How Palghat gave birth to cartooning gharana

4 November 2013

Palghat, or Palakkad, in Kerala is famous, as the former chief election commissioner T.N. Seshan once said, for “cooks, crooks, civil servants”. And Carnatic musicians. And cartoonists. The landlocked town with exactly two landmarks has produced four top-class political cartoonists for New Delhi’s newspapers: P.K.S. Kutty, O.V. Vijayan, Ravi Shankar, and E.P. Unny. In the…

And so, India’s three best cartoonists are…

3 July 2012

It isn’t often that Indian cartoonists talk about their craft—or their colleagues and compatriots. There is, for instance, a famous incident of the doyen of Indian cartooning, R.K. Laxman, being asked in the course of an interview with The Illustrated Weekly of India, about a younger cartoonist then working for the Indian Express. “Ravi Shankar?…

Will The Sunday Standard set the Yamuna on fire?

31 March 2011

Dummy editions of The Sunday Standard, the weekly newspaper from the Madras-based New Indian Express group, have begun doing the rounds. The eight-page dummy printed on standard newsprint seems to suggest that the 21st century weekend paper will have a conventional, 1990s design. Edited by former India Today editor Prabhu Chawla, the paper was originally…