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Journalism of Courage
Talent blooms in odd places. A few years ago a circulating library in Munnar threw up a promising caricaturist 8212; a member8217;s teenaged son. Once, with a few deft strokes of his pen, this gifted lad endowed a popular politician8217;s photograph in a magazine with a bulldog-like expression 8211;furrowed brow, flattened proboscis, drooping jowls and floppy ears. The 8220;face-lift8221; was truly comical and would probably have earned the grudging admiration of the politician himself!
In particular, the boy loved to deface filmstars in film magazines. As a result, comely heroines grinned toothlessly their ivories having been blacked out or leered from behind fierce-looking moustaches. Handsome heroes were rendered cross-eyed, pot-bellied and generally cretinous. And venerable old thespians were made to look positively ghoulish with Dracula-like fangs and bloodshot eyes! However, the library members tolerated all these pranks. And some of them, young at heart like yours truly, even secretly admired the talentedlad.
On the other hand, what irked the womenfolk was the recipe or discount-coupon lifter whose handiwork was a yawning, neatly slit rectangle in one of the pages of a women8217;s magazine. There were two possibilities. Either a housewife had decided to try out a new recipe 8212; with her unsuspecting family as the guinea pigs, as some observed uncharitably. Or she wasgoing to cash in on a discount sale 8212; and probably impoverish her husband in the process! Or sometimes a teenager would hijack a blow-up of his favourite filmstar or cricketer to adorn the walls of his room, raising the hackles of the others.
Occasionally extempore wit did surface. Once after reading a piece advocating the abolition of corporal punishment in schools, a dissident jocularly scrawled in a corner of the page: 8220;I still firmly believe that a pat on the back administered hard enough, often enough and low enough develops character!8221; The member who got the magazine next pencilled a tart rejoinder below: 8220;Please stop scribbling in the magazine 8212; or we8217;ll have to give you a dose of your own medicine!8221;
There were other irritants as well 8212; badly mutilated magazines that appeared to have survived a tug-of-war between kids; magazines that had doubled as fly-swatters, sometimes with a fly plastered to the cover as proof of the wielder8217;s prowess; dog-eared dailies embellished with children8217;sdoodles; half-completed crosswords, abandoned in frustration, pockmarked with unsightly deletions and overwriting; and 8220;word power8221; features blithely ticked by vocabulary-builders, often indicating exaggeratedly high ratings! However, the library members good-naturedly tolerated all this.
They also stoically put up with that all-too-common human failing 8212; forgetfulness. Like the time a member forgot to return an 8220;adult8221; magazine even after a month had passed. When he eventually did return it, he attached a cryptic but candid note: 8220;Sorry for the delay 8212; I slept over this!8221; Discreet enquiries revealed that he indeed had 8212; quite literally. For in order to keep the well-spiced magazine away from his children, he had hidden it under his bed 8212; and forgotten all about it!
