By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam
I discovered my gift for satire entirely by accident, the way most useful things in life are discovered. I wrote something in my college days about a particularly pompous professor who delivered forty-minute lectures on the virtue of brevity. My classmates laughed. The professor did not.
I immediately understood that I had found my calling but did nothing about it till I started working in the government. This was the time I felt that I needed to tell the world reflections of my experiences without hurting anyone’s sentiments, but with a bit of learning thrown in.
Being a satirist is, at its core, a service profession. You look at the world with one eyebrow raised, which is a more sustainable posture than the alternatives. The earnest reformer develops a furrowed brow. The pure cynic gets a permanent sneer. The satirist simply raises one eyebrow and waits. The world, reliably and on schedule, delivers material.
There is a particular joy in watching someone who has just lectured you about humility walk into a room and spend the first five minutes establishing their credentials. I have sat through governance conferences where the opening speaker spent twenty minutes on the importance of listening. He then talked without pause for another ninety. Nobody interrupted him because the occasion called for silence and he had, after all, just explained that listening matters. I took notes. Not on governance.
Politicians are, of course, the satirist’s greatest benefactors. They deserve our gratitude, even when they do not deserve much else. The politician who rails against corruption from a stage and then quietly adjusts his constituency funds is not a hypocrite in any simple sense. He is a performance artist of considerable technical skill. He holds contradictory positions simultaneously without visible discomfort. This requires training that no university offers. The satirist simply notices and says so, which is apparently the more objectionable act of the two.
The development sector, which I have inhabited for several decades now, is a particularly rich ecosystem. I have sat in meetings where people discussed the empowerment of poor communities for six uninterrupted hours in an air-conditioned room in a five-star hotel, never once opening the window to check whether any poor communities were visible from that floor. The catering was excellent. The irony was better. I ate both.
There are those who argue that satire is unkind. This misunderstands the transaction entirely. Satire is not an attack. It is a mirror. The mirror is not responsible for what appears in it. When I describe the senior bureaucrat who issues circulars demanding that offices reduce paper consumption and then sends the circular to forty-seven people as a printout, I am not being unkind. I am being accurate. This distinction matters enormously, especially to bureaucrats.
The satirist does develop certain professional hazards. The first is that people stop telling you things because they suspect everything will end up in print. This is not entirely incorrect, which complicates the denial. The second is that you start finding comedy in situations that require solemnity, which can produce unfortunate facial expressions at the wrong moments. I have learned, over the years, to look at the floor during meetings where important people say things that would, in any other context, be hilarious. The floor has been very useful to me.
The third hazard is the most serious. You begin to notice your own contradictions. I once wrote a sharp piece about people who give unsolicited advice. I wrote it without being asked. The moment it was published, I understood that I had created a small problem for myself. The satirist who cannot laugh at the satirist has missed the entire point. I laughed, eventually. It took a few days.
There is real joy in this work though, and it is worth naming clearly. The satirist is, in the end, an optimist in disguise. Only someone who believes that things can be better points at how they currently are and laughs. The pure pessimist does not bother. He already knows nothing will change. The satirist writes the piece, sends it out and secretly hopes that the pompous professor reads it and pauses, just for a moment, before the next forty-minute lecture on brevity.
Sometimes they do pause. Occasionally they even change. When that happens, the satirist sets down the pen, looks out the window and starts watching for the next meeting where someone important is about to explain listening at great length to a roomful of people who stopped listening fifteen minutes ago.
The material is never exhausted. The eyebrow stays raised. And the work continues.
[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]
This post was published on May 6, 2026 5:05 pm