Sikh identity in America and Canada in the wake of Operation Bluestar and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984.

But in spite of this failing, the book can serve as an excellent foreground to explore the theme of Punjabi identity further. In the opinion of the reviewer, the insights provided by one or two Pakistani academics in the context of socio-political culture generated by the experiment of canal colonies can be helpful in understanding the socio-political and cultural scene in the post-partition states of Punjab in India and Pakistan and the state of Haryana today.

After all, it is the cultural content in the life of the middle class elites which go a long way in shaping the future of society. And the agricultural colonisation in British Punjab fostered a typical cultural genre among the landed elites and other beneficiaries of the Raj for which the coming generations have to pay a heavy price.

— D.R. Chaudhry

Dimensions of Gandhian Thought by M.S. Dadage. Chhaya Publishing House, Aurangabad.

AS a subject of exploration, Gandhi has been a major attraction to authors and the publishing industry. Studies on Gandhi fill a library. Material on him has been extensively used to prove this or that theme. One may well wonder whether anything has been left unsaid. Yet his admirers and critics are tirelessly producing a steady stream of literature on him and his philosophy. Any addition to this stock needs stringent quality control if it is to make a real contribution to Gandhian thought.

M.S. Dadage’s "Dimensions of Gandhian Thought", the book under review, is just not another book on Gandhian thought. He had done a lot of hard work to discuss the various dimensions of Gandhian thought and has justified the old saying that there is always ample scope for adding something new to the existing stock of knowledge. That is precisely what research is all about. The book contains eleven articles on the different dimensions of Gandhian philosophy.

Gandhi never claimed to be, and certainly cannot be regarded as, an intellectual, but this does not mean that he was not an original thinker. His reading, especially on morals, economics and politics was wider than what is usually realised, though less systematic than that of the intellectuals of his generation. And yet, it was far more critical because of his willingness to give his whole attention to anything he decided to read, and the original approach that he brought to it.

The opening chapter is on "Gandhian conception of man". Gandhi started with a very definite conviction what man is in his essential nature and what he becomes through a false view of himself of what he should be and can become. Gandhi admitted man’s animal ancestry. In his own words, "We were born with brute strength, but we were born in order to realise God who dwells in us. That indeed is the privilege of man and it distinguishes him from the brute creation." The essential difference between man and brute, according to Gandhi, is that the former can respond to the call of spirit in him, can rise superior to the passions that he shares with the brute and therefore superior to selfishness and violence, which belongs to the brute’s nature and not to the immortal spirit of man.

But as author Dadage has rightly observed, Gandhi approached human problems from an integrated outlook of life in which philosophy, ethics, religion and economics were synthesised. Since he was very sensitive to the feelings and needs of the masses, he could never stand apart from his people. Moral elevation of the individual and the satisfaction of the needs were not antithetical. Rather he was of the definite opinion that economic development must precede other developments.

When Rabindranath Tagore told Gandhi that he was giving more emphasis to economic considerations than on moral, aesthetic and romantic aspects of human personality, Gandhi wrote back: "To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages". He further wrote. "True to his poetic instinct the poet lives for the morrow and will have us to do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze the beautiful pictures of the birds early in the morning signing hymns of praise as they soar into the sky. But I have had the pain of watching the birds who for want of strength could not be coaxed even to a flutter of their wings. The human birds under the Indian sky get up weaker than when he pretended to retire. It is an indescribably painful state which has to be experienced to be realised. I have found it impossible to soothe the suffering patients with a song from Kabir. The hungry millions ask for one poem — the invigorating food."

But the foundation of a good society must rest on fully integrated human persons. To Gandhi providing a mere economic minimum to the members of society was not the summum bonum of existence. A society must follow a norm of life where material well-being (though very essential) is not the only motivating force. He gave full importance to the divinity of man which is epitomised in the great maxim that a jiva is always Shiva — man is by and large divine.

In the chapter "The relevance of swadeshi in the present economic crisis", the author argues that the neglect of swadeshi has progressively landed us in the present economic and financial crisis. It has led to our enormous adverse balance of trade with almost every country of Europe, America and Japan in Asia. it has forced us to take to deficit financing which has stoked inflation. The country is neck deep in debt and the creditors are hovering around to extract their pound of flesh. Instead of becoming a land flowing with milk and honey, the country is heading towards financial bankruptcy.

In the chapter "Gandhian experiment in non-violence" Dadage draws some very interesting conclusions. First, at its lowest, the practice of nonviolence may express nothing more noble or more constructive than a cynical disillusionment with the fruitlessness of violence which has been previously practised without having produced the intended results.

Second, nonviolence may express a conviction that man’s divinely allotted role in the economy of the universe is to adopt a patiently passive attitude towards a mundane scene on which it is God’s exclusive prerogative to execute his divine will through his own action, which would be hampered and not assisted, if man were to presume to intervene in what is wholly God’s business.

This second philosophy of nonviolence is as pious and as scrupulous as our first is unprincipled and cynical, but at the same time it resembles the nonviolence of disillusionment in being unconstructive.

Nonviolence may, however, also be practised as a means to serve an constructive end. This is precisely what Gandhi desired. The main thing for Gandhi is that more and more people must be prepared to accept the absolute value of non-violence as a widely relevant principle of social and political action.

Some of the other chapters, specially "Science and sprituality", "Gandhiji on value education and peaceful world order" are worth reading.

Though there are some typographical mistakes here and there, the book is an important and welcome addition to Gandhian thought. I heartily endorse the author’s concluding remarks. "Gandhian is not a systematic intellectual exercise either in metaphysics or in political philosophy. It is a political creed, an economic doctrine, a religious outlook, a moral precept and, above all, a message blended with humanitarianism. There is however an underlying unity in Gandhian terms of hetrogenous character."

Taken separately, Gandhism is an endeavour to transform human society. It aims to substitute concern as its dominant trait with supremacy of self-suffering and love. It dreams of a nonviolent society and a pacifist world.

—Jai Narain

Rib-tickler of the Times

The Tunnel of Time — An Autobiography by R.K. Laxman. Viking, New Delhi. Pp. 236. Rs 295.

"YOU might wonder what is a cartoonist and what sort of life he leads. Most of you might have seen a carpenter at work, a tailor stitching clothes, a bricklayer building a wall, a watch repairer, a motor mechanic and so on. But few, I am sure, have breathed down the neck of a cartoonist to observe his creative process. It would be a cruel act. For he is in the throes of creation, waiting in agony. It would be like asking a man in the dentist’s chair, ‘Do you mind, sir, if I watched your molars being extracted? ‘..."

Well, readers of "The Tunnel of Time" are certainly not allowed to watch the extraction of the molars, but they do get to sit close enough to hear the whirring sounds made by the dentist’s tools and the accompanying moaning sounds of the patient. R.K. Laxman’s "The Tunnel of Time" is not all revealing and exposing much as autobiographies normally are, but then "this is not an autobiography in the usual sense". The book dwells on the everyday impressions and descriptions of a cartoonist. Actually the reader does not conjure the image of the cartoonist, but of his bald and bespectacled Common Man effortlessly narrating and recounting interesting and intriguing events. I guess, it is the turn of the Common Man to say "I Said It"!!

Yes, somewhere both R.K. (Rasipuram Krishnaswamy) Laxman and the Common Man, with a permanently bewildered expression and dressed in a checked coat and a dhoti, and who had been a silent spectator all this while, seem to fuse together.

And dealing the narration with a lot of tenderness, though without evident trace of sentimentality, the adventures of this Common Man seem very charmingly common! Somehow, it feels as if one is reading one’s own story of a loving and indulging family, of travails of friendship, of cricket games and tediously-long school lessons, of depressing exam failures and of struggles of making a name for oneself in a competitive world. The delight of reading this amusingly woven "common story" is definitely similar to a journey through a tunnel that promises a view of spectacular and brilliant sights ahead.

Beginning from his childhood tales, which sometimes seem similar to those of Swamy in his brother R.K. Narayan’s "Malgudi Days", one suddenly comes across Laxman’s not so common anecdotes of meeting the "frail, laconic and withdrawn" Indira Gandhi, or of having a "competent and efficient" Bal Thackeray as a colleague, or encountering Walt Disney who proved to be a "disappointment" as he "talked like an industrial tycoon and corporate giant", or drawing T.S. Eliot who had a "tall figure, large nose and dreamy eyes".

The flitting in and out of the likes of Bertrand Russell Clement Atlee, Graham Greene, V.K. Krishna Menon and Rajiv Gandhi as also the cartoonist’s best friends, brothers and sisters, his stern but tolerant father, his cheerful mother, his "classic stereotype" teachers and his wife Kamla (who was his sister’s daughter) creates an engrossing motif.

Animated, yet oh-so-familiar adventures of this creator of Common Man do make the story of his life a must read: his unabashed crying in front of a horde of his cousins and nieces on failing his secondary school examinations; his being caught in a police raid of a New Year Eve’s party during the prohibition days in Maharashtra when Morarji Desai was Chief Minister, his being a handyman at home to mend leaky taps, pressure cooker valves and fuses; his soaring popularity making his fans ask him to design marble headstones for graves; his being honoured with the Padma Bhushan and being asked to bring his wife in a saree whose border should not exceed two inches; his meeting a Japanese cartoonist who being a grandmaster in the martial art of aikido, worked in the company of thugs emanating from his aikido workshop!! All this and much more is sure to offer the reader a refreshingly sunny melange of images, each of which is sketched splendidly with deft strokes.

As the book’s dust cover, having a bemusing typical Laxman-cartoon melange, suggests, these remarkable experiences do rival those that the Common Man has endured over the years, yet like him Laxman seldom uses acute caustic comments by way of his judgements. Yes, acrid sometimes, but always without malice. In fact, and interestingly for a political cartoonist, there seems to be a detachment of sorts from the critical events and affairs of his times in his autobiography. While "illustrating" the scenes Laxman had witnessed during the first Indo-Pak war he notes. "The buildings on either side of the main streets were damaged. Twisted bicycles, handcarts, blown-up carts and buses lay on the road. Heaps of shoes, sandals and broken crockery were strewn all over the place". Nothing that tells the readers anything new.

The impressions of the Emergency that he records are only those of the long queues of people at the Central Censor office, or of the "deplorable speech" made by the then Congress president. D.K. Barooah — "India is Indira and Indira is India". His remarks thus seem to be quite leniently tangy, and there are very little signs of cynicism to be detected. Or, is this because such scenes and events cannot match the turbulence of today’s times? The journey through a tunnel certainly does not always have pleasant surprises to offer!

Somewhere, in the story of his times and life, Laxman appears to be proud of his downrightness though he never indulges in it. But his struggles and endeavours as a political cartoonist somehow don’t surprise the reader. "To each his sufferings...." And who doesn’t enjoy the romance of a rags-to-riches story? Oh well, there is no such grand romance. So what if he failed in Kannada in secondary school, he was still illustrating Narayan’s stories for the Hindu; it did not matter if JJSchool of Arts denied him admission, he managed to finally graduate from high school; and what if The Times initially asked him simply to draw cartoon strips for the Illustrated Weekly, did he not get to draw nudes to break the monotony of the work schedule!! Certainly, a simple story.

The most delightful part of R.K. Laxman comes alive when his "time-travel" unveils the "drawings and pictures" of his childhood. It is here that he displays a quiet but buoyant optimism. And as he progresses through the tales of his childhood, the reader will become aware that the zest and enjoyment of life has given way to a kindly but genuine wonder at this thing called life. "Observing her (granddaughter Mahalaxmi) from a corner provided me with all the entertainment and companionship I needed, and also a mysterious sense of being reborn. This precious child has added a new dimension to my life", he ends his story thus on a positively contented note.

But with the progression of "time" in his book, Laxman becomes very matter of fact. His pen starts jotting down memories in the manner of a reader randomly flipping the pages of a book, with unfortunately a dull passion. What keeps one hooked on to reach the very last page is that the book appears to be a potpourri of events, recreating many cherished and captivating moments.

Laxman’s training has been as a cartoonist, and thus he appears to enjoy describing people and events as if sketching them graphically. There is no need for Laxman to use words to describe words. In fact picture-perfect but detailed, the descriptions always "look" to be safe in the hands of a cartoonist. "There was a well in the shade of gigantic margosa tree. Dilapidated huts were overgrown with grass and wild plants. A broken cart wheel rested against a fence, completing a perfect composition." Little wonder that most of the respected Indian cartoonists like Mario Miranda, Abu Abraham and Sudhir Dar have also turned out to be admirable authors, somewhat naturally!

Budding cartoonists definitely need to pick up this book, not only to gain insight into this popular political cartoonist’s wit and humour, but also to pick up a few handy tips from the master himself. "....I also took the trouble of enacting an actual fall down a staircase when no one was looking. I carefully took notes of my observations; the angle of the hand trapped under the body, the twist of the limbs, facial grimaces and so on. Later I incorporated these authentic details as I worked on drawing after drawing".

His writing style is never plastic, because the cartoonist in him does not need a novel as a vehicle for his ideas. But it has the capacity and wit of an enjoyable read. Sometimes it does read like one’s own granddad recalling the "good old times" when, even with all the imperfections and vices of the world, existence meant a celebration of life. And this conversation-like tone of Laxman is like a soothing finish after a hard day’s work. Once through his story, get hold of The Times of India publication — "50 Years of Independence Through the Eyes of R.K. Laxman". A visual treat from a man who possesses a remarkably extraordinary way of viewing life through his "common" course of life.

The unassuming strength of "The Tunnel of Time" lies in its being sincerely Indian — not the conscious and contrived need to present India as a land of large families or arranged marriages or corrupt politicians, but by being earnestly devout and traditional, and conventionally honest about the joys and sorrows of one’s life. The setting, obviously Indian, is not about any attempt to reveal Laxman’s allegiance to the Indian traditions via a foreign language or to convey hues of Indian thought and culture.

"The Tunnel of Time" is sincerely and directly told story of his life. A story that has the familiar components of ever-present and endless relatives, or a ridiculous education system, or the know-all but ludicrous politicians and a whole lot of such everyday Indian phenomena, but they smugly fit into his vista of growing up, without expressing the need to evolve any Indian idiom.

— Sonoo Singh