R. K. Laxman was born in
Mysore in 1921 in a Tamil His father was a headmaster and Laxman was the youngest of eight children: six sons and two daughters. His elder brother was novelist
R.K. Narayan. Laxman was known as "Pied Piper of Delhi". An ill-mannered student in school, he was often punished by his teachers for misbehaving. In his words, “I felt wretched in the classroom. I am convinced that school-learning is unnatural and bad for human beings.” His academic performance was poor, and it was in this time that his inclination to art blossomed. Laxman was fascinated by the illustrations in magazines such as
The Strand,
Punch,
Bystander,
Wide World and
Tit-Bits, before he had even begun to read. Soon, at three years old, he was drawing on his own, on the floors, walls and doors of his house and
doodling caricatures of his teachers at school; praised by a teacher for his drawing of a
peepal leaf, he began to think of himself as an artist in the making. Laxman notes in his autobiography,
The Tunnel of Time: At age nine, Laxman decided to be an artist. He would cycle around Mysore and observe the nature around him while looking for something to paint. Eventually, he found and studied illustrations in foreign magazines, and was influenced by other artists like
Sir David Low (whose signature he misread as “cow” for a long time), a British cartoonist who appeared now and then in
The Hindu. Laxman's idyllic childhood was shaken for a while when his father suffered a paralytic stroke and died around a year later, but the elders at home bore most of the increased responsibility, while Laxman continued with his schooling. After high school at Maharaja's Govt. High School, Mysore, Laxman applied to the
Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art hoping to concentrate on his lifelong interests of drawing and painting, but the dean of the school wrote to him that his drawings lacked "the kind of talent to qualify for enrolment in our institution as a student", and refused admission. He finally graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the
University of Mysore. In the meantime he continued his freelance artistic activities and contributed cartoons to
Swarajya and an animated film based on the mythological character
Narada. ==Career==