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Long before social media, anonymous trolls and WhatsApp ‘forwards’ reduced irreverence and lampooning to little more than pressing ‘Send’, satire demanded considerably more enterprise, ingenuity and courage.

For me, it took the form of ‘The Lampoon’, an anonymous satirical pamphlet that I roguishly conceived, typed, cyclostyled and covertly circulated around Mayo College, Ajmer, where I was a callow assistant master for around two years in the mid-1970s.

Only some two decades later, when I eventually entered journalism professionally, did it dawn on me that this improbable exercise in organised naughtiness had been an unexpected apprenticeship for a career in the Fourth Estate that has spanned some 45 years. Long before a newspaper carried my first byline, The Lampoon had already taught me many of journalism’s enduring fundamentals: observing people closely, puncturing pomposity, questioning authority, protecting identities and, whenever necessary, making the establishment distinctly uncomfortable.

The principal difference, of course, was that The Lampoon carried no signature and reached its readers by stealth rather than through conventional circulation. The methods were unconventional, yet the instincts, as it turned out, were much the same.

That unlikely, fleeting journalistic venture at Mayo came flooding back recently whilst rummaging through a pile of yellowing papers, nestling at the bottom of one of my office drawers in New Delhi. Out fluttered several fragile, sepia-stained fragments of The Lampoon, their cyclostyled ink faded, but their capacity to provoke embarrassment among those mercilessly caricatured wonderfully intact, even if many such victims had departed this world in recent years.

But reading the brittle pamphlets after almost half a century transported me back to a time when anonymous satire required not the click of a mouse or a social media account, but planning, ingenuity, trusted accomplices and an acceptance that discovery could bring an abrupt end to one’s career. In those days, the occupational hazard was not merely being ‘cancelled’ online, but being summarily sacked for ‘gross insubordination’ and ‘unbecoming behaviour ’.

Op Lampoon was, to put it mildly, a carefully choreographed undertaking requiring equal measures of resourcefulness, discretion, obsolete hardware –now largely confined to museums, collectors’ shelves and fading memories – and a select band of collaborators, sworn to secrecy. The equipment comprised a portable Remington typewriter, wax stencils, a hand-cranked cyclostyling machine and fingers permanently stained purple by duplicating ink—the indispensable tools of subversion in the pre-digital........

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