It has happened to me more than once that upon asking someone from South India (collectively, humurosly, lovingly, and perhaps inappropriately known as Madrasi to Northies) about his childhood remembrances of the glories of such great men as Super Commando Dhruva, I was met with a gaping mouth, a confused gaze, and a general stammer indicating that my question was neither well understood nor well received. At such moments I generally look at the person with growing incomprehension and an increasing sympathy at a childhood spent without the fantastic presence of Super Commando Dhruva in it - a tragedy which should probably qualify as child abuse. Because you see, those ill drawn comics with their ridiculous storylines, gaudy antagonists, and misplaced speech bubbles constituted a carefree, frolicksome, even invigorating part of my life that was completely missing in any other medium of the day.
That was the time of sensible television. A time when TV shows not only did not suck on a universal scale, they even managed to be good and informative. Unlike the present crop of mind-melting, skin-evaporating mediocrity of general entertainment, the shows then were infinitely more sensible. But sensibility is hardly the seed of imagination. It's probably an impediment. So in an age when there weren't gazillion cable channels, when newspapers actually delivered sober, to-the-point news, when Bollywood was still writhing below miles of suffocating mediocrity, and when sport was just sport and not the athletic equivalent of a mardi gras parade high on coke as it is today, a young boy's imagination didn't have much to take refuge in except between the 32 sheets of colorful mindlessness. At Rs. 5 a copy, ecstacy didn't come cheap but it was atleast legal. And oh! how I loved the touch of a new comic. How I adored that laminated cover with those gripping images which were always specially drawn and were much much better than any that you could find inside. Not only could you not find images as good as the cover image, you could not even find anything inside the comic that bore any resemblance to the cover image. But I used to love those laminated covers and I can still remember the steely touch of those two staple pins which bound the comic together and stood out like welcome, sweet pangs of pains in a smooth life full of happiness. I knew that they would come to signify the 16th page, the page of destiny in many ways - that is the page that is destined to be opened if you hold the comic on its edge and let go, and that is the page where things start getting really complicated.
I often tried to delay the actual reading of the comic for as long as possible, forever scrutinizing the images on the front cover and reading the junk on the back. But once inside, I let myself drown in the hurricanesque bombardment of crazy ideas, thinly held plots, highly strung storylines, amphetamined dialogue, and grotesque characters. It was a world where men were probably born with six-packs and where ladies routinely gave Barbara Millicent Roberts a run for her money. In a highly conservative society like ours at the time, it was surprising to see how much tittilation went unaccounted for in a comic book meant for children. In our generation's appropriately less neurotic attitude towards sex, I wonder if a small contribution was made somewhere in those pages; because there was hardly another outlet.
There was an abundance of violence too but it was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Unlike the comic books of Japanese and American origin, ours never managed to scare. Even the action ones were essentially happy and never made me feel gloomy. It meant that while on one hand I could always be assured that the good guys would win in the end and that their paths, although torturous and bloody, would never be dark and realistic enough to affect me negatively, on the other, those comics failed to speak in an entire language of human emotions. In fact, one of the very few imaginative failures of those comics, like the failure of Bollywood on a much more universal and sustained scale, was their assertion that good guys always win in the end-an assertion that is not only wrong in real life but also a huge creativity jammer, an unnecessary, restrictive assumption.
Western comics, while much more sophisticated and imaginative on the scale of ideas and plots and dialogue and drawing, fail to match the brilliance of the Indian superhero. One reason for this is a pig headed refusal on the part of the Indian comic artist to acknowledge the existence of anything akin to the laws of nature. While his Nagaraj can produce snakes from his wrists without being apologetic and explanatory about his past, Spider man cannot produce so much as a thread of web without having to explain his trip to a museum and the structure of DNA. Since we as readers have chosen to be more gullible, they as artists have chosen to be more imaginative. Their imagination manifested itself in whackier and whackier characters unless the logical evolutionary endpoint was reached in Chacha Chaudhry whose power, despite what the comic would have you believe, was controlling coincidences. Chacha Chaudhary, despite his benign and almost stupid facade, was nothing less than an evolutionary singularity. Once you start controlling coincidence, you start questioning the very basis of our language, our ideas, our knowledge and civilization. There is nothing in the western comics which rivals his bad-assery.
I miss those innocent little nuggets of dreams. I'm almost led to frown upon the things which keep the average child occupied today. But I'm also aware of the eternal folly of it. Childhood, by virtue of its irrevocable loss and foggy distance, is automatically nostalgic. And it sweetens the associated memories out of proportions. Years from now, I'm sure, the dark, humid, smarmy nights spent playing War of Warcraft will be spoken off in words as laced in maudlin nostalgia by today's 12 year olds as those with which I remember the 32 paged respite.
