Why This Theme, Why Now
The 2026 theme — Politics and the Pursuit of Peace: Do They Ever Reconcile? — is deliberately left as a question rather than handed over as an answer. It is the same question Ram Ugrah spent a career circling, one panel at a time, and it remains as unresolved today as it was in the decades he was drawing. Students are not being asked to settle it. They are being invited to observe it — to notice, the way he did, the small ironies and large contradictions that sit inside the relationship between politics and peace, and to render that observation with wit, with warmth, and with a caption that does some of the work a thousand words otherwise would.
The Man behind the Memory
There is a particular kind of courage that belongs to people who make us laugh at the things we are usually too afraid, or too polite, to say aloud. Late Shri Ram Ugrah Ji had that courage in generous measure. For close to four decades, his pen moved across the pages of Lucknow’s and New Delhi’s leading publications, turning the noise of Indian politics into something quieter, sharper, and often far more honest: a single-panel cartoon. He watched governments rise and stumble, watched leaders posture and retreat, and captured all of it not with anger but with an affection that only a true satirist can manage — the kind that wants the country to do better, and says so with a smile rather than a shout.
The Man behind the Memory
There is a particular kind of courage that belongs to people who make us laugh at the things we are usually too afraid, or too polite, to say aloud. Late Shri Ram Ugrah Ji had that courage in generous measure. For close to four decades, his pen moved across the pages of Lucknow’s and New Delhi’s leading publications, turning the noise of Indian politics into something quieter, sharper, and often far more honest: a single-panel cartoon. He watched governments rise and stumble, watched leaders posture and retreat, and captured all of it not with anger but with an affection that only a true satirist can manage — the kind that wants the country to do better, and says so with a smile rather than a shout.
Born in 1940, Ram Ugrah Ji came of age alongside a young republic still working out what it wanted to become, and he spent his working life chronicling that becoming. From the political churn of the 1970s onward, his cartoons appeared where readers looked first each morning, distilling complicated, often contentious developments into a few deft lines and a caption that lingered long after the newspaper was folded away. His body of work was eventually gathered into India: A Cartoon Chronicle, a compilation that reads today less like a scrapbook of old jokes and more like an alternative history of the nation — one drawn in ink instead of written in prose. He passed away in the United States in September 2014 at the age of 74, but the instinct he represented — to look at power honestly, and to do so with humour rather than hostility — is not the sort of thing that ages out of relevance.
Tributes to a Master Cartoonist
A Legacy Carried Forward
Honourable Mr. Prakash Gupta
Consul General of India in Seattle
It is fitting, then, that this competition exists because of his son. Prakash Gupta, IFS, an alumnus of CMS Station Road campus, has spent his own career in a rather different register of public life — as a celebrated diplomat of the Indian Foreign Service. He has represented India at the United Nations as Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Indonesia, held charge as Consul General in Shanghai, and went on to become the Founding Consul General of India in Seattle, establishing an Indian diplomatic presence there from the ground up. It would have been simple enough for a life this accomplished to look only forward. Instead, Mr Gupta chose to look back — to the classrooms of his own schooling, and to his father’s memory — and asked CMS to help keep both alive through the students who walk these corridors today. This competition is the result: not a distant tribute organised at arm’s length, but a living bridge between a cartoonist who questioned power through humour, a diplomat who has represented the nation with quiet dignity, and a new generation of students being invited to find their own voice on the page.
Cast Your Vote
Between 25th July and 31st August 2026, this space transforms into a vibrant gallery showcasing outstanding student work from across all CMS campuses.
Take a few moments to browse through the entries and cast your vote for a favourite. It takes hardly any time, yet it means the world to the student who created it. In doing so, you help carry forward a cherished family tradition and contribute to a wider national conversation that continues to inspire the next generation.
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Voting Window: 25th July 2026 – 31st August 2026 |
Cartooning, at its best, is an act of gentle honesty — the willingness to look at something difficult and find, within it, a reason to smile rather than despair. That was Ram Ugrah’s craft for the better part of his working life, and it is the inheritance his family now offers to the students of his son’s alma mater, City Montessori School.
Every pencil that touches paper for this competition carries a small piece of that inheritance forward. The invitation, this year as in every year to follow, is simple: look closely at the world, find its contradictions, and draw what you see.