If I could save time in a bottle, I'd choose to borrow a time-machine first and travel back around twenty years to when I had just learnt to read. I wasn't much of a fan of colouring- though I liked collecting crayons- but I loved the splashes of brightness on the pages of comics. The speech balloons were invariably ignored as containers of serious, unwanted information, all concentration being devoted to pictures. And, of course, Tinkle was the comic that won hands down.
To this day, when I visit a book-stall at a railway station or on the pavements, my eyes skim past the rows of glossy magazines with photographs of larger-than-life celebrities on their covers, seeking the warm colours of that one comic that brings back waves of nostalgia of the years when life seemed more wholesome and complete than it does now.
Tinkle is 30 years old. It may not be as delightful as it used to be- the curse of modernity- but it is still relatively innocent and earthy, a breath of fresh air in the midst of pretences and the frightening race for an early adulthood.
Which Tinkle character/story lingers on in your head all these years on?
2 comments:
Tantri the Mantri!
His ingeniously diabolical (and yet always unsuccessful) plans to kill the Raja and take over the kingdom, had me rooting for him. The poor guy had been going at it for years!
Doesn't he sound very much like Saint Rodney :P? Replace Hooja with Katja/Imogen, of course!
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