Corruption Cartoons
THROUGH the columns of DDT, I had the great fortune of acquiring a gem of a friend, Gopal – Dr. VS Gopalakrishnan, a retired IAS officer, who was once Development Commissioner of an EPZ. A multi-faceted personality, Dr. Gopal is a prolific writer, singer, cartoonist and of course a bureaucrat. We had carried one of his articles and a few of his cartoons earlier. His wife thought that he was both the cartoonist and the cartoon.
Now Gopal says,
“Will it be right to say "A scam a day keeps boredom away"? Apart from their repulsive and depressive values, scams do have some entertainment value too! Modern scams tend to be mega scams. Older scams by comparison would pale into insignificance. Interpreting Hinduism to the West, Dr.S.Radhakrishnan used to say that Hinduism was actually "a way of life in India". His written texts could perhaps be re-edited to state that "Hinduism and corruption are a way of life in India"!
Very recently, megascams discovered in India have made a hero of the looters. They preen themselves and shamelessly give flashy million dollar smiles before the TV cameras signifying their Alexandrian conquests! There is some strange, unexplained " vastu " about all our jails by which the jails are simply out of bounds even for the most criminal of our politicians!”
This would have been a great occasion for Gopal to go back to cartooning, as I suggested to him, but he prefers re-visiting some of his old cartoons, which depict small time corruption as it existed in the good old days.
We bring you one of those cartoons today. We will bring some more in the next few days.