Time Out

Time Out
Jayaditya Gupta

The teenage years, and the ones immediately following them, are usually the ideal setting for the generation gap to take root and prosper. The opportunities for parents and children to agree on anything, or to appreciate the same thing, are few and far between. Things were no different in our house. My brother and I couldn't connect with our father on politics, on music, on outlook, on how to deal with people. What we had in common, though, was a shared passion for sport. And a love of Peanuts. And so it was that I read about Charles M. Schulz, creator of the strip, deciding to retire with more than the usual comics-buff's sense of dismay. For me, it meant the snapping of another umbilical cord.

Peanuts was (is, at least for another month) more than just a set of funny-looking characters. It was a large slice of life modelled, in fact, on Schulz's life and so close to the creator that he will not allow anyone else to handle it. It could make you laugh, it could make you think, it could make youunutterably sad. That made Peanuts easy to identify with; and maybe that's what made it so good for us. Who, after all, could remain unmoved at the sight of Woodstock, placard in hand, looking for his mother on Mother's Day? Or keep a straight face when reading about Snoopy in `Joe Cool' mode trying to chat up the `chicks' on a Sunday afternoon? Or not sympathise with Charlie Brown when he went up, for the nth time, to kick the football, only to have Lucy move it, as usual, at the last minute?

For me, one of the charms of Peanuts was the diversity of characters (and, unusually for a comic strip, there were many). Lead role went, of course, to Ch-arlie Brown, the long-suffering `round-headed kid' with an innate trust of mankind and unrequited love of `the red-haired girl'. He was the Average Guy, the one who had sand kicked in his face, the one who couldn't win anything. The most he could do, when pushed, was exclaim `Good grief!'. One of the more heartbreaking strips had him actually winning a trophy, thendiscovering, in memorable anguish, that his name had been misspelt. Another, dealing with Charlie Brown's crush on his teacher Miss Othmar, and then learning she'd gone on leave to get married, spoke to the schoolboy in each of us. Lucy was his bete noire and psychiatrist, the girl with loads of Attitude. Who couldn't see in her in the `I-know-best' stance, the philosophising, domineering and determination to have her own way their elder sister? There was Linus, her calm, almost ethereal younger brother, who spouted the deepest homilies and was stirred out of his even temper only when someone dared take his security blanket away. There was Schroeder the pianist, whom Lucy had a crush on, Peppermint Patty (soft on `Charles') and sidekick Marcie, Freda, Franklin, Woodstock and his troupe of scouts...

And there was Snoopy. A one-dog tour de force of a cartoon strip, who switched personae as easily as you and I change our socks. Schulz, it seems, reserved his best moments for the beagle, giving him the guiseof ace World War I pilot, novelist, pet-care agony aunt, the aforementioned Joe Cool, college cat, `pawpeteer'... It was Snoopy, I guess, who bound our family -- even my normally indifferent mother -- to Peanuts, because we believed anyway that dogs were superior beings.

Yes, Peanuts was a large part of our growing up. Clothes were never important in our family, but my brother and I were proud possessors of `original' Peanuts sweatshirts. One said `I'm a sore loser', the other bore the more typical `How can we lose when we're so sincere?' And when the Calcutta School of Music staged the play `You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown', whose record did they borrow? Ultimately, I feel, Charlie Brown -- and Peanuts stood for the one thing my father, brother and I, and by extension our family and all families, believe in: Decency, gentleness and faith no matter what -- in your fellow human being.

You're a good man, Charles M. Schulz.