Tanmaya Tyagi is someone I have known since he was a child. He is the son of Hari Prakash Tyagi, an artist and critic who died young. He was a friend of mine for whom I had a great deal of regard. So it is with a sense of considerable satisfaction that I write this critique. Behind my assessment of his work, I have neither my friendship with his father nor the fact that he has been to my old school, St. Columba’s, and has been, of course, contributing work to Peoples Democracy. They reflect his journey through life; but that is all. It is the body of this work that I rely on entirely. And it pleases me.

Tanmaya’s caricatures and cartoons are the product of a trained hand. He firmly holds the belief that bright ideas are only one part of creativity and it is their execution that determines the final impact. This is why I pay special attention to execution. One could have a projectile but its mode of delivery is what counts if it hits its target or not. Tanmaya’s strong drawing achieves that purpose.

Its most striking aspect comes out in his caricatures. They highlight a cartoonist’s skill for two reasons. First, they have no captions to fall back on, and, secondly, the cartoonist has the physical features of the subject as a constraint on what he or she can do with a caricature. If he then acquires originality, as he does in his caricature of Che Guevara as a revolutionary and not a t-shirt icon, I consider it a success. Read more About Me.