N Ponnappa writes:
On 29 October, G Bala from Tamil Nadu was arrested for drawing a cartoon showing three naked men, albeit one sporting a tie, another a cap, and all three covering their genitals with small wads of currency. By their feet lies a child, face down, supposedly charred, some flames still burning across its back—similar in a sense but gorier than that of the refugee child Aylan Kurdi washed on to the beach, dead, by the Mediterranean in 2015. The cartoon is based on a suicide bid by a daily wage labourer who burnt his two children, his wife, and himself in front of the Tirunelveli district collector’s office. Unable to bear harassment by a moneylender against whom he had complained six times to the district collector via petitions, the man took this step.
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