Brahmadatt Shath Mishra.
ब्रह्मदत्त शठ मिश्र
That is his full name. Nobody uses it. The village calls him Tau. The internet calls him Tau Baklol. He answers to both, and corrects neither — a man who has stopped arguing with what people call him has more time for what people do.
Read the name carefully
Brahmadatt — "given by Brahma." A name his parents chose with hope. Shath — Sanskrit for a rogue, a trickster, the one who cannot be trusted to say the comfortable thing. A name the world confirmed later. Mishra — the surname of scholars.
So his full name is, quite literally, a warning printed on the label: god-given, mischief-inclined, dangerously well-read. The village shortened all of this to "Tau" — elder uncle — because that's what villages do to complicated things. And "Baklol" — fool — he picked up somewhere along the way and never bothered to put down.
Why would a scholar keep "fool" attached to his name? Because it's the oldest trick in the tradition — the court jester, Birbal, Kabir's उलटबांसी. The man who calls himself a fool buys the license to speak the truth. Wisdom announced is ignored; wisdom smuggled in under a joke gets all the way home before anyone checks the bag.
The mask is called Baklol. What's behind it does not blink.
The particulars
He is around sixty-five and lives in a village near Lucknow. He has spent plenty of time in the city — enough to know its manners, its markets, and its excuses — but he never moved. The city is a place he visits; the village is a place he is.
He holds a PhD, and he is a genuine scholar of literature — the reading shows in every second sentence. Ask him where he studied and you'll get the same answer everyone gets: "The degree came from a university. The education came from everywhere else." No one has extracted more than that, and at this point, no one tries.
Four languages live in him with equal rights: Urdu, Hindi, Awadhi and English. He quotes Ghalib and the Ramcharitmanas in the same breath, drops an English aphorism when it cuts cleaner, and lands an Awadhi proverb when the moment needs soil, not polish. Whichever language makes the line cut deepest is the one it gets said in.
Official File
- Full name
- Brahmadatt Shath Mishra
- Called
- Tau (by everyone)
- Alias
- Baklol (kept voluntarily)
- Age
- 65, give or take
- Address
- A village near Lucknow, U.P.
- Education
- PhD (institution: classified by Tau)
- Languages
- Hindi, Urdu, Awadhi, English
- Occupation
- Telling the truth, at a discount
- Weapon
- Courtesy
The two roots
Everything Tau says grows from two soils at once, and both are required.
Lucknow's tehzeeb
The "pehle aap" refinement. Tau is never rude — and that is precisely his sharpest weapon. The harder the jab, the more courteous the sentence carrying it. By the time you feel the knife, he's already offered you tea.
The village soil
Awadhi proverbs, examples from the fields, and the flat, unimpressed directness that strips city cleverness naked in one line. The village taught him that most complicated things are simple things wearing a suit.
The method
Tau's craft runs on one principle: courtesy opens the door, and the truth walks in behind it. He never insults anyone directly. He speaks with such respect that you only realize later where the cut landed — and by then you're laughing, which makes it very hard to file a complaint.
He is in no hurry. He speaks slowly, pauses before the punchline, and lets silence do half the work. Not everything he says is funny — some of it is pure philosophy with no punchline at all, and some designs under his name carry no words whatsoever. Where there are words, it's Tau's tongue. Where there aren't, it's still Tau's eye.
He speaks for nobody and belongs to no side. He watches, and he says what he sees — whether or not it goes down easy.
He says less. It lands harder.
What Tau will never do
- Never crude.No vulgarity, ever. It's against both his age and his tehzeeb — and the register turns cheap the moment it appears. His sharpest lines are his politest ones.
- Never cruel to the small.Tau's satire punches at power, pomp and pretence — never at the person who can't punch back.
- Never in a hurry.No shouting, no urgency, no manufactured outrage. Tau's weight lies in the fact that he does not come down from it.
- Never joking about grief.When something genuinely sad happens, the character steps aside and the human remains. One plain, true sentence — no wit.
- Never unverified.Every word published under Tau's name is manually reviewed and approved before it goes out. A machine can print anything; not everything earns the stamp.
Tau and the shop
Tau Baklol is the publishing house built around this one man — except its pages are t-shirts, mugs, posters and books. What sells is the line; the fabric is just an excuse to wear it. Tau's observations, couplets and definitions go out into the world daily, and the ones that stay with people long enough eventually get printed — so the audience itself decides what becomes a product.
People follow Tau the way earlier generations read a favourite columnist: not for the product, but to hear what the old man says today. The shop is simply where his best sentences go to live permanently.
Visit the shop →