It's nice to have double standards: R K Laxman

THE LEGEND: Laxman is known to be wry, caustic and casually arrogant in the way only talented people can be.

          

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For 60 years, R K Laxman has shown us who we are. In those 60 years, he has jealously guarded from us who he is. Only family, friends and colleagues from The Times of India, where he has worked most of his life, can claim to know the man behind the famous signature.

He’s known to be wry, caustic and casually arrogant in the way only supremely talented people can be.

Anuradha SenGupta meets R K Laxman in his Pune home, which he visits every few months, and spends half an hour trying to get into the head of the man who has mapped the idiosyncrasies of a nation over its lifetime.

Anuradha SenGupta: Mr Laxman, thank you for talking to us.

R K Laxman: Welcome.

Anuradha SenGupta: You are a person who is notoriously careful about guarding your privacy, isn’t it?

R K Laxman: Somewhat, yes. Otherwise it becomes difficult to. Very normal.

Anuradha SenGupta: What do you mean by that?

R K Laxman: I mean I am not one of those cinema stars or cricket fans. I am just a human being and I would like to continue being so.

Anuradha SenGupta: Do you feel, if you had let yourself become more of a celebrity than you already are, would it have affected your work and the way you perceive the world?

R K Laxman: It would certainly not only affect my work but others’ work also. I am not self-conscious about what I’ve done.

Anuradha SenGupta: Are you the common man?

R K Laxman: I suppose I am.

There is nothing ordinary about R K Laxman’s long reign as India’s best-known political cartoonist. He began his career with the Free Press Journal but it was only after he moved to Benett & Coleman, starting with the Illustrated Weekly and the Evening News of India and The Times of India, that his reputation was established. The front page of the paper has a place reserved only for the Common Man.

Says Former Editor of The Times of India, Dileep Padgaonkar, “No editor of the The Times of India would control Laxman. I tried a couple of times to tell him that he might wish to change a word or two in his captions. And he’d fly into a rage! So, I don’t think he would have ever, ever would have stood for any pressure from his editor. And I doubt very much – and certainly not during my tenure as editor – I never came across a single instance where there were pressures.

“Now it’s quite likely that during the Emergency, that there were, perhaps, a couple of cartoons. One in particular I remember of a grown-up Sanjay Gandhi sitting on a pram and his mother, Indira Gandhi, was taking away – that was found to be offensive. But nothing graver. He didn’t receive any warning. And so he’s continued to do what he wants to do.”

R K Laxman: It came naturally to me. There is no other conscious thought. Thinking six hours, seven hours, and whole day becomes about traffic jams, about economics, about budget, political events, foreign affairs, one after another it comes, to choose.