The ends The means

I had no concept of pocket money when i was a child, leave alone the concept of pocket money as something children could demand from their parents. In fact I never had to ask for money, not that my pockets we always stuffed with money .. just that the leftover money that remained after buying the stationary was enough for the luxuries of my life back then. They were comics, i mean the luxury. I would rent them from a guy who was in to bicycle repairing and did comics as a side business. He was very hardworking. We were sort of friends and i often would drop by to check if anything suiting my taste had come. I still remember his face so vividly, but like many other acquaintances and friends, he too is just a face in memory now.

Those were the blissful childhood days. I didn't have a single hint about the ends, just that the means were being 1st in class. I did great at following the means, was always 1st in class for 10 straight academic years uptil 10th. In 11th and 12th however .. i was in a bigger school, and occasionally one of my classmates would pip me to be number one and it didn't hurt. Perhaps the ends that i had in mind had taken over the means set by others.

Coming back to comics, I had read Billoo & Pinki and Chacha Chaudhri & Saabu & Rocket earlier , all of them being the creation of Pran Kumar Sharma of Diamond Comics, but the comics guy was the one who introduced me to the world of Dhruva and Nagraj. It was a glamorised and surreal world indeed. Reading those made me feel so powerful, for i would vicariously imagine myself doing all those rescue acts of Nagraj and Dhruva. People at Raj Comics knew how to take one on a ride to the fantasy world.

Dhruva, i liked everything about him, his duals with Mahamanav, his romantic interest Natasha and the secret identity of his sister as Chandika that he is ignorant of. He always used his mind to get the better of his enemies. You can't help but love a superhero who has vowed not to kill.


Nagraj was also a flagship character of Raj Comics but i think he could never achieve the popularity that Dhruva enjoyed. Snakes, Saudangi, Visarpi, Nagmani .. his world was a bit difficult to relate to.

I also tried Doga, the superhero with a dog mask, and somehow managed to complete that particular comics. Like Dhruva, he also adopted this alter-ego to avenge a personal tragedy that befell him but unlike him he carries tonnes of guns around him and kills without thinking twice. I thought he was repulsive and never read him again.

And then there was Bankelaal, who always made you laugh. The whole set up of his world is so funny. He knows that he is cursed that he can't do bad things to others, but he still makes plans and eventually fails. He serves a moronic king with a funny moustache and often plans to dethrone him but everything done by him with the ill will to the king turns to the advantage of the king, he gets annoyed but enjoys when the kings praises him for his doings. He was a hit with my mom and my sister.

However, my favourite comics character is neither any of these superheroes nor Bankelaal. He is the Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes. A comparison perhaps might not be valid because Calvin & Hobbes, created by Bill Watterson, is a newspaper comics strip. It was a year back that i got immersed in to his world and over the next month went through each and every strip that Watterson created over the decade 85-95.

Calvin is funny, humorous, naughty, annoying, imaginative, troublesome, carefree and complacent six year old. In his various alter-egos he imagines himself and acts as stupendous-man, the one with stupendous powers; tracer bullet, the detective that can give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money; spaceman spiff, the one who keeps traveling to far off planets in his spaceship and fights aliens. He is a child who tries his parents' patience and often brings them to tears, but tries to cook to help his mother when she is sick. A child whose imagination and creativity knows no bounds when it comes to making snow men. A child whom you can only hear, agape in wonder, when he talks about society and philosophy. A child who creates a pirate group g.r.o.s.s(get rid of slimy girls), but likes his classmate Susie and hates admitting it. A child who has to make a call to his father to know what exactly is 11+7.

He reminds me of my own childhood. Though i was an ideal student, unlike him, but I always troubled my mom because i just won't change my uniform after coming from school. He makes me feel what joy friendship is, he and Hobbes are the best friends ever(Hobbes is a toy tiger that comes to life when only Calvin is around). Calvin makes me long for his carefree nature where he is chasing no ends. There are many other characters in Calvin's life : a baby-sitter whom he actually fears; his class teacher whom he hates; his neighbour and classmate, Susie Derkins; Moe, the one who bullies Calvin at school; the principal whom Calvin ends up meeting almost everyday. And most of them remind me of someone or the other from my own school days..

You have been missing a lot if you are still alien to the world of Calvin & Hobbes .. i would say download(1,2,3) and get started right away ..

Labels: calvin and hobbes, comics, me