Festival.

Manmohan Singh, said Shankar, an executive editor at The Sunday Standard, is one of his pet characters along with another prime minister, the late P.V. Narasimha Rao, and the man who could never become prime minister, L.K. Advani.

"They have been in the midst of a lot of situations," Shankar said, when asked who he loved to draw the most over 40 years as a political cartoonist, working with leading media outlets like The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Indian Express and India Today.

Shankar claimed that political cartooning has much to do with tapping the contemporary public mood. Putting his reasoning in context, he said: "Today, you cannot draw a Manmohan Singh cartoon as Superman with a halo on his head. It won't work. You have to understand thepublic sentiment."

Terming India a place where one had to avoid drawing cartoons with religion as a motif, the Palakkad-born Shankar recounted an instance when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad called a strike in New Delhi after one of his cartoons in The Illustrated Weekly used the Mahabharata's Kurukshetra war scene canvas to juxtapose the untenable defence of Congressman A.R. Antulay, who was involved in a corruption scandal in the 1980s.

"Pritish (Nandy, the then editor of The Illustrated Weekly) was scared and met Advani," Shankar said, detailing the fallout of the cartoon.

"The reason why we don't see Indian religious allusions in cartooning is because in India people cannot accept religious humour in cartoons," he said.

Shankar called America the last free frontier, where cartoonists can take excessive licence and lampoon everyone