My love affair with Chacha Chaudhary

It's an unfortunate fact that we mostly only remember the people who've influenced our lives after they've gone. This Wednesday when I heard the news of Pran's demise, I realized how little thought I had given to someone who was such a major part of my childhood. Tributes to his work and career including the famous Chacha Chaudhary began pouring in and reading those was a reminder of the number of lives he had touched across socio-cultural lines. The least I felt I could do was share my personal Chacha Chaudhary story, if not as a tribute then as a contribution to documenting the scope of his influence.

The first two years of my school life were spent in Delhi where English and Hindi were the main languages. I could talk, read and write in Hindi because that is what I had learnt. Every Sunday, my mother would take me to the local newsstand where she would get magazines for her to read and allow me to borrow a comic to take back home. I wasn't interested in reading Champak and Tinkle back then because I found them very preachy and void of action. What I did enjoy was flipping through Chacha Chaudhary because it seemed to be a lot more fun. My mother wasn't very keen on me reading it because a giant man called Sabu bashing up villains wasn't something she was comfortable with me reading at that age. Most weekends I would throw a tantrum at the newsstand and start crying to publicly embarrass my mother into getting me a Chacha Chaudhary or at the very least, a Billu. I rarely succeeded because there isn't much you can do when you're little and your mother tells you that you won't be served dinner.

A year later, we decided to move to Punjab where Hindi wasn't taught till fifth grade. The language of choice was Gurmukhi, which I had no idea how to read and write. Overnight, my entire orientation and primary language with which to communicate changed. My mother realized not only was I going to fail every Gurmukhi exam, not learning Hindi for three years would mean I'd also forget the little Hindi I could read and write. As fate would have it, under the pretext of "not forgetting the Hindi I had learnt in Delhi", I was now encouraged to read any Hindi I could and that for my little boy brain meant one thing: Chacha Chaudhary. With time I learnt to appreciate and love the Tinkle's and Champak's of the world but I didn't know any other old man who was as cool as Chacha Ji and no other character that could make a volcano erupt on Jupiter just by getting
angry.

Like millions of other kids, I'll be grateful to Pran for all the entertainment. On behalf of my mother however, a special thank you for making sure I never forgot the little Hindi I had learnt in Delhi. Thank you.