My Enduring Hard-Disk

In my college days, when I used to work as a political cartoonist, I still remember,
If there was demand for a caricature, we only got demand-like instructions; “need a caricature of so-and-so person” – that’s it, no reference, nothing!
You might say, what’s the big deal here? But I would like to mention that this was a time when the internet wasn’t around yet. We had to recall every politician with all their minute details and personality traits from memory.
In other words, a cartoonist had to have both good drawing skills and excellent memory! Of course observation played an important role in all this.. On TV sets, in the papers, whenever I used to see these politicians, my antenna would go up and grab all the details! Unknowingly, observing everyone’s faces, their quirks, posture, body language etc, had become an integral part of me..
Nowadays Google and connectivity has made life simple. With a single click the reference is in front of you…
But I tell you, since this facility was not available in my time.. it made me develop such memory & skills that even today I can remember all those faces. Everything is safely stored onto my ‘hard disk’ and even today I love to access my memory to draw any personality, any time, without the help of Google.
Yes, some challenges make you complete!⁠⁠⁠⁠

–Guru Thakur