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RK Laxman: Lines of Laughter

CP Surendran remembers the Common Man, RK Laxman

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In the late 80s, when I was pushing copy at the desk of the Times of India, Bombay, there used to be a morning shift. This was just before computers were introduced, so agency and wire copies of the night before had to be edited and slotted physically. The newsroom was a very large hall with one side lined by editors' cabins which had plate glass doors; what happened in there was as mysterious and seemingly as complicated as running the country.

The patricians of the paper inhabited the glass cages, till one day, years later, the management decided to demystify the running of the paper and overnight, the cabins were demolished, rendering the occupants roofless after a fashion. The hall itself was littered with benches, chairs, and long wooden tables on which reporters banged away on huge, noisy, Godrej typewriters and, at the far end of the hall, where the subs sat around in some sort of a circle, we could hear lines ending on the pages, because of the violence with which reporters stuck the roller back to the start.

Then the computers came; the newspaper, located near the great Victoria Terminus station, went in for several makeovers, both physically and spiritually. But one fixed point in the changing Times was R.K. Laxman. His cabin and his position as the mascot of the paper remained unscathed. It was as if the genius was a sort of family heirloom passed safely down the generations of stakeholders and readers.

I used to be an early bird during those days at the office, as I had just arrived in Bombay and could not get used to the tortuous commuting. To leave my lodgings before the peak hour started was the only way out, and I was cloyingly sweet to the editorial assistant who set up the rota for the week so I got the morning shift. Often my arrival at around 8.15 or so coincided with the dramatic entry of Laxman. He would come in a black Ambassador that everyone from security men up pretended was a Cadillac or some such, because the man who rode in it was worth his weight, as everyone knew, in ink.

Laxman always wore white: loose white half-sleeved shirt, loose white trousers and black shoes. He would be unfailingly followed by someone younger, who looked just like him but somehow at the same time different: his son, Srinivas Laxman, who was for long the aviation correspondent for the Times. The father always in front, the son, destined to be in his father's shadow, following him like a cloak, his gaze trailing the ground.

As far as I know, Laxman never attended newsroom meetings. Editors came and went, subs and reporters switched papers, the security men changed, the lift boys grew fat and lazy, but Laxman's routine and his strokes stayed the same. His Common Man was nothing if not a stroke of genius. He captured in that much-abused term a certain questioning conscience of the reader whose helplessness in the face of the Establishment became a daily source of humour. In effect, Laxman was saying that the common man would die if he did not live to tell a joke.

But unlike, say, an O.V. Vijayan, or Abu Abraham, Laxman's humour was never sulphurous. It was the sense of absurdity of the onlooker that came through the lines and comments.

To my mind, this was partly due to Laxman's own world vision as an outsider. But equally it might be because of the man on whom the Common Man was modelled; I suspect the real common man was one Mr Nair, who, if I remember correctly, was in charge of the Times News Service. He would sit in the far corner of the hall, next to a tall window that opened out to the terminus. He had the same moustache, the same ear hairs waving in the wind, the same bald head, and the same thin build. He was taciturn, and when he did speak there was the least trace of a smile on his lips. Perhaps it was the set of the mouth. It was, now that I recall him clearly, a very earnest face incapable of anything violent. Just like the Common Man, an invention that patented how a people managed to survive despite themselves. The essential Indian. The man who faced his red-taped fate with a smile.
 

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