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 age.Appearing every few months, seemingly from nowhere, these pamphlets gleefully lampooned fellow masters—including, on occasion, even the Mayo College principal himself—to the immense delight of students and the mounting discomfort of their targets. At the time, Mayo, like other such institutions, founded in the colonial era and modelled on the great English boarding schools, possessed a rich ecosystem of colourful personalities, eccentric traditions and an elaborate pecking order, carrying echoes of both imperial habits and the fading world of Rajput royalty and feudalism.Some of its masters in my time carried themselves with military erectness, others with the solemnity of high court judges, while a few were convinced they had been personally entrusted with preserving the British Empire long after the Union Jack had been lowered for the final time. Collectively, however, they provided an irresistible cast of characters for anyone afflicted with a weakness for satire.Besides, caricaturing in the 1970s operated under a rather different rule book.Political correctness had yet to be invented; sensitivities were less easily bruised, and almost everyone—from principals to pupils—was considered legitimate material for a well-aimed barb. Humour was generally broader, sharper and considerably less inhibited than it is today. Consequently, The Lampoon could be merciless, but it was never malicious, obscene or vindictive. Its sole purpose was to puncture pomposity and celebrate absurdity—qualities that, in a venerable boarding school, were seldom in short supply.No master was ever identified by name.Instead, each appeared under the affectionate sobriquets bestowed upon him by generations of students—Kaddu, Randu, Rampu Sampu, Panty, Piaro and assorted others—which preserved a veneer of anonymity, while leaving absolutely no doubt as to who was being mercilessly, if extravagantly, skewered. The Lampoon specialised in doing what every hierarchy and establishment dreads most: puncturing pomposity. The ensuing ridicule was often outrageous, but never vulgar; its purpose was not to wound, but to deflate inflated egos and expose the absurdities of those who always took themselves a little too seriously.But every covert operation, however modest and mischievous, depends on a simple principle: the hand behind it must remain hidden, and The Lampoon was no exception. Self-preservation and anonymity demanded a degree of subterfuge, for the finger of suspicion inevitably began pointing in my direction after the first Lampoon edition mysteriously and suddenly surfaced.So, in an effort at muddying the waters, one of The Lampoon‘s favourite and most excoriated victims became its creator. Under the student-conferred sobriquet ‘Thud’—earned after my frequent and rigorous encounters on the squash court—I lampooned myself with an enthusiasm that occasionally exceeded that directed at my colleagues. It was, in a sense, camouflage by self-immolation, and the deception endured mercilessly in subsequent Lampoon editions, as few of my fellow masters could quite believe that the culprit would so mercilessly ridicule himself!Each edition of The Lampoon—and if memory serves me right, there were three or four—descended on the campus without warning. After the first issue, which was a runaway hit, students awaited each new one with barely concealed anticipation; all their masters did too, though for entirely different reasons and with mounting apprehension and irritation.Nonetheless, The Lampoon’s production and distribution required equal ingenuity and duplicity.Fabricating each edition was itself a major exercise in covert operations. Each line was laboriously hammered out onto a stencil on a portable Remington typewriter allocated to me as staff adviser to Mayoor, the school’s monthly magazine. One careless typing error on the stencil entailed tedious surgery with correcting fluid and a razor blade before the whole exercise could continue.The completed stencil then made its furtive journey to the school’s solitary cyclostyling machine, tucked away in an obscure corner of the impressive main building and presided over by a magnificently turbaned peon who remained blissfully unaware that he was an accessory to reproducing literary contraband, rather than another dreary set of routine examination papers that he took The Lampoon to be.The printing was the relatively easy part.Distribution was the make-or-break stage of Op Lampoon, on which rested the entire enterprise’s success. Each copy had to reach its destination unseen on publication day, before the alarm was raised. A handful were quietly slipped by me into the masters’ mail pigeonholes in the charming 19th-century Stowe Staff Club, where the teaching fraternity gathered daily for their mid-morning elevenses.The remaining incendiary cargo was destined for the senior dining hall, where it lay innocently among the cutlery and crockery like paper time bombs waiting to detonate when the students gathered for lunch. Nearly half a century later, it is probably safe to acknowledge the cheerful complicity of Sham Singh ji, the towering, affable Rajput feudal who ruled the dining hall with quiet authority. He asked no awkward questions, betrayed no confidences, and, to his everlasting credit, maintained a silence worthy of the Intelligence Bureau, while the final distribution of The Lampoon was executed by a small inner ring of reliable senior student accomplices.Thereafter, lunch that day descended into barely controlled chaos, as the only item on the menu attracting universal attention was The Lampoon. Copies had been rationed with calculated meanness; scarcity, I had quickly discovered, was the publication’s most effective publicity agent.Students pounced upon the precious pamphlets, snatching, borrowing and passing them from table to table with the furtive urgency usually reserved in those pre-internet days for pornography or a rare copy of Playboy. By the time each issue had completed its circuit of the dining hall, it was almost as dog-eared as the masters it had so mercilessly caricatured. The masters themselves, seated at the head of every table, turned varying shades of crimson; a handful displayed admirable sporting spirit and laughed along, albeit somewhat stiffly.The mystery surrounding the scurrilous pamphlets’ authorship only magnified the excitement. Every edition seemed to materialise from thin air, leaving behind equal measures of delight, indignation and paranoia. In retrospect, the school was probably far more entertained by the hunt for the culprit than by the contents themselves.But after months of successful deception, my downfall arrived from the least expected quarter.At the final morning assembly of the term—my last, as I had quit to try my professional luck elsewhere in the wider world—the College’s sporting Principal announced my impending, voluntary departure from Mayo. Then, with impeccable timing and a faintly conspiratorial smile, he publicly outed me as the elusive creator of The Lampoon, which by then had become one of the school’s more entertaining diversions and a prime conversation piece.The announcement finally resolved a mystery that had lingered for several months. Students greeted the revelation with predictable delight; a number of masters with the quiet satisfaction of having had their suspicions confirmed. Fortunately, with my departure already imminent, my outing came too late to have any practical consequences.The episode ended almost as quickly as it had begun.My contribution to the grand tradition of lampooning was, in truth, decidedly modest—I merely terrorised a boarding-school staffroom for around two memorable terms. Only much later did it occur to me that this improbable escapade had provided a rather better introduction to journalism than I had appreciated at the time. The Lampoon taught me that satire is journalism with fewer footnotes, better jokes and no accountability whatsoever.It also revealed that those in authority possess an almost supernatural inability to laugh at themselves, and that nothing unnerves the pompous quite so much as becoming the butt of everyone else’s amusement.