His cartoons may not make you laugh. Even when the contours of Vijayan’s unique strokes tickle your imagination, the laughter, when it comes, comes salted with the inevitable sadness that their biting sarcasm evokes. Vijayan has drawn with painful awareness of the reality around him—and that is no laughing matter. It was during the Emergency, when the elements of power in India had taken their ugliest shapes, that Vijayan’s cartoons lashed out best against the stink in the corridors of the establishment.