Satwant caricatures 50 years of freedom

CHANDIGARH, Aug 11: Satwant Singh’s "India, My India", is not what the city has been witnessing for the last few days as his sharp attacks on India during this Golden Jubilee bash cry loudly, "Oh darling, yeh hai India". For his sketches rip apart the contemporary corrupt system.

An exhibition of his cartoons got off to a start at the Museum of Fine Arts in the Punjab University this morning. Satwant has compressed the 50 years into two figures, Nehru with his red rose and Vajpayee with a nuclear bomb in the button hole.

He has a hard-hitting one on everything that is wrong with the country; right from the politicians who tell a bewildered Gandhiji, "Your place is on the currency notes only", to Nehru’s "Tryst with dynasty"; from the common man’s plight under the soaring rate of inflation, in which the purchase of onion invites IT men into the house, to the poverty that makes naked children wonder at the scantily-clad girls on a beauty pageant, "are there more poor people than us?"