On Tuesday, the book was released at an event in Hyderabad
HYDERABAD: A bureaucrat’s journey through cartoons may seem an unusual path, but then, civil service isn’t all about files and policies. Some find satire between the paperwork. And he did—the thick, black-and-white strokes of a pen captured a familiar scenario of two farmers, worn by drought, watching their minister head off to seek divine intervention instead of policy reform.
Obtuse Angle: A Bureaucrat’s Journey Through Cartoons by retired IAS officer Prof. B.P. Acharya is a collection of drawings that records moments that are at times mundane and other times absurd and taken straight from his life as a civil servant who spent decades in Telangana’s industrial clusters, all while privately sketching the ironies he witnessed.
On Tuesday, the book was released at an event here. Prof. D. Narasimha Reddy, former fean, school of social sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH) was the chairperson at the event with S.A. Huda, former AP DGP and Subhani Shaik, Senior Cartoon Editor, Deccan Chronicle as the panelists.
The room wasn’t packed with casual readers. Many were research scholars, students and academics. A familiar face at Deccan Chronicle, Subhani studied the sketches with quiet appreciation. He had drawn countless editorial cartoons over the years, but something about these struck him differently.
"Daily cartooning is like running on a treadmill," he admitted. "This, though… this is a long walk through a bureaucrat’s mind."
The book wasn’t just about governance. It was about the people caught in its machinery. A man staring at an LPG cylinder, contemplating the merits of raw vegetables. An Election Commissioner putting on a show for foreign observers, while invisible hands directed him from behind the curtains. A file sitting at the bottom of a pile, forgotten, but not lost, just never important enough to be remembered.
The discussion moved effortlessly between humour and critique, between the technical and the personal. Acharya spoke of his influences like R.K. Laxman, Mario and Kutty. These are the artists who shaped Indian political cartooning for decades. However, his own work had a distinct quality. It wasn’t drawn from a distance; it was drawn from within.
