THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Celebration to Keralites means queuing up before the Bevco outlets and cartoonist Unnikrishnan highlighted this with the first cartoon at his exhibition ‘Kannirukkikalam’ celebrating the 60 years of Kerala’s formation.
The cartoon exhibition, which was held at the Museum auditorium, successfully captured the transformation of the state over past 60 years.
All the sixty cartoons mirror the transition that Kerala has undergone. As it is with cartoons and caricatures, the dark humour in Unnikrishnan’s creations doesn’t put off people, but makes them relish the satire.
In a cartoon titled ‘Sakshi’(Witness), the character is shown recollecting the saying ‘One who’s sitting above is seeing everything’. The satirical take comes in the form of the CCTV cameras placed overhead.
One of the notable cartoons placed in the exhibition was ‘Belly’. Here a pot-bellied man has been shown sitting on a couch applying oil to reduce his tummy fat while watching a news on infant deaths in tribal area due to starvation.
Shedding light on the lost habit of letter writing, the cartoon titled ‘Post’ has a man reminiscing about the messages he had written on the now forgotten blue-coloured inland letters. He wants to post the picture of one of his letters on Facebook.
The hypocrisy of a Malayalee, the quotation gangs and his over-indulgence in electronic gadgets have also been featured.
A Mallu NASA scientist who returns to Kerala, immediately visits an astrologer to get his future predicted. This shows progress in science has no effect on a person’s habits.
He also featured the present generation’s lack of interest in literature. The cartoon shows a grandmother reading Madhavikkutty’s ‘Neippayasam’ while her grandchild is glued to mobile games.
The excessive use of JCBs, loss of water bodies, Keralites aversion for the colour black, ever increasing trend of atrocities on women and the loss of sensitivity towards the neighbour’s suffering were the others in the collection of 60 cartoons.
“It took me four months to prepare these cartoons and my focus was the transformation of Kerala in the past sixty years. The title ‘Kannirukkikaalam’ is also a realisation that nature has some thing in store for vain Keralites,” says Unnikrishnan.