Sudhir Tailang (26 February 1960 – 6 February 2016) was a renowned Indian cartoonist. He was known for his sharp wit and insightful commentary on social and political issues. Tailang's cartoons often featured satire and humor, making complex topics accessible to a wide audience. He worked with several prominent publications, including The Times of India and The Hindustan Times. In 2004, he was honored with the Padma Shri award for his contributions to literature and education.

Tailang's career spanned several decades, during which he created a vast body of work that continues to be admired and appreciated. His cartoons are remembered for their thought-provoking nature and ability to spark conversations.

Sudhir Tailang (26 February 1960 – 6 February 2016) was a renowned Indian cartoonist. He was known for his sharp wit, insightful commentary, and unique style of political satire.
Here are some key points about his life and career:
* Early Life and Career:
   * Born in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India.
   * Started his career with the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1982.
   * Later worked with Navbharat Times, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Times of India, and Asian Age.
* Notable Works:
   * His cartoons often satirized politicians, bureaucrats, and social issues.
   * He was known for his signature style, using simple lines and bold colors to convey complex messages.
   * His cartoons appeared in various newspapers and magazines across India.
* Awards and Recognition:
   * Awarded the Padma Shri in 2004 for his contributions to literature and education.
   * Received numerous accolades for his work.
* Legacy:
   * Sudhir Tailang is considered one of the greatest Indian cartoonists of all time.
   * His cartoons continue to be admired for their humor, intelligence, and social commentary.
   * He left behind a rich legacy of political satire that continues to inspire and entertain.
Sudhir Tailang's untimely death in 2016 was a great loss to the world of Indian cartooning. However, his work lives on, reminding us of the power of satire to expose the truth and bring about change.

Sudhir Tailang (26 February 1960 – 6 February 2016) was a renowned Indian political cartoonist. He was known for his sharp wit, insightful commentary, and ability to capture the essence of political events through his cartoons.
Here are some key points about his life and career:
* Early Life and Career:
   * Born in Bikaner, Rajasthan, on February 26, 1960.
   * Started his career with the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1982.
   * Worked with various prominent newspapers, including Navbharat Times, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Times of India, and Asian Age.
* Contributions to Cartooning:
   * His cartoons often satirized politicians and political events, holding them accountable for their actions.
   * He was known for his unique style, blending humor and social commentary.
   * His cartoons were widely appreciated for their clarity, wit, and ability to provoke thought.
* Recognition and Awards:
   * Awarded the Padma Shri in 2004 for his contributions to literature and education.
   * Published a book of cartoons titled "No, Prime Minister" in 2009, focusing on former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
* Legacy:
   * Sudhir Tailang's cartoons continue to be remembered for their impact on Indian political discourse.
   * He is considered one of the most influential political cartoonists of his generation.
Sudhir Tailang's untimely demise on February 6, 2016, was a significant loss to the world of Indian cartooning. His legacy lives on through his insightful and humorous cartoons, which continue to inspire and entertain.

No artist in the world is expected to come out with a creation everyday.A cartoonist,however,can't survive if he doesn't! People often ask me how I manage to think of something to draw every day. It certainly isn't an easy job.It would be even more difficult if our politicians didn't come to the rescue.I feel most of them work for themselves and for the cartoonists.

Foreward - By Cartoonist Abu Abraham

दिल्ली 20/09/1979

धर्म के साथ राष्ट्र भी नष्ट होता है-

Sudhir Tailang, a Padma Shri awardee (he got it in 2004,) is what I would call a visual thinker. Tailang currently works with Asian Age, but similar to Mario Miranda, he started his career with The Illustrated Weekly of India.

Tailang worked mainly with The Hindustan Times (I am a Time of India reader but for a short time, way back in the 90s and early 2000s, I had subscribed to the HT for a limited time. I remember seeing his cartoons then. When you look at cartoons and you yourself like to draw, you tend to look at the name of the artist when you like a drawing. So I remember looking at his name and thinking that he was cool.

While his line-work is different from Mario‘s, or Ninan‘s, or even Laxman‘s; Tailang’s humor cuts through it all and reaches you; and for a cartoonist, the message is always more important than the visual.

Find a collection of his cartoons at:

http://www.asianage.com/category/author/sudhir-tailang-1

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ... ..George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Sudhir Tailang Is Making Shankar New!

Sudhir Tailang, One of India’s Finest Cartoonist Passes Away at 55

Born in Bikaner, Rajasthan, Sudhir breathed his last in Medanta hospital, Gurgaon.

Sudhir Tailang is one of India’s finest political cartoonists, passed away on 6th February 2016. Known for his unique drawing style and unsparing satire, Sudhir Tailang kick-started his career with the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1982.

He was a great man Vibha Tailang ma'am. Although we had never met I admired his work.

Vibha Tailang what I loved about him is the fact that he was/is not only honest but also fearless and had great courage of conviction to stand up and speak out no matter how powerful the individual or institution may be. That's a rare quality in people nowadays and very few embody and practice these values today in a world full of apathetic people.

- Jeroninio Almeida

New Delhi: when Sudhir Tailang wielded his brush like a weapon the ink could turn to blood. His was not an easy job, he would say. On his blog he repeated one of his favourite lines, that though he had to work very hard he could always count on the politicians to work for him full-time.

PMs and Presidents would ask him for copies of his drawings. During Kandahar episode he drew Jaswant Singh in Taliban attire and, Sudhir said, the then minister, far from offended, sought the signed original.

But my favourite was the one that showed Lalu Prasad Yadav, his hair like a pile of hay, looking around and saying “Fodder? What fodder?”

He began with Indira Gandhi early in his career and thereafter spared no one. No subject was taboo and even an incomplete list of his assassinations would require a lengthy chargesheet.

Sudhir would have wanted us to find some humour even in his death. I have tried, unsuccessfully, for the better part of the day. Many artists are cut down in their prime but Sudhir would have known, as many of his breed do, that he would live in his work.

He believed there were few real cartoonists left. Actually, by his death that special species is extinct. We revelled in his fame for he belonged to us. God is laughing up there now that he has him for company.

He will find out sooner than later that Sudhir Tailang is used to having the last laugh. Rest in peace, my friend...

New Delhi: Sudhir Tailang was deeply suspicious of all authority. And he was completely unafraid. This is what made him India’s finest contemporary political cartoonist.

A career of over three decades was cruelly cut short by brain cancer on February 6. Sudhir would have been 56 on February 26.

He would have been brave to the end but he would not have failed to ask God why. It was an old trait, this challenging of authority, one that we his colleagues had experienced time and again.

He had an air of old Bikaner, where he was born and which remained in his heart.

The years of drawing for various leading newspapers of the country had honed his paintbrush to a rapier points always seeking the tenderest spot, pricking, thrusting, never a wild slash.

There was nuance but never so subtle that it would escape his audience.
He could be gentle with his victim, and congratulatory very rarely.

Toons inspired Sudhir to wield the brush
Eminent cartoonist Sudhir Tailang succumbed to brain cancer on Saturday after battling it for almost two years. Tailang, who was associated with The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle, would have turned 56 on February 26.

Survived by his wife and daughter, Tailang had been under treatment for brain cancer since 2014 and breathed last at his East Delhi residence in Mayur Vihar.

The cartoonist, who had a long association with a number of newspapers, was admitted to Medanta Medicity Hospital in Gurgaon in December but was brought home around a  month ago.

Read: Strokes of genius

Tailang was awarded a Padma Shri in 2004. As a cartoonist, many politicians including Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Atal Behari Vajpayee, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi bore the brunt of his brush.

Mr Tailang, who was born in Rajasthan’s Bikaner on February 26, 1960, had his first cartoon published in a newspaper at the age of 10 in 1970.

It was in 1982, when he got his first major break in Illustrated Weekly of India, Mumbai.

As a child, Tailang was fascinated by comics such as Tintin, Phantom and Blondie, which is known to have encouraged him to go for drawing cartoons.
For several years he was with HT and Indian Express also.

He was with the The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle as Associate Editor and Political Cartoonist when he died.

Sudhir Tailang at the launch of book , India - The Future is Now, in Delhi on April 30, 2013.(Waseem Gashroo/ HT file photo)

Hindustan Times | ByNarayanan Madhavan

We shared many things: A Mumbai local train, jokes and mirchi-wali roti. But I am sad that I could not meet Sudhir Tailang in his last year of life, despite his being only a mile away from where I lived.

We met in the training room of the Times of India, Mumbai, then Bombay. He had joined six months earlier as a trainee journalist in Hindi, while I was an English language trainee. As it turned out, his cartooning skills were so good that the establishment suggested he become a Trainee Cartoonist. I don’t recall there ever being another trainee cartoonist anywhere.

He took to the task with delight--and the task of being a “Hindi” cartoonist (Do cartoons have language?) in the same company and floor as the venerable R K Laxman was a daunting one. But Sudhir took up the challenge with a dedication that never left him.

We talked news and cartoons a lot. Myself from Delhi and he from Bikaner were both lost souls in the mangled urban wilderness of Bombay, struggling to put ourselves into its machine-like routines. We both would squeeze into the Harbour Line local train from the King’s Circle station. We simply could not get into the Central Line. Inside the crowd, we would discuss everything under the sun, but his passion for cartooning was often a theme.

Later, we both shifted to the Delhi office of the same company.

Being a cartoonist for Navbharat Times, he had the luxury of a corner cabin, where we would meet for quiet lunches from our tiffin boxes. It was during those days that he announced he wanted to create a character resembling Laxman’s Common Man. “Hum usko journalist banate hain, jholewala,” he said. So a jhola journalist was born in his cartoons as an observer of the world around him. As it turned out, he fashioned it after Sushil, one of his goatee-bearded journalist friends who used to drop by. Somewhere along his career, the jhola journalist character disappeared, perhaps in keeping with the waning of the stereotype.

One day he showed some mirchi-ki-roti, a Bikaner special item that was somewhat crunchy. You could make it a meal or a tea-time snack, he said, but best had with tea. Then he would take me to the Inter State Bus Terminus because that’s where you could get a thali that reminded him of home. Then he got married, and I attended his wedding in a far corner of Delhi. The girl was a student-admirer he fell in love with. His passion showed everywhere.

(There was one particular incident where he roped in a friend to pose as Mani Shankar Aiyer, who was then a diplomat close to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and rang up to meet me. I thought there was something interesting for a journalist and turned up to meet Mr Aiyer at his home early in the morning only to be told by an annoyed Aiyer that somebody had been playing a prank by sending people to meet him. I caught Sudhir out because someone had told me the internal office extension sounded two rings, and I now knew it was not an external call. I observed Sudhir’s movements and the grin on his face and knew it was him).

Suddenly, he left Navbharat Times to become an English language cartoonist, and we lost direct touch but his work was everywhere. His works were particularly noticed in the Hindustan Times and then the Asian Age. He prepared to switch to English for a wider audience, and surprised us with his increasingly smooth English captions that were clearly an acquired skill.

The boy who would look up with envy to Laxman was suddenly in the same league--certainly for someone so young.

We would meet now and then socially but time flew as we moved in different professional orbits.

Social media brought us together again, and we were chatting on Twitter decades later, like old times. I had hoped that I would release a book of my political verses with his sketches. Alas, that was not to be.

One day, I heard he had a cancerous growth. As I got caught up in some stuff, I tried to raise some help for him by hollering out on Twitter, but clearly, it was time to go.

It is my deep regret I could not see him in his last days.

I hope his soul somewhere up there forgives me, the way I forgave his prank. Though I never told him I had actually been fooled by him.

Tailang’s cremation will be held at 2 pm at the Lodhi crematorium, Delhi, on Sunday, February 7.

(Narayanan Madhavan is a senior journalist with Hindustan Times.)

Sudhir Tailang has been always one step ahead of me. When I joined The Times of India he had already left for The Hindustan Times... all I could meet was the easel Sudhir bhai used to work on. Those were the days of cartoons produced with India Ink, brush, nibs or Rotrings. The pen and ink days; Photoshop had not arrived.

Over the years, I had several opportunities to meet the man in the black shirt. I think wearing a black shirt to all his social outings was part of the black and white attitude he had towards politicians and politics. No grey areas.

Politicians who followed his cartoons closely were both his harshest critics and his greatest fans. In fact, the complainants were those who were not featured in his cartoons. A particular neta of national level once called him just to ask why he is not featured in his cartoons... was he not popular enough?

Sudhir bhai's creative genius was not only in drawing cartoons. I was surprised to see his artwork painted on the wall of a restaurant in Noida, which belonged to our common friend Gunjan Bansal. Strictly for close friends only, I guess.

In 2012, at the launch of one of his books in Delhi, two leaders from the rival parties of UPA and NDA shared the stage with him. In fact, they actually flanked him. Both the leaders had no problems with each other since they had one thing in common: both were victims of Tailang's cartoons. His cartooons were incisive and spared no one.

My wow moment with Sudhir Tailang was in 2013 when The Times Of India launched the book of cartoons called Jest in Time. To make the launch unique, we wanted some of the top Indian cartoonists to come together and create a cartoon on stage. Ninan, Keshav, Jayanto, Manjul, Prasad, Tailang and I were part of this event but the extempore on stage cartoon on India could not have been possible without Sudhir Tailang's participation. Drawn on a large board, the original still lies with The Times of India.