... Banerjee has a wicked eye for the ubiquitous visuals of life in Delhi and Kolkata, so often representative of other parts of urban India as well. There is an awkward vibrancy to the way his characters are drawn. Like their surroundings, in schools, government offices and yes, the homes of the bourgeois, their beauty is complex and ungainly; it coexists and melds with their ugliness, their indifference, their sense of semi-permanence.

Banerjee draws these imperfections without caricaturing them, and his colouring expresses their mood near-perfectly. Sometimes in black and white, sometimes in cool, solid colours, each piece of art acquires depth and clarity. In File #6851 / 5M / Jessie, Banerjee depicts the scientist J.C. Bose, who demonstrated a wireless telegraphy experiment in Kolkata years before Marconi, but lost out on a Nobel Prize because bureaucratic delays prevented his discovery from becoming international news in time. He is looking, Banerjee says, “at two fornicating ants, wondering whether to cremate the pair with his magnifying glass or let his good upbringing come in the way”.

There is a poignancy to the tea-stained sepia illustration of the great man, and to the nonchalant absurdity of Banerjee’s text, that no middle-class revolutionary can adequately convey.

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