India, April 18 -- Once upon a time, we laughed without offence or guilt. We laughed at power, at politics, at bureaucracy, and most of all, at ourselves. It was a laughter steeped not in mockery but in a shared understanding of the absurdities of life. Remember R. K. Laxman's Common Man?
The bespectacled, bewildered figure who stood silently witnessing the nation's daily dramas was our collective conscience drawn in ink. His was the lens through which middle-class India smiled at its foibles. No one was spared, and yet no one was wounded. His cartoons, which ran for decades under the banner You Said It, didn't merely capture the socio-political temperature - they made us laugh through the chaos, without cynicism, without rage, and it insp...