Written by Nirupama Subramanian |New Delhi |Updated: January 20, 2019 3:34:48 pm
An ex-foreign correspondent on why Tintin’s journeys were more like fun holidays
In a sense, Hergé, without leaving his studio in Brussels, was the true foreign correspondent behind Tintin, with his compelling stories about real and made-up places and their rulers such as Raja of Gaipajama.
For every time I sat in front of a computer with lots of notes, a blank mind, a hack’s block, a ticking clock and a news editor screaming over an international line, there must have been a Tintin lurking in the room, laughing his red mop off. Don’t get me wrong. I was hooked on Tintin ever since my parents got me my first one, Tintin and the Shooting Star (1941), in which he sets off on a ship to find a meteorite that has crashed into the Arctic. And I, too, like travelling to exotic places more than writing about them. But hey, guess what? A foreign correspondent’s daily routine bears little resemblance to the serendipitous life of the greatest journalist to inhabit a comic strip.
Did anyone see this teenage smart-ass ever file a report? Who were his editor and news editor? And, very important, who was the accountant back in the office who never asked tiresome questions about expenses as this young lad in plus fours, accompanied by his dog and an alcoholic sea captain named after a fish, trotted across the world, from Tibet to South America and every country in between? He hired camels and private planes, sponged off friends in palaces, climbed the Himalayas, went on an underwater expedition looking for lost treasure. Heck, he even went to the moon, long before Neil Armstrong.
Most of Tintin’s journeys were more like fun holidays, a slightly more adult and funnier version of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventures. But unlike the five siblings and cousins who rarely left the English countryside, Tintin travelled to little-known far-off lands.
In a sense, Hergé, without leaving his studio in Brussels, was the true foreign correspondent behind Tintin, with his compelling stories about real and made-up places and their rulers such as Raja of Gaipajama.
He took people to the moon before NASA and wrote about genetic mutations well ahead of his time.
As a child growing up in Delhi, I had not heard about the Yeti until I read about the “abominable snowman”; never heard an opera singer till I met Bianca Castafiore at Marlinspike; never saw spaghetti until I saw Snowy slip and slide on some in the Shooting Star. And, though, I had no consciousness of it then, some of the stories must have been my introduction to the Cold War. In Tintin and the Picaros, for example, a deposed General Alcazar — with the help of revolutionary guerrillas or terrorists, depending on whose side you are on — is trying to mount an uprising against General Tapioca who had ousted him in a coup. There’s even a multinational called the International Banana Company.
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