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  Rage targets: Yogendra Yadav with ink on his face; (above) a TV grab of a shoe hurled at P. Chidambaram

Angry kya? Then how about expressing your outrage in time-tested ways? Nothing leaves a lasting imprint quite like a slap or good old footwear. And if the pen doesn't work, try ink. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Yogendra Yadav would vouch for its hard-to-shake off blot.

Across India, people who are bugged with politicians are picking up their own arms — from shoes to garlands made out of slippers or ink. Last week, an irate member of the public threw ink at Yadav at a rally in Delhi. He may or may not have been encouraged by another serial protestor who smeared ink over Sahara chief Subrata Roy's face earlier this month.

In recent years, several politicians have been manhandled in public. The trend of chucking shoes probably got a boost with the much televised 2008 incident when an Iraqi reporter threw his shoe at then US President George Bush.

Four months later, Jarnail Singh, a Delhi journalist, hurled a boot at the then home minister P. Chidambaram at a press conference, angry that the minister had seemingly given a clean chit to Congress leaders allegedly involved in 1984's anti-Sikh violence.

Sometimes, acts such as these lead to unexpected perks. Singh has been given a Lok Sabha ticket by the Aam Aadmi Party to contest from West Delhi in the coming Lok Sabha elections.

Others, however, get jail terms. While Yadav did not want to press charges against the man who defaced him, Harvinder Singh, who slapped Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and former telecom minister Sukhram, had a stint in jail and a mental hospital.

'I am mentally disturbed if that means caring for my country, enough to take action,' Singh says on a Facebook page named Harvinder Singh/The man who slapped Sharad Pawar, which has been lying dormant since December 2012.

Psychiatrists put such erratic behaviour down to explosive brain chemistry. 'It could result from impaired thinking or the inability to ordinate impulses or thoughts,' says Dr Rupali Shivalkar, who treated Utsav Sharma, the young man who slashed the face of Dr Rajesh Talwar, in jail for murdering his daughter Arushi.

But the trend of public humiliation is not a new one. Maharasthra, it seems, is particularly volatile. Some years ago, former minister Arun Shourie had his face blackened in Pune by a group of Dalit agitators protesting against his views on B.R. Ambedkar. Years earlier, Anil Gote, a legislator from Dhule district in northwest Maharashtra, made news when he slapped a minister.

'I too made history,' boasts Gote.

In 1972, Gote, who was a journalist with a Marathi daily, slapped Haribhau Vartak, Maharashtra's minister for food and civil supplies. It was the year of a terrible drought, and Gote had reported a starvation death in Ahmednagar district, causing a ruckus in the state Assembly.

But real hell broke loose when Gote met Vartak at the secretariat. When the minister rubbished his story, Gote presented a touchy analogy to argue his case. 'I told him that it was like accepting his father as his mother's husband, but not as his biological father. He then called me a ba^%$#d,' says Gote, who then admits to slapping him twice. 'The minister has died but history is alive,' he says.

Kanti Dhulla, a former Congress corporator, cringes these days when he sees MPs shouting and hurling missiles in Parliament, but does not regret spitting paan juice in 1987 at three rival Shiv Sena corporators — one of whom, Narayan Rane, become the chief minister of Maharashtra in 1999.

After a fist fight broke out in the well of what was then the Bombay Municipal Corporation over remarks about Indira and Rajiv Gandhi made by Shiv Sena members, Dhulla told a group of Shiv Sena MLAs that they were not even worth his spittle — 'main tum jaise logon pe thukega bhi nahin' — and gave in to their dare by spraying them with red paan juice.

'They wouldn't understand any other language,' says Dhulla. 'Besides, we were 37 Congress councillors, heavily outnumbered by 100 Shiv Sena members. They would not have heard me peacefully.'

Within a couple of days, every floor of the corporation building had a 'No Spitting' sign, he laughs.

Dhulla, who defected to the Shiv Sena in 2000, fondly recalls how Bal Thackeray jokingly asked him, 'Tu majhyavar thunknar nahin na (I hope you won't spit on me)?'

It wasn't just spraying betel juice that Dhulla excelled in. He threw a paperweight at Divakar Raote of the Shiv Sena, who was the BMC standing commissioner chairman, during a heated debate over an alleged garbage disposal scam a year later. 'It only grazed him, but we both went to the neighbouring Azad Maidan police station and filed complaints against each other,' he says.

Those under attack, however, take a dim view of such assaults. 'The attacker may get his two minutes of fame because of the media, but eventually it is the attacker who gets labelled a coward or frustrated soul,' says social activist Swami Agnivesh, whose controversial remarks on the Amarnath shrine lingam earned him a much viewed slap by Mahant Nityanand Das, the chief priest of a temple in Nadiad, Gujarat, in May 2011. A year later, he was roughed up by the right-wing Sanskriti Bachao Manch members at a public meeting in Bhopal.

But while Agnivesh says he has publicly forgiven his attackers at both the events, he adds that he was 'hurt' when Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, who were present with him, did not speak out.

In October that year, it was Kejriwal's turn to face the people's wrath. A slipper was flung at him at a meeting in Lucknow. He's said to have urged the construction company that sacked the attacker to re-employ him.

Many believe that the best way to treat such attacks is by not taking them seriously. George Bush played down the incident by jokingly referring to the size — 10 — of the shoe that now sits in a museum housing an obscure collection in an abandoned freight elevator in Manhattan.

But in the sometimes deceptive calm of villages, missiles could permanently dent victims. In Yavatmal, chilli powder was stuffed into the eyes of Sunita Agam, a village panchayat member who had protested against budgetary discrepancies and the purchase of alcohol with gram panchayat funds in 2009.

Public ire can take all forms — from the absurd to the fatal. But the most dreaded form is not a boot, but being booted out of a constituency. You may see some of that in May this year.