Since he sprang from the mind and pen of his creator half a century ago, the Common Man has become Laxman's vehicle for expressing the bewilderment, long suffering and resignation of those he has described as "the mute millions of India."
For decades, Laxman has excelled and delighted in needling India's ruling elite, who have promised much but delivered little, leaving a desperately needy populace as hungry and deprived as ever.
In 1969, after U.S. astronauts landed on the moon, Laxman depicted the Common Man being introduced to NASA scientists as the perfect candidate for life on the moon. "This is our man! He can survive without water, food, light, air, shelter."
Years later, when India still lacked reliable telecommunications, an office worker in a Laxman cartoon protests to another that "of course" his phone works: "It worked on May 4th, June 21st and again on the 2nd of this month."
Particularly in the first few decades of his career, Laxman's acerbic observations and the Common Man's ever-befuddled expression served as much-needed correctives to the lofty but empty rhetoric of pompous officials.
"At a time when India hadn't opened up in the way it has now . . . Laxman's point of view was very important," Padgaonkar said.
But the irreverent artist who gleefully pricks the egos of politicians can be critical of his fellow ordinary Indians just as well.
He once remarked that crows, which have fascinated him throughout his life, lined up to jump into a puddle with more order and discipline than seen in any Indian bus queue. One of his cartoons took aim at the propensity for public urination among many Indian men, with an observer expressing surprise that India had any problem with depleting water tables.
As a child, Laxman spent hours sitting on a bench and sketching the activity around him in the southern Indian city of Mysore. He had difficulty at school with math problems asking him to divide 15 mangoes among three people, but he could draw a mango, a leaf, a tiger with precision and panache.
One of his teachers noted his talent and encouraged him. Another shook with anger when he caught the boy caricaturing him with bug eyes and buck teeth.
In one of history's ironies, Laxman was turned down for admission to an art school in Mumbai, then known as Bombay. But submissions to newspapers and magazines and his illustrations for books written by his brother R.K. Narayan, who went on to become one of India's greatest authors of the 20th century, helped build his reputation.
