PUNE, INDIA — His career has outlasted more than a dozen governments. The Mr. Magoo-like face of his most beloved character has been immortalized on a postage stamp and adopted as the official symbol of one of India's low-cost airlines. Many of his fans have started their day with him for longer than they have with their husbands or wives.
R.K. Laxman is India's premier newspaper cartoonist, a celebrated satirist and keen political and social observer who has been drawing his trademark panels for the Times of India for 60 years, many of them featuring the permanently bemused Common Man, his most famous creation and a national icon.
His longevity has given him a ringside seat on India's twists and turns, its triumphs and tragedies since independence from Britain in 1947. A collection of his work reads like a history book, a graphic chronicle of an unruly nation struggling to govern itself and embrace modernity amid poverty, corruption and religious strife.
Laxman's unsparing look at life in India and his instantly recognizable style, all bold lines and subtle shading, have made him the country's "finest journalist" for much of his career, in the opinion of Dileep Padgaonkar, former editor of the Times of India.
"In a few strokes of the pen and one caption," Padgaonkar said, "he'd encapsulate the particular mood at that time finer than any of these analyses you'd read in the paper."
Now 84, Laxman still sits down at his desk every morning to create the cartoons that skewer the country's leaders, and sometimes the led. He continues to offer up his take on the absurdities and quiddities of life in the world's most populous democracy, though some say the sharp eye and wit have dimmed. His single-panel cartoon, "You Said It," runs six days a week, featuring one of the country's most recognized signatures, with its Zorro-like slash through the "x."
"If I don't do it, I won't survive," he declared in an interview at his home here in western India. "It's a habit."
A stroke a few years ago impaired movement on his left side. (Fortunately, he draws with his right hand.) His hair is thinning on top, and he squints from behind a pair of thick glasses. Like pets that begin to look like their owners, he bears a growing resemblance to the bewhiskered, bespectacled Common Man, a character in a rumpled checked shirt with neither a name nor a voice.
