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Tweaking reality

K.V. Shyamsundar wields his pencil with great sarcastic effect to produce some outstanding caricatures

CRITICAL VIEW Politicians are K.V. Shyamsundar's favourite subjects

It's very difficult to be funny — people who have tried it will admit. And more so if your medium is sarcasm and caricature.

That's precisely what K.V. Shyamsundar does and succeeds.

A retired Deputy Director of the Department of Land Records and Survey Settlements, he's into making pencil caricatures. His highly sarcastic and sometimes caustic character depiction of people in the socio-political field offers insightful glimpses of the aberrations in society.

The heaps of drawing books on Shyamsundar's table have been indexed in the order of the areas he has worked in — Mandya, Madikeri, Bangalore, Dakshina Kannada and two special volumes on Kerala.

And it's not like you can just flip through these books casually. It will require a lot of attention to detail to get the point of the sarcasm. Shyamsundar works effortlessly on the pages with his pencil and one cannot even begin to imagine what picture will finally come alive on the white blank sheets. He is a serious creator of caricatures, a special genre of art in itself. A completed work has many elements — there are human figures with funny facial expressions, shrunken limbs and immense confusion in the showing through the eyes of the character.

Satirical touch

Shyamsundar expressly brings out political satire in his caricatures. One particular caricature depicts Daridra Naryayana. Mandya's political one up-manship, by various "sons of the soil" and political heavyweights, needs a careful look for the viewer to be able to fully savour the intricacy of the artist's thought process.

Always reserved and seemingly in his own world, Shyamsundar appears aloof. But behind that outer façade is a sharp mind. He voracious reader and reads through the latest books and newspapers and grasps every controversy, every issue and its nuance in his own characteristic ways.

K.V. Shyamsundar

The range of themes he has depicted in the large number of his works is mind boggling. Though these are the same things that happen around us day in and day out, it's his understanding and perspective that give the edge to everyday situations.

The raids of the Lokayukta and the so-called powers (read, toothless) conferred on Justice Venkatachala, the controversies over the Devanahalli International Airport, the rise of Naxal movement in Dakshina Kannada, the politics of the Kannada language movement, the paradoxes that exist despite high literacy levels in modern India and many other issues have provoked him and inspired caricatures that sets people thinking, if not spur them into action.

Keeping his work to himself all through his life, Shyamsundar is modest about his art. He says when he looks at them he feels he has been too sarcastic about things around him, but as a "critic" of his life and times, he could not have done better than sketching them in the way he did.

M. RAGHURAM

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