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E P Unny

The 20th Century's most elusive creature
It was Rajiv Gandhi who invented the 21st century for us. He kept insisting that he would take us there, so much so that O.V. Vijayan shot back in a cartoon, ``The calendar will.''

But to Rajiv's credit, he at least spared us the ``millennium''. An eye-teaser of a word we should thank the spell-check for the ``m''s, ``n''s and ``i''s crawling in line like a typographical caterpillar.The calendar finally caught up with us. The millennium arrived with its men, women and child prodigies who matter. The sort who, as they say, leave their footprints on the sands of Time from the barefoot Buddha to the jackbooted Mussolini.

The much-talked-about Millennium Men (read persons, if you insist) are amenable to cartooning because familiarity is the key to caricature. Put the most obscure and bland face under the limelight and it grows steadily into a caricature. No such luck with the NMM or the Non-Millennium Man (NMM). The cartoonist is called upon to target him, capture his imagination and possibly get him into the cartoon. A tall order because no one is quite sure what the character looks like.

Even Laxman says he didn't find the Common Man, an earlier incarnation of the NMM. He would ink in a crowd of onlookers in the background which eventually thinned to leave behind the bespectacled little man in perpetual bewilderment. Who is he? Probably one of those endless small town migrants who came into the country's first commercial metro. But today he is far too well-known to be the NMM and far too gentlemanly to survive.

The NMM is made of sterner stuff. You think you have zeroed in on him and he promptly mutates into a more resistant strain. He remains the Indian cartoonist's singular nightmare. His western counterpart has no use for the character. He finds no place in their pocket or edit cartoons. The strip cartoonist doesn't give him a second look either. The 100-plus comic strip on the other hand has been into the business of building up vivid, distinctive characters right from its first born Yellow Kid in 1896 to Snoopy who just bid us good bye.

So it is our cartoonist's brief to find the NMM, ironically in a landscape that can't possibly get more ethnically and linguistically uneven. Does one abstract the Lucknawi lip, the Bihar brow, the Gujarati grin, the Punjab cheek, the Assamese eyes and the Tamil moustache into a single human form? Maybe a cubist artist can. The cartoonist needs a more concrete model to build up on. That takes him back to Operation NMM.

Where did we see him last? Just the other day in an Internet cafe browsing desibaba.com? Or way back in the '70s in a Kerala teashop or the Calcutta coffee shop getting worked up on Vietnam? What is the NMM into software, soft porn or soft drinks? At your favourite restaurant, is he the one who opens the door, dressed to the hilt like a maharajah? Is he as broke as the Air-India's maharajah? Is he the stock-market savvy cabbie you ran into in Mumbai or the cycle-rickshaw puller in Chennai who has a regular flutter on the horses?

Can't tell if he is good or bad. Or is he just indifferent, as he was to the I&B ad in 1945 which exhorted him to ``say no to the black market and there will be no black market''. Today in Free India is he the one who faces the noose because he can't afford a good lawyer? Or was he the one who escaped the noose in the erstwhile Travancore State where death penalty had been abolished?

Is the NMM the shabby creature who runs your neighbourhood hardware store and drives back home in a Mercedes? Was he part of the crowd at a Tamil film set scrambling for the leftover of an apple the dancing star had bitten into? Or was he a regular at the annual post-budget discourses of Nani Palkhiwala? Is he the stenographer at peace with the world after blowing a lifetime's earning on the daughter's wedding? Or could he be the corporate climber who drives like a maniac from the gym to the Reiki session? Was he the literate Keralite who voted back the Congress after the Emergency or the unlettered peasant who voted out Indira Gandhi in Rae Barelli? Has he been around long enough to recall P.C. Joshi's IPTA or is he the little fellow growing up on M.M. Joshi's textbooks?

If it is any consolation, the cartoonist is not alone in this punishing pursuit of the NMM. He is in the enviable company of the politician and the filmmaker. The trio has quite a bit of misery to share. A couple of years back the NMM made the cartoonist look like a fool. The government had announced a hike in petro-prices and there he was popping out of the cartoon protesting vehemently. In one week flat, when the finance minister highlighted the reason for the hike, he was back in the very same cartoon frame drowning in the oil pool deficit pleading to be helped out.

The NMM one suspects is fond of films or is he? Once in every while he sends the filmmaker scurrying for cover from one hip-swinging, mafia-glorifying success recipe to another hip-swinging, tradition-reviving formula. And as for the politician, just look at his BP chart during the poll campaign. Though he has no love lost for the club of three, he isn't averse to the members getting together. He was there to bless the marriage of politics with cinema (M.G. Ramachandran, N.T. Rama Rao, Jayalalitha) and the incredible one between politics and cartooning (Bal Thackeray). Since then he is back to his disappearing and reappearing act.

Don't give up, says my Net-savvy friend. He might just be a click away at nmm@godknowswhere.com.