The best way to start telling this story would be by posting this below.
Or this one:
Or else this other one:
The first one says Vote Tharoo(R) – which in Malayalam, without the R in brackets, would mean give vote. And with the R, it would of course be Vote for Tharoor – Shashi Tharoor, the Congress candidate for Thiruavanthapuram in the just concluded Lok Sabha elections.
Sabari Venu is the 21-year-old artist behind the comic series. Home is Thiruvananthapuram, and work – freelance work these days, a year after graduation – is in Bengaluru. “I graduated in Bachelors of Design – it’s my dad that suggested the course – a year ago from the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology,” he says, a little before taking a bus from one city to the other.
Sabari began the series after noticing the immense popularity of his first such pun-comic. He drew a man being killed by a coconut that fell on his head and an investigator announcing dramatically, 'this is no ordinary murder, it’s a thenga kola' – a pun in Malayalam for commenting on something nonsensical. (The English equivalent would be bollocks). In literal Malayalam, it means coconut murder.
“I had put it up and gone out. When I came back an hour later, there were already some 400 shares! That got me started on the series. I mostly draw them on my pen tablet,” Sabari says.
As a child he drew on the sides of his textbooks. But he didn’t just leave it there. When he finished school and it was time to apply for college, he tore these pictures from his textbooks, made them into a portfolio and sent it. Srishti College liked that and he got in.
It’s in his final year the puns he had always enjoyed making began appearing as comics, after of course, Thengakola’s popularity. “My dad and I used to make these puns, and later I’d do it with my friends,” he says. The puns, such as that Dog Monet comic above, are almost entirely linked to Malayalam. The joke with 'Dog Monet' – not sure if Sabari would name it so – is the Malayalam translation – Nayinte Monet, where Nayi means dog, and Monet (t silent, of course) means son. So the comic says, son of a dog -- perhaps a female dog. And poor Sabari has taken the pains to actually draw the Monet picture, not use a photo of it. He likes to be sure what he does is right, and even then, he always credits.
Sabari calls that one his favourites. If we are choosing favourites, the one below would be a top pick by many women.
Explanation: Pennu means woman in Malayalam. So pennu, not pen, is mightier than the sword.
Most of his Instagram posts gets a thousand ‘likes’ or more, Shashi Tharoor himself sharing the work on his Facebook page recently.
Lately, Sabari’s comics began reflecting his thoughts and concerns on the politics of the country. There are quite a few he has posted on his personal account but not shared on his page, like the one below.
And these ones:
“I am cautious, of course. There are some messages and trolls that have come to me, but the best way to deal with them is to not engage with the ones sending it,” the young fellow speaks with an admirable maturity, taking stances that folks much older refuse to do, even as he understands the risks.