Woman of letters: Where did you go, Charlie Brown?

Dear Charlie Brown,
At a time when the whole world is carrying a 'Je Suis Charlie' placard with a dark border around it, I thought I should write to you, one of the greatest cartoon characters of our times and in fact the inspiration for the name of the satirical magazine 'Charlie Hebdo' at whose headquarters 12 innocent people were killed this week, many of them Europe's leading cartoonists.

As many might know when the bunch of highly talented cartoonists including the likes of Georges Wolinski, Gébé and Cabu behind the satirical magazine 'Hara Kiri ' in the late 1960s had to change their name to side step a ban they chose to call themselves 'Charlie Hebdo' derived from the monthly comics magazine called Charlie Mensuel (Charlie Monthly), which took its name from your strip of Peanuts which was one of its more popular features.
And so I write today to you Charlie Brown, you who had once so famously said: "It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black."

I write to you because I am afraid that the blackest hour has come now and we so need your gentle, angst-ridden voice to find our way out of this miasma.

When you were created in the 1950s by Charles Schulz and the world was beginning to be charmed by a spherical headed anxious little boy in a zig zag tee shirt and his wise-beyond-their-years philosophy spouting companions, we lived in very different infinitely gentler times.

Your creator could spend his days ruminating on such subjects as the unrequited love of a red haired girl, the happiness a warm puppy could bring and the glory that comes with hitting a game winning home run or winning at a game of marbles!

Brought up on a diet of this gentle subversive humour: "Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."

"I've developed a new philosophy. I only dread one day at a time."
"Sometimes you lie in bed at night, and you don't have a single thing to worry about…that always worries me!" Your fans could turn their attention to the things that really matter in their lives like friendship, kicking a football or flying a kite.

Warming to your endearing neurosis that so aptly mirrored that of the world' readers could just not get enough of the solemn little boy who said things like "I love mankind – it's people I can't stand!"
Or "Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life!"

It was a world where dogs called Snoopy with writerly pretentions typed out their masterpieces, where four-year-old music prodigies saw history in the shapes of passing clouds and where a child's security blanket could become a universal comforter.

How did it all go so very wrong Charlie Brown? And why? Why did the lines between tolerance and intolerance, provocation and expression, freedom and fundamentalism become so fraught?
Why can't people live and let live, allow each other their freedoms and know that if they don't like a certain cartoon, they just have to turn the page or unsubscribe to the journal?

How is it that we have travelled such a very long distance between your world and the world of your namesake magazine and when did the change happen and who saw it coming?

In 2000, you breathed your last dear Charlie Brown, and with you went a whole era of gentleness and empathy.
"Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos," You had said once.

Well, it's a world of too many goodbyes now and I can just imagine you standing there looking like the sky has fallen on your head uttering your favorite phrase: "Good grief"

But it's not good grief any more, dear Charlie Brown, it is anything but good, and for your sake as that of your creators I am so happy you're not here to see it any more…

Take care, love to Lucy, Linus Schroeder and pals.
In sadness and in tears,
Yours sincerely, etc

Malavika Sangghvi- The writer believes in the art of letter writing
malavikasmumbai@gmail.com