Books: What Did He Say?

Entertainment and the Arts

India Today
October 5, 1998

BOOKS
What Did He Say?

An autobiography that informs but fails to impress.

By Ravi Shankar

THE TUNNEL OF TIME
BY R K LAXMAN
VIKING
PAGE: 237 PRICE: Rs 295

When a cartoonist writes an autobiography, he is taking a risk. The main protagonist is himself. Old habits die hard, even if it is for India's most celebrated cartoonist, R.K. Laxman -- habits of perception, of angular understanding, of the prejudiced sieving of planes which is the essential nature of a cartoonist. An autobiography leaves a cartoonist very little choice but to caricature himself. And Laxman is no exception to his own habit.

Apart from the fact that reading The Tunnel of Time does not really let you see any light at the end of it, the book is a tepid drawl of incidents and quirky narrative. To be fair to him, Laxman is not supposed to be a writer. Except when he sketches people with words; they then stand out as strong visual images. His father as "a Roman senator"; V.K. Krishna Menon "like some dark wasp flitting from capital to capital"; and pocket cartoon sketches of people who pass through the pages.

But essentially the book is an autobiography in self-defence, of the journey of a small town boy who came to the big city in pursuit of his passion -- drawing. Of the exploits of a grown-up man reciting his victories over those who had slighted him at one time or the other: ticking off JJ School at a felicitation ceremony for rejecting him as an art student, jibing at Shankar for being too patronising, scoring a point over the proprietor of The Free Press Journal, of the speech which generated more applause than a filmstar's at a school function.

Fans of Laxman will no doubt ensure sales of a million copies as memorabilia. But one cannot blame the impartial reader for looking like the immortal Common Man by the time he finishes reading the book: bewildered, confused and bemused.

You Said It, he tells the author. But what? And why?

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