A District Attorney in New York Arrested a Diplomat for Visa Fraud. You will Never Guess What Happened Next!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

The past few weeks have been really distressing for those of us who like to think of themselves as ‘Americaphiles.’ We have been betrayed, left saddened and made to feel unwanted by someone we used to fondly refer to as Uncle Sam. By arresting Devyani Khobragade for the crime of simply being an Indian, they have unintentionally let us know what they really think of us. And from where we’re sitting, it doesn’t look pretty.

Various interests group have turned Devyani Khobragade into a symbol of their pre-formed beliefs. To some, the furore over Devyani’s arrest seems like a representation of everything that is wrong with India’s elites. They declare that the reason the establishment is acting out is because someone dared to treat them like “a normal,” and not like the precious gift that they are. They proclaim that since most members of the elite have been allowed to get away with breaking the law in their own country, they don’t understand why another country wouldn’t accord them the same privilege. Being given special consideration is their birthright and they shall have it!

Of course, the people accusing the country’s decision making apparatus of overreacting couldn’t be more wrong. Obviously, the real symbol in the whole hullaballoo is Sangeeta Richards. She is what is wrong with the country. She did not for once think about all the things Devyani had done for her! Would anyone else have taken her to New York? I bet that Sangeeta was probably the first member of her family to even see the inside of an International airport. And Devyani provided her with everything! She didn’t even charge Sangeeta market rates for all the calls made to India. She just automatically deducted a small amount of money from Sangeeta’s salary. Not because Devyani couldn’t afford to pay for Sangeeta’s calls. Not at all! She was teaching her the value of money. How else would have Sangeeta learned how important money is since she probably spent her whole life without having much of it? Devyani also gave Sangeeta all her clothes that she wasn’t using anymore. Some of them were almost brand new, or worn only a couple of times. Do you think Sangeeta could afford a Dior? Ha! Not with what Devyani paid her, for sure! It is clear that Sangeeta did this for a green card. She saw all those buildings visible from Devyani’s New York residence and got greedy. If only Devyani hadn’t relaxed the ‘no going outside at all’ rule she had for Sangeeta out of the goodness of her heart, none of this would have happened.

The Americans made a huge mistake by arresting Devyani. They can deny us access to the mastermind behind one of the major terrorist attacks in our country. They can even invade the privacy of millions of our citizens and access all their private information. But, arresting one of our own for violating the rule of law in their country? That is taking things too far! I blame Preet Bharara, the District Attorney handling her case, for detonating this diplomatic time bomb. What sort of name is “Preet Bharara” anyway? What is he, an appetizer in an Indian restaurant in New York’s Meatpacking District? Although, one day, I’d really like to meet his twin brother, Preet Changezi. Is this how he treats a citizen from the country of his birth? After all we’ve done for Bharara! Sure, if his parents had stayed in India, he’d not have gotten most (or any) of the opportunities that he has had, but that is not the point! We gave him a name that is not only familiar but also sounds exotic at the same time. That must be come in handy during election time. We gave him a lifelong love of the law by ensuring that his actual place of birth was a lawless wasteland. We even gave him a huge vote bank of Americans of Indian origin by making certain that the only way they could be successful was to go to foreign shores. And this is how he repays us?

Mr. Bharara put Devyani in jail. With common criminals! Is this how they treat important people in the so-called ‘oldest democracy in the world?’ Maybe Mr. Bharara and his cohorts should come to India to learn how to treat people of stature who might be suspected of committing or have been convicted of committing a crime. We give them the respect they deserve and the resources they are used to. Make them feel like they’re not in jail, but at home. And we don’t let them mix with the riffraff in any circumstances. Regular jail is for people without any connection to someone important. Only an unpatriotic person would disagree with this arrangement.

So we did what we had to do to put the Americans in their place. We hit them where it really hurts! First we unfriended them on Facebook. Then, we cancelled their licences for importing liquor and afterwards, we got rid of all the barricades outside their embassy. That’ll teach them! Now, they will think twice before messing with us. Although, if it were up to me, I would have taken more stringent measures. Like putting up a huge statue of Edward Snowden giving the finger right opposite the US Embassy in New Delhi. We could force them to use only the Vodafone 3G network to try to access the internet. Or give them free tickets to an exclusive screening of the new hobbit movie, block all the exits once all of them are inside the theatre, and then play Dhoom 3 instead.

However, the most important and inspiring lesson of the series of events was lost in all the noise. And it is that as long as you know someone who matters, you can do anything you want. The world is literally your oyster.

And don’t you ever forget that.

Now please excuse me as I explain to my indentured servants why rising prices mean that their salaries would have to be cut in half.

No Country for Bold Men

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

If you’re a man of the world, you probably would have noticed that we’ve become a country that is losing its morals. Our children have been corrupted by the liberal media which in turn is being aided and abetted by dangerous foreign intelligence agencies whose sole aim of existence is to destroy our superior way of life. Also, don’t call me sexist, but the fact of the matter is that women don’t notice these things because they have all that make-up in their eyes. Therefore, it’s up to the all good, moral, upstanding male citizens of the country to uphold our traditions and stop the country from turning into the worst nightmare of our idol and mascot, Alok Nath.

We must remember that the enemy is smart and will try to seduce us into joining its ranks with things like ‘facts’ and ‘logic.’ However, we must pay no heed to such temptations and persist in our battle to bring back our country’s glorious days, so as to be able to finally make this India’s century. The problem is, nowadays, anyone who even tries to speak the truth gets shouted down by the droids of the liberal media, without even being given a chance to explain themselves. Recently, when - India’s premier ‘Shock Jock’ and man who was never hugged as a child because his parents thought withholding such useless niceties helps build character - Subramanian Swamy talked about the country’s gay citizens in a hateful manner, there was a lot of scorn heaped upon him. This is what our country has become! You can’t even dehumanize millions of people without being referred to as a ‘hater.’

What people don’t understand is that unlike homosexuality, being a hater is a choice. It’s an addiction. It’s like eating the whole cake that you  baked for the big party tomorrow even though you promised yourself that you would just have one piece. For a hater, every piece of cake represents a percentage of the population. You start with hating one group until you end up hating everybody. You keep telling yourself that you can stop anytime you want to, but finding a new group of people to detest for no discernible reason is the dragon you keep trying to chase.

* * *

Now, even though I personally find any human interaction outside of the bare minimum required to survive on this planet quite repellent, I do realize that not everyone is lucky enough to find companionship and fulfilment with a bottle of Jack Daniels. I get that there are some among us who possess an inexplicable need for human interaction. Some people even decide to voluntarily cohabitate with other like-minded individual(s). Whatever helps you sleep at night, buddy. I don’t judge! 

Nevertheless, I do judge those miserable individuals who make it their life’s work to spread some misery around by making life difficult for those who they consider to be different. Especially in our country where ‘tradition’ has become code for discrimination and ‘being orthodox’ is code for ‘people who are angry with the modern world and yearn for a time when their fear of the other was the law of the land.’

Most of the time, the reluctance of some people to accept same-sex relationships stems from them being afraid that it will encourage their own children to “choose that lifestyle.”  Their ignorance and bigotry is couched as concern for their children. All I want is for my children to be happy! No you don’t! All you want to do is make yourself happy. If you really cared for your child, you wouldn’t be forcing them to pretend to be someone they’re not. You’re okay with your offspring living with the same denial as you do because you feel embarrassed admitting to some stranger that your child does not resemble other people’s cookie-cutter children in any way.

The worst offenders, of course, are those who purport to be down with equal rights but make it all about themselves. They see other people as a one-dimensional construct and their support is tenuous and patronizing. What sort of gay man are you that you can’t even differentiate between ghost white and ivory? Did they make you leave your hometown in the North-East because you don’t play guitar? What self-respecting Punjabi doesn’t do the bhangra at a wedding?

This week, as we celebrate the fourth anniversary of the landmark judgement of the Delhi High Court that decriminalized human behaviour, we should remind ourselves that we still have a long way to go before we are able to achieve equality for all our citizens. This has been a banner year for gay rights throughout the world. Anytime a marginalized group of citizens are able to carve a space for themselves and make their life a little better, it is a victory for all of us. It means that we’re actually evolving into a better society, despite our best efforts to achieve the contrary.

Until, of course, the combination of quakes, tornadoes, floods and other natural disasters wipe out the human race from the face of the earth. .

Then we start again from scratch. 

You Know Who Else Was A Superpower?

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the most popular narratives of the late 90s/early aughts was the emergence of India as a candidate for this century’s “superpower.”
We were supposed to finally break the shackles of the past, realize our full potential, and take our natural place among the world’s most powerful countries. But then reality intervened and everyone realized that we weren't really ready for prime-time. However, despite being faced with a large amount of evidence to the contrary, the narrative still strangely persists.

We’re the ‘Ajit Agarkar’ of superpowers. The only reason we’re on the team is because someone with actual power pulled some strings to get us in. A real superpower shouldn’t have millions of malnutritioned children going to bed hungry every night. A real superpower shouldn’t have a complete electricity grid failure for more than half the country because some idiot overloaded the system by switching on his toaster. And the primary objective of a real superpower’s foreign policy shouldn’t be to get every country in the world to like them.

When someone says that they want their country to be a ‘superpower,’ what they’re trying to say is that they now want their country to be the world’s ‘decider.’ The sort of asshole country which tells other countries what to do and where they can stick their ‘sovereignty.’ What they mean is that they want to be the guy in the room who has the remote to the teevee and will continue to watch a documentary on the drainage system of the Aztec civilization even though everyone else wants to watch that show which has ‘everyday people’ eating bugs for money. 

What jingoistic patriots don’t realize is that being a superpower is not all that it is cracked up to be.

Superpowers have to keep fighting wars; even those which they have won. Did you know that there are still more than fifty thousand American soldiers stationed in Germany. Why? Probably just in case Germany gets that funny feeling in its stomach and wants to try to take over the world again. In India, we don't like wars. No, not because of the millions of lives that would be fruitlessly lost. No one cares about hippie things like “human lives” in our country. The reason we don't like wars is because they clash with the cricket season.

The various spy agencies of a superpower need to be powerful enough to engineer a coup in unstable countries. Our spy agencies can’t even organize a dinner party successfully.

Superpowers have huge empires. Do we really want to be like the people Tom Alter portrays everytime he is forced to speak Hindi with a bad accent? We’ve always maintained that our country doesn’t want someone else’s territory. We’re happy with what our Mama gave us. Plus, we satisfy all our colonial urges by acting like an occupying force in Kashmir and the North East.

Superpowers need a constant supply of straw enemies to keep a large portion of the country’s populace so terrified that the government could do anything in the name of national security. Okay, I’ll let you have that one.

The demise of empires like Ancient Greece, the Romans, Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, and the USSR are proof that no superpower stays on top forever. Being a superpower means spending a few years at the top and then eventually fizzling out. Being a superpower means penalising future generations by making them live in a country whose best days have passed but whose people still have delusions of grandeur. If superpowers were people, they’d be the 1983 Indian cricket world cup team - a bunch of has-beens hanging on to every last shred of glory for something which happened decades ago. Maybe it's because I never stayed in a hostel or participated in an NCC camp, but I don't see the point of playing the geographical version of "mine is bigger."

I’m not saying that we should burn all our weapons in a bonfire and invite all our neighbouring countries to hold our hands while we dance around the pyre singing ‘kumbaya.’ However, we could tread a saner yellow brick road. Maybe we could try being the superpower of space exploration (Think of all the “ring view” apartments in gated communities they can build on Jupiter!). We could try to be the superpower of not letting foodgrain rot in government warehouses. If we’re not expending all our energies enriching Israeli defence equipment companies, we could try to be the superpower that provides its citizens with quality healthcare (Most of our current healthcare plans involve asking people who cannot afford treatment to ‘walk it off’). We could even try to be the superpower of not trying to ruin the environment at such a rapid speed that mother earth finally loses her cool and cancels ‘the human race show’ forever.

Or we could just spend all day dreaming about punching China in the face.

It’s Hard Out There For A Bigot

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

On twitter, a person’s one line ‘bio’ is a great way to gauge how people look at themselves. If the first thing they mention is what they do for work, then they usually turn out to be the sort of people who like to be defined by things they do in a professional capacity.  Anyone calling themselves a ‘foodie’ is the kind of person who goes to a restaurant and orders the most exotic sounding thing on the menu. A person who refers to themselves in third person is the type of person you need to stay away from. Someone with a mildly amusing, self-deprecating one-liner in their bio wants you to think that they’re funny. And when someone’s twitter bio says that “they’re politically incorrect,” what they’re trying to tell you is that they like to say racist things out loud. I’m a bigot and I know it!

Recently, while giving a speech at a fundraiser in California, American President and the guy who plays god to thousands of people through his killer flying robots, Barack Obama, called the state’s Attorney General, Kamala Harris, “the best looking attorney general in the country.” It became the sexist compliment heard around the world and Obama apologized to Harris a couple of days later. The apology angered a lot of people (mostly men. Shocking!) who hate ‘feminazis,’ the ‘p.c. police’ and the ‘liberal media’ for brainwashing everyone into believing newfangled ideas like treating other people with respect and dignity. Ugh. What has the world come to? Why can’t we benevolently compliment a woman about her looks in a professional setting? What’s next, not being able to constantly stare at women we’re not related to, lecherously? Tyranny!

If you’re not part of a marginalized group then you might have a blind spot towards subtle forms of discrimination they face. Even today, a lot of women are told that their only job is to look pretty and sit on the side with the other women while the men discuss important business, sweetie. It is a symptom of the problem that even an accomplished professional like Kamala Harris-a rising star who is talked about as a future Gubernatorial candidate or a nominee for the US Supreme Court-cannot escape the epithet.

If you’re someone who grew up in the 90’s then you probably know someone who visited a foreign country and was asked where they park their elephants. (There was like one guy who was asked this question for real and then everybody else stole the anecdote and made it their own. That question was the “have you seen slumdog millionaire?”  of that era.) or if you’re the vice-president in multi-national company but a lot of people still come to you with their computer problems because you’re Indian and they assume that you’d be able to help them even though the only thing you know about technology is how to browse matrimonial websites. If these things piss you off, then so should the fact that one of the most powerful people in the world thought it was okay to add “. . . but but she’s so purty” to a colleague’s resume. When we do things like that, we’re reducing the vastness of the human experience to a single attribute.

Although, in India, we’ve got the act of reducing people to a single attribute down to a T. We’ve had lots of practice, over the years. We can glorify/demonize large groups of people just based on one common attribute they inadvertently share. We like to put people in a box and get confused when they don’t fit.

If you like to kvetch about being mistreated, then, you probably shouldn’t be doing that to other people either. For example: If the best joke you can make about someone is based on a regressive stereotype, then maybe “jokes” are really not your forte. Try to be a little creative, maybe? Or not. As the first of April proves every year, a large majority of us are just not funny. Ask your doctor if shutting the f**k up is right for you!

You don’t have to be respectful towards other people. You can be as obnoxious as you want! No one’s stopping you. But if you want to be taken seriously, then maybe you should try to treat people like, you know, people.

Except, of course, anyone from Chennai.

Because nothing good ever comes out of that shithole.

How Should a Woman Be?

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Over the past few months, many people in this country have been attempting to have a conversation about equal rights. Each time we start talking about how citizens belonging to a particular gender have been relegated to second-class status, the conversation gets hijacked by something trifle. However, on international women’s day, a few high-minded activists took to social media website twitter dot com to bring everybody’s focus back on perhaps the most important issue of our time: men’s rights.

For far too long women in this country have been manipulating the men into thinking that they are lesser beings. Men have been oppressed in this land of ours for centuries. Whether it was watching from the heavens as their wives voluntarily gave up their lives by forcing members of her family to throw her into her husband’s funeral pyre, or conning kings into marrying so many of them that the poor fellow had to suffer every man’s worst nightmare – having more than one mother-in-law. Over the last few decades, women have been trying to have it all by taking it away from the men. Not satisfied with letting their family elders choose which man they have to spend the rest of their life being subservient too, they now want to be the one taking all the decisions concerning their life. If women are allowed to decide what they want to wear or who they can be friends with or what time they want to return home, that would render religious leaders and judgemental senior citizens without anything to do.

That is why they all breathed a sigh of relief when during the discussion on the anti-sexual violence bill, the brave men in Parliament took a stand against criminalising every so called ‘harmful male behaviour.’ Just because some women let themselves be caught in compromising situations every now and then doesn’t mean that we have to penalize every man in this country. To paraphrase India’s premier icon of sexual desperation, Mahatma Bhagat: First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they realize that you won’t take no for an answer so they start running away from you. Then you chase after them because if women didn’t want men to sexually assault them, they wouldn’t have been doing provocative things like, you know, existing.

* * *

Recently, due to some unforeseen circumstances, I found myself at a fast-food “joint,” at 11p.m., ordering what I hoped was an edible pile of fried cholesterol. I noticed that a large crowd was present at the same venue. However, in one of the safest neighbourhoods in the city, at a time that wasn’t ‘too late in the night,’ there were no female patrons. And that’s one of the consequences of our delusional that victims of sexual crimes are ‘asking for it.’ Every time we hear about a horrific incident of sexual violence, some asshole will try to mansplain how the victim has to share some of the blame because she put herself in that situation. If only we’d have restricted more of the victim’s freedom, nothing like this would have ever happened!

This train of thought was the subtext of the discussion about the anti-sexual assault bill under consideration in our most important legislative body and winner of the Palme d'Or for the ‘Worst Advertisement about Democracy’, the Lok Sabha. Besides the victims themselves, the second biggest villain was the ever dependable ‘western culture.’ When in doubt, blame the west.

Damn you and your wretched hold over our minds, western culture! Pretty sure it’s western culture that makes people believe that women in this country don’t have a right over their own bodies. It’s probably western culture that makes people ruthlessly kill a new born when they don’t approve of its gender. It’s the cowardice evangelized by western culture that makes people in this country look the other way when they see sexual harassment taking place. If it wasn’t for the corrupt influence of western culture, no MP would have dared to rise up in parliament and give a rousing defence of criminal stalking.

None of our problems would have existed if we’d just followed Indian culture.

Now please excuse me as I’ve got to explain to a class full of teenage girls how our ancient traditions expect them to treat their future husbands like a God.

These Are the Days of Our Lives

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Somedays, it feels like we’re all living in a soap opera. No, not because we have a non-identical evil twin bent upon spending its whole life trying to destroy us –Hi Pakistan!–but because whoever is writing the story of our lives keeps using the same tropes and storylines. I’m guessing that the ‘god’ in charge of determining the direction of all our lives wrote one good thing – which he stole from a more deserving candidate anyway – and got promoted to Head of Operations (Asia Pacific) and now keeps making the same things happen again and again because that’s all he knows. Which suits us fine because we hate change anyway. We avoid it like we avoid the bubonic plague. We like to see movies with the same script. We prefer to elect politicians who make the same promises. We give our money to people who have cheated us before. We even cheer for the same team repeatedly hoping that this time they won’t disappoint us and will finally win the match, giving us the validation that comes from cheering for a bunch of people we have no personal connection to achieving an arbitrary goal. As they say: the millionth time is the charm!

A familiar trope that has been recycled more times than a gay joke at a bollywood awards show is the suppression of free speech. This is one storyline which brings with it a lot of ‘buzz.’ All you have to do is get one viewer to post a tweet and voila, you’re all over the newscycle.  No publicity is bad publicity, right? Currently, this storyline is being used for the ponytail loving cult leader called Arindham Chaudhari. This character suffers from what people in the medical profession call a classic case of ‘being an Indian whose orders must be compulsorily followed by a few minions due to unavoidable circumstances.’  He’s paranoid (the IIM mafia is out to get me), narcissistic (refers to himself in third person), misstates facts (free laptop!) and suffers from delusions of grandeur (gives himself grandiose titles which don’t mean anything outside the confines of his diploma shop). Like so many other characters on the show, Chaudhari misused the law put in by the government to make it easier for people who have something to hide to censor all criticism. What else can you expect from a character whose megalomania even outdoes last year’s breakout star, Mamta Banerjee. Not to be outdone, Ms. Banerjee has begun to bring back the focus on herself by ramping up the craziness quotient of her antics from ‘this is terrible but hilarious’ to ‘can we airlift everyone but her from West Bengal?’ In fiction, usually, things don’t end well for such characters who are on a trajectory of a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. But in our world, the only people who suffer from consequences are those who are trying to do the right thing.

This week’s ‘bharat bandh ’ special episode would have been a  flop if at the last minute goons from various political parties hadn’t bullied people into enacting a ‘spontaneous protest.’ It’s the thought that counts, even if the thought appeared in your brain once you saw someone else not thinking the same thing getting punched in the face.

For the next fortnight, we will have to also sit through the reruns of ‘Parliament Adjourned.’ These are broadcast so frequently because they are the easiest to produce. All they have to do is record a bunch of people rushing to the ‘well of the house’ while shouting indiscriminate slogans for ten minutes while the speaker tries to silence them with her vulcan death stare failing which she rolls her eyes and ends the session. They get this footage on the first day of every term and put it on loop for the next five years.

But the storyline I can’t bear to follow anymore is the one in which they declare a curfew in Kashmir and cut off their access to the rest of the world. I am so bored of that! Just because we keep treating them like they’re our colony doesn’t mean we have to keep hearing about how we’re denying them their fundamental rights. Why can’t they stop crowding the streets and turn their angst at being treated like prisoners in their own home into art? Hell, I know I’d be more sympathetic to their cause if one of them made a nifty graphic novel which showed the day to day indignities they have to suffer through. They need to realize that if it wasn’t for our stabilising influence, they’d descend into chaos.

Now, where have I heard that one before?

The Times They Are A-Changing

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

When the grand mufti of Kashmir heard about Pargaash, an all girl rock band from Kashmir, he was livid. A woman following her passion? Who does she think she is, a man with enough money or power to buy off any threat of religious persecution? He then issued a ‘fatwa’ directing the band to quit, an instruction which was promptly followed. “Our tradition doesn’t allow it,” he whimpered. ‘Tradition,’ of course, is a polite word for saying that one should be ‘acting like an idiot for no logical reason.’ You mean the only reason I shouldn’t be doing this because thousands of years ago, some superstitious asshole wrote something down on paper-like material with a quill pen? Okay, that totally makes sense! Going to take all the important decisions of my life according to the ‘Five Point Someone’ of 102 B.C. What could go wrong?

We don’t send tweets to each other through birds, even though they were its traditional carriers. We don’t need to digest a billion ‘traditional’ herbs to cure a headache anymore. We don’t even need to rub two stones together to make a fire when we can use an overcharged phone battery. However, we insist on listening to a person barely educated in anything-other-than-religious-dogma on how we should live our lives, even though most of their edicts are – traditionally – pulled out from where the sun doesn’t shine. For example, do you remember a time god threatened to burn the earth down because of a really wicked rock band? Yeah, me neither. Hey, if he didn’t banish the group ‘Nickelback,’ to an eternity of hellfire and brimstone, then all the other bands are quite safe from his wrath.

Yet, the one thing the grand poobahs of all religions agree on is that we must strive to preserve gender roles forever, because it makes it easier to determine whom to discriminate against. It’s not misogynist if it’s written in the book! Stop complaining. What are you, a girl? Their basic grouse with the modern world is its snail-like journey towards equality. They are nostalgic for a time when men were men and women knew their place. Like during the stone age when men were gruffly, emotionless neanderthals who had the fashion sense of Tarzan and the wit and charm of the great Khali, and they ate anything they wanted to without even cooking it or washing it in boiled water (or as we call it in India, ‘Chinese food’). Meanwhile, the women stayed home in the cave combing their armpit hair while waiting for their man to bring home the uncooked bacon.

This discrimination also manifests itself in our culture of masculinity. We like our men to be like our most popular motorcycle: cheap, loud and using the same design since the Second World War. A ‘manly man’ must never drop his guard. If he makes one wrong move they can revoke his man card. It can be something as small as drinking the wrong beer or driving an SUV in a mountainous region while wearing a seat-belt. It can even be something simple like washing his hands before eating that can get him disqualified. And watching any teevee program whose description requires the use of more than one syllable qualifies him for instant self-deportation from Manlymanville. One would imagine that someone who wants to be perceived as a strong person with a will of steel wouldn’t be so subservient to society’s orthodox diktats. Turns out, the people who pretend to be the strongest always turn out to be the most afraid and paranoid.

We also like our government to be manly. We don’t like it when sissified college graduates lead them. An ‘education’ weakens you because it makes you do all those girly things like ‘thinking’ and ‘caring about consequences.’ Real leaders listen to their guts and only communicate in grunts and head nods. Diplomacy is for countries without a nuclear weapon arsenal! Why doesn’t our government just grow a pair and knead other governments in theirs? Man up and kill all those people whose mere existence makes us wet our pants.

Limiting your life to conform to other people’s expectations is an idea whose time has long passed its expiration date. We can only have real equality when people start looking at each other as individuals and a person’s gender won’t trap them into a life they don’t want. Being who you are is going to be the new normal. 

Now please excuse me while I spend the rest of the day learning how to make a sandwich.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Free Speech

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Most of the time, whenever someone talks about supporting free speech in this country, they always end up following it with a qualifier. “I’m all for free speech, but we need to have some restrictions!” Even the constitution does the same thing. You can have freedom of speech and expression, but within reasonable restrictions. And that’s where the problem begins, when we leave those ‘reasonable restrictions’ up for interpretation. With each successive generation, the ‘reasonable restrictions’ keep expanding while the space for free speech & expression keeps getting narrower. You can take a walk in this park and get some fresh air, as long as you also breathe in all the toxic smoke coming in from the factory next to it.

This has been a banner year for all the free speech restrictionists. Whether it involves preventing writers from speaking at literary festivals, or stopping artists from displaying their wares. They even managed to turn something as mundane as posting something on the internet into an act of civil disobedience. Free speech is one of those things which are defined by absolutes. Either speech is free or it’s restricted. When you add a qualifier, it’s an invitation for other people to do the same.

The Internet has been one of the biggest battlefields in the war on free speech. Recently, when a couple of young adults were arrested for posting harmless updates on Facebook, the Minister of Communication and ‘India’s nanny,’ Kapil Sibal, said that he was quite saddened by the misuse of the IT act. He was shocked that a law put in specifically to suppress dissent, was being used to suppress dissent. That’s like putting a ‘for rent’ sign outside your house and then wondering where all the prospective tenants came from. He didn’t start the fire, he just wrote a vague piece of legislation which could be widely interpreted and misused even by those who apply the law using the most stringent standards. When you don’t trust another party with the law you’ve made, then there is something wrong with your law. You don’t leave the door to the henhouse wide open and then get to pretend that you could never even imagine that the fox would go inside.

People like Dr. Eyebrows would like you to believe that the internet is one huge quagmire of filth from which they need to protect the innocent and the impressionable. They portray the internet as some huge lawless wasteland where anything goes; a wild, wild west where duels are fought by drowning your opponent in a quick stream of sarcasm and won by the first person to be compared with Hitler. They don’t use the internet themselves so they imagine it to be somewhat of a virtual Bangkok where temptation lurks in each corner.

What they conveniently miss is the Internet’s ability to correct itself. Most of the properties in this so called wasteland are owned by huge corporations whose interest resides in removing malicious content. Even Reddit, the ‘Uttar Pradesh’ of the internet, has removed content deemed inappropriate or malicious.

Of course our elected representatives are not big on discussions. They spend all their life shouting over each other, whether in Parliament or on teevee.

But what about us?

Free speech doesn’t just involve being able to say what you want. It also means being able to say what you want without being intimidated to take it back. It involves being able to write a book without being placed on the wrong side of an angry mob. Free speech means being able to question a national celebration of death without being questioned about your patriotism. It involves being able to have a character in your movie call a city by any name you want. Free speech means not throwing a tantrum on national teevee because someone on the internet was mean to you. It involves being able to hear things you don’t like, no matter how angry it makes you. Free speech means keeping all your ‘hurt sentiments’ to yourself.

I, for one, think that people need to be more tolerant of other’s opinions.

Hey, if you don’t believe me, ask all the people I blocked on twitter.

A Tale of Two Thackerays

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Last week, the country lost a man of great influence. A man who ended up changing the politics of his home state forever. A man who didn’t need to win an election to make the government apparatus bend to his diktats. But enough about Ponty Chadha!

In a just world, the demise of such an important man would be all everyone would focus on. However, if you turned on the teevee, all you heard about was the death of an old, obscure politician called Bal Thackeray. News anchors couldn't stop talking about how great this man was.  Even Arnab Goswami, who shows his independence by interrupting politicians of all political parties, suspended his usual persona to show us his gentle side. You could see that he was holding back his own tears while he was talking about the passing of this great messiah. After all, this was the person on whom Arnab had based the character he plays every night on India’s #1 variety comedy show, Times Newshour. In fact, perhaps for the first time in its history, everyone on Indian television seemed to be in agreement that the country had indeed lost its most magnanimous leader. Perhaps such a tragedy merits such unifying gestures. Even the members of the Hindi Film Industry – a group of people who cannot even agree on a name for their industry – were steadfast and united in their praise for the departed. The last time India had been united like this, Emperor Ashok was earning his stripes and establishing his candidacy for lending his name to the National Emblem. If there was any doubt to his greatness, would millions of people gathered for his funeral? If there is anything history has taught us it’s that if millions of people worship a person, he can never be evil.

I then realized that I should get out of my ignorant stupor and use the Google machine to find out more about such a dear leader. But I was shocked and astounded! There was no mention of the Bal Thackeray everyone was talking about on teevee. But there was lots of information about another person named Bal Thackeray, who lived in Mumbai too and wasn’t the omnipotent force for good that the our Bal Thackeray was. In fact, I couldn’t find any information about the original Bal Thackeray. The person Pritish Nandy called one of his ‘finest friends’ with whom he could always enjoy great conversation along with a warm glass of beer and whose death made Lata Mangeshkar feel orphaned. Someone seemed to have scrubbed all the archives of the news reports which point towards the contributions made by the original Bal Thackeray to the development of the country that his supporters evangelize about.

Though I must admit that reading about what Bal Thackeray’s namesake had been upto was quite a horrifying experience. He appears to have used Balasahab’s name to create a boilerplate for anyone who wants to rule through hatred and fear. Start by creating ‘an other’ by misleading a large group of people (united only through a single attribute which they share due to the accident of birth) into believing how their share of happiness is being stolen by another large group of people (united only through an attribute which they share due to the accident of birth). Pretend to be the messiah who will save them from this group and their usurping tendencies. Beat some members of the villainous group but do nothing to help your so-called own people.  Insulate yourself from any criticism by convincing people that anyone who dares to question you is insulting not only the proud traditions of your people, but is spitting on the legacy of the great ancient king himself and must be put down like the diseased-ridden animal they are. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Bal Thackeray is not dead. He will live through every instance of an innocent teenager being arrested for daring to share his opinion on the Internet. He will live through each time a mob ransacks a home/office/clinic because they didn’t like what the people residing/working there said. He will live through every work of art which is prevented from being shown to the public because it hurt someone’s made up sentiments. He will live through every filmmaker who goes to the house of a politician with an apology for their supposed transgression and a request to call off their goons.

Bal Thackeray made sure Gotham city will always have a Bane.

Along with a lot of dark nights.

Dude, Where’s My Patron?

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As the festival of lights screeched its way into the calendar like a rogue firecracker, the city of Delhi got ready to say goodbye to the scorching summer and welcome the wavering winter by decking up its houses in different shades of lights. The ones belonging to minimalists were decorated like they were being prepared for a showroom opening, the dreamers had decorated their houses like they were characters out of a YashRaj movie and the large dwellings housing the extra enthusiastic were decorated with enough lights to power an entire solar system.

Of course, winter in Delhi also means another seasonal session of Parliament. Our MPs get together for a few days next month for another epic wastage of taxpayer money. Recently, we were provided with a preview of things to come when the leader of the opposition and potential prime ministerial candidate (pro tip: if a member of the BJP is able to breathe, then they’re a Prime Ministerial candidate) gave a speech specifying her legislative priorities. If on any day of the session her party sticks around for more than ten minutes before rushing to the ‘well of the house',’ she plans to introduce bills penalising those who dare to defy her religion by referencing names of mythological characters in movies and on teevee. She also talked about protecting cows from being slaughtered. The last time she was in the news for strongly advocating a policy position, she had demanded that the Bhagavad Gita be made the national book, after a small court in Siberia was entertaining a petition to ban it. Seems like she really has her pulse on the important issues of the day!

Now, Mrs. Swaraj is neither joining PETA nor appearing on the cover of Vogue wearing a saffron fedora anytime soon. These are the issues she talks about because she knows that these are the sort of issues that are going to get people to talk about her. She has to be seen doing something! You think talking about child malnutrition or illiteracy is going to get her on prime-time? She knows her constituency well. They’re going to be quite happy that she’s pissing off the asshole secularists by trying to legislate a belief that exists solely because some dude said something hundreds of years ago. Holy foolproof argument, batman!

Anyway, we don’t elect our politicians to lead. We elect them to be patrons. We want extra gas connections, free colour teevees and subsidised prices. Get your 'sound economic policies’ off my lawn.

We don’t need a government run by professionals who know what they’re talking about. That is why we ended up with an environment minister who thought global warming was a hoax and a health minister who thought that late night teevee was the best method of birth control. We’re happy enough if the government is being run by someone with whom we can establish some sort of kinship. Like in UP, where the two main parties spend all their time in government avenging “their people.” One of the first thing Mayawati does after taking office is to transfer anyone with the last name ‘Yadav’ holding positions of consequence in the police or the bureaucracy to posts which are considered as ‘punishments,’ replacing them with her people. Then whenever Mulayam wins back power, one of the first things he does is to transfer those people back. 

Elected officials - whether they are in the ruling party or the opposition, whether they are an MP, MLA ,a member of the municipal corporation or local panchayat - can do a lot to change the lives of their constituents. But most of our elected officials are not there to do real things. They have favours to payback and coffers to fill. If they spend their time in office learning about the issues that actually affect people, when will they find time to earn enough kickbacks to be able to pay for the next election campaign?

And no one really bothers to burden our ‘lawmakers’ by asking them questions about policy. The latest ‘comeback kid’ of Indian politics, amateur comedian Laloo Prasad Yadav has been getting lots of coverage lately. Most of the articles focus on the fact that he’s making jokes at his rallies again, which, for some reason, translates into him becoming a strong contender to win back the state! Having lost a number of elections doesn’t mean that Prasad has to now offer specific solutions to people’s problem. That would be silly thing to do! Instead, he has generously offered to award the chief ministerial post to a member of any caste, should he win the next election. Who wouldn’t like to elect such a progressive leader?

Now please excuse me while I courier my local MP my proposed thousand page draft bill that bans the use of the word “chillax.”

Let’s just hope he can read?

Another One Bites The Dust

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As the lights dimmed and he headed back to his ‘make-up’ room, he looked back once again to the stage to see the last remnants of his dignity. He had just done a scripted-to-look-impromptu dance with a former leading lady who appeared on his show to promote her comeback movie. He used to be the biggest superstar in the country and now he has to suffer a thousand indignities everyday being a circus monkey for people he wouldn’t even have looked at when he was at the peak of his career. People who only are allowed to appear on his show because he needs them. His first teevee show gave the channel enough ratings to keep them on the top for a decade. Now, to attract a decent audience, he needs to use people with sad stories to sell as a crutch. His father was right: if you want people to stop caring about you, grow old.

One of the most popular tropes on twitter among people who don’t have anything funny or original to say is to make a ‘joke’ about someone in the news being a contestant on Bigg Boss. This sort of came true last week when commode enthusiast and alleged cartoonist Aseem Trivedi became a contestant on that show. Because the best way to fight injustice is to participate in a show famous for playing psychotic mind games with its contestants and is moderated by a man whose career is dedicated to making bullying seem kitschy-cool! Trivedi made so much noise about being in jail and when he was freed he voluntarily entered a large compound in which he, along with other inmates, has to follow a rigid set of rules – which if broken invite their own set of penalties, receive food rations barely enough for sustenance, and can only exit when asked to do so by a presiding authority. Well played! Seems like all our modern messiahs want to do is become famous enough to get on teevee.

Of course, in India, the shortest route to fame - other than leading a vague protest against the government’s policies - is to become a contestant on a reality show. We love the people on reality shows! Sure, we forget about them the minute the current season of the show ends, but electing a proper Indian Idol is more important than electing a proper government.

And we have a whole spate of reality shows to choose from! You have your regular talent shows, in which people who didn’t succeed in their actual chosen profession select people who are going to fail in theirs. Nowadays, most of these shows have turned into a contest to determine who is more poor and desperate. Will you vote for the grocery vendor from a village without electricity situated deep inside the Himalayan mountains whose parents have to trek 200 kilometres just to catch a glimpse of their only offspring on teevee or would you vote for the orphan from the streets of the badlands of UP who survived famine, caste war, family feuds, dacoit recruitment officers and Anu Malik’s poetry to reach the finale. Why wouldn’t you help them achieve their lifelong dream of winning a show that didn’t exist until a month ago, you monster? Some shows also feature celebrities – and by celebrities I mean anyone who might have appeared in a movie or television show or had their photo appear in the newspaper that one time  – dancing and singing away, shamelessly asking their ‘fans’ to vote for them. Perhaps the only thing more pathetic than contestants on reality shows assuming that they have fans is people on twitter assuming that those who follow them actually give a crap about which first world problem prevented them from sharing their bon mots with the rest of the world. Even the scripted banter on these shows is more banal and cliché ridden than Ravi Shashtri’s commentary.

Then there are a zillion ‘crime shows’ which portray crude dramatizations of real-life incidents while the anchor pops in after every scene to give a very serious monologue requiring very serious background music. Judging by the ratings of these shows, it seems India really loves watching ‘people like us’ suffer fatal consequences for bad decisions.

The worst of the lot are those interchangeable ‘youth-centric’ shows. Their basic conceit is to humiliate everyone involved in the show on national television. A whole generation has been brought up watching these shows, confusing notoriety with fame. Possessing a real talent has been replaced by possessing an ability to bully, cajole, outwit or seduce. Bonus points if you get bleeped every two seconds.

Perhaps that is going to be this generation’s teevee legacy: a bunch of illiterate people shouting the f-word at each other, completely devoid of any context.

It’s the law, stupid!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Ever since Mumbai’s latest self-appointed moral guardian, ‘Herr Inspektor’ Vasant Dhoble started his blitzkrieg to rid Mumbai of unsympathetic scum like people trying to have an overpriced drink, he has been heralded as a pioneer. Look, someone is finally doing something! Someone brave enough to apply the law! Stop waiting and make him Prime Minister already! Those who support Supreme Commander Dhoble and Brigade of the Righteous are upright citizens who believe in the rule of law and those who don’t are probably know-nothing elitists who hate democracy, freedom and punishing criminals.

In Maharashtra, possession, consumption or transportation of alcohol without a permit is illegal and can invite a fine up to fifty thousand rupees and/or a prison sentence for up to five years thanks to the Bombay Prohibition Act, 1949. In some states, you cannot keep more than two litres of liquor in your house. You cannot bring a copy of the Satanic Verses into the country because of a customs ban. Doordarshan has repeatedly used provisions of the Indian Telegraph Act 1865 to claim its right to broadcast all important sporting events in the country. In 2010, the Indian government used a provision of the IT act - which allows it to ban websites that threaten “the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence and security of the state” or that endanger “friendly relations with foreign states” – to briefly block an adult website displaying pornographic images in cartoon form. A website which displayed cartoons against corruption was refused hosting privileges by a service provider after a complaint by an official from the crime branch.

Yet, like good, obedient members of the proletariat, we have been led to believe that the police are not trying to harass us, they’re just doing their job. It’s the law, stupid! If only the law wasn’t structured in such a way, the police would not have to arrest you under sub-section Fuck(U) of the What You Looking At Punk Act, 1860.

The problem here is not just the bad laws in our books. It’s also the careful selection of which laws to enforce. Using the example of the raids conducted by the Right Honourable Captain Dhoble, how did those places skirting the law exist in the first place? Did they exist in a parallel dimension not hereto visible to honest, non-self serving police officers? Did they follow each and every law in the books in its letter and spirit until the day they were suddenly raided? What about raiding those people in the government who benefited from the very establishments who were allowed to function despite violating the law? Why aren’t those people paraded in front of news cameras for teevee viewers to cast their judgement on and tut-tut at the deploring state of morality in the country? It’s easy to bully juice vendors with hockey sticks. What about those establishments which flout a lot of laws but are spared because they are either owned by the politicians in power or by people close to them?

As anybody who has tried to run a business in this country will tell you, the law is structured in such a way that even if everything is in order you will be violating some asshole provision or the other. They will always find a loophole. A few weeks ago, I was at a popular market in Delhi when it was being raided by officials from a government department. These officials received ‘gift vouchers’ from all the shops in the market. As the owner of one of the shops later explained to me, if your papers are not in order, you pay fifty thousand rupees. If your papers are in order, you pay five thousand. You cannot conduct business in this country without having to give a bribe at one stage or the other. Anybody who thinks that should sign up for my very profitable home business in which all you have to do is sell some exclusive world class products and recruit lots of other people to do the same and then sit back and watch the money roll in and no it is not a pyramid scheme why do you ask?

We’ve had various law commissions over the decades who have recommended removing the old laws from the books. Some of these laws are older than AK Hangal! And yet they persist. They do so because they’re part of our government-industry complex. You’re going to have to take away those laws from the cold, retired hands of all those officers from the various government departments who have ‘invested’ a lot of money to be transferred to lucrative posts. The law is blind; and for those who can afford it, it’ll play dumb too.

Those who think just repealing the laws will fix the problem, please pick a number and get in line. A concerned official will be with you shortly.

Meanwhile, there are some exclusive products we would like to show you . . .

If you don’t read this article, I’m going to punch you in the face

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As students submit applications to institutions in which they will spend the next few years learning about things which will leave them woefully unprepared for adult life (or as it is otherwise known as, ‘college’), our whole offense economy is gathering itself to spend most of next month frothing in the mouth about ragging. Yes, ragging. The cutesy term we give to the event in which college seniors compensate for their imagined masculinity by trying to humiliate their newly-arrived juniors.

When it started, many decades ago, it was probably really about breaking the ice and getting to know each other. A privilege the seniors assumed they had over their juniors, who in turn could assume the same privilege when they became seniors. It degenerated to such an extent that some juniors started killing themselves because of the humiliation they suffered. That is because we’re Indian, when we get a privilege, we have to overuse it. Look, free drinks, let’s drink so much that we lose all our senses and hit on the hosts’ wife. So, the sign outside the restaurant said ‘All you can eat.’  Those idiots may think of it as a marketing slogan, we think of it as a challenge.

The mêlée of people at the receiving end of the objections may also be confused because we are a culture which seems to be at home with bullying. People have objections to what other people are doing all the time and make it their life’s work to make them comply. Anybody who gets an opportunity to bully other people in this country is going to take it. We consider being able to forcibly exert control over people a virtue. We’re okay with someone being a bully as long as they can explain it with warped logic. I just spotted a woman in a pub. Why is she here and not at home learning 18 different ways to make brinjals from her mother? I don’t see her father or brother around her! Let us sexually harass her and put some shame into her. Along with our penises, of course!

We always ‘feel free’ to tell other people how to live their life. Fat people should be thin! Divorced people should be married! Poor people should be rich! Children should never be tired! Gay people should just be straight! Brown people should be white! And white people, ZOMG! CAN I KISS THE GROUND YOU”RE CURRENTLY WALKING ON? And we accept this like its holy gospel! We even teach our children from the day that they are born. Being yourself is never good enough. You need to be better. Even if you are terribly unhappy, you are not supposed to do anything. Just stay there and pray! Show the other cheek! When that turns red from pain too, take off your pants and show your other two cheeks. No, don’t try to fight back. Gandhi would not have approved.

Old people can impose their own agenda on the young because it is our culture. Listen to your elders, even if they are assholes! Police officers who want to be the big-man-on-campus will raid a party full of teenagers and call it a rave. Look how successfully I am protecting your city by arresting a bunch of harmless kids drinking beer! Members of one community will bully members of another community just because they can. Making other people bend to your wishes is a value we hold very dear in this country. It doesn’t matter whether the person is different from us because of his religion, caste or the pastry shop he frequents. As long as he is not ‘one of our own,’ he or she is fair game. In fact, instead of the ‘Ashok Chakra,’ our national emblem should be a portrait of a guy going into a restaurant while the text in the thought bubble above him says “I’ll have what he is having. No, really. Take it away from him and give it to me. Thanks in advance.”

We don’t mind cutting off other people while on the road. Or skipping queues. The right to skip huge queues is probably enshrined in the constitution, though only for those who can afford it. Doctors can bully patients because, they studied for ten years to get here, and they don’t have time to be nice to you. Companies can bully their customers, because what are you going to do? Fire us? Ha! They are so many of you it doesn’t matter if we lose a few. Event organizers make things as difficult as they can for all the fans who managed to buy those overpriced tickets. Just because we promise something, doesn’t mean we have to fulfil it. If you want a good concert experience, go to a different country where even though they will look at you like you’re going to blow them up, they will still treat you better than your own countrymen. And we assuage ourselves, that it is okay to do this! If we don’t be ruthless with other people, they will be ruthless with us.

Even a lot of our sources of entertainment subliminally enforce this message. Most of our popular television reality shows are about people submitting themselves to being harassed and mentally tortured just for a chance at their fifteen minutes of fame. Even though fame is not kind to the people who are unfortunate enough to marinate in it, but everybody wants to be famous. So that they can too be celebrated for being mean to other people.

Now please excuse me while I go and fire the household help for daring to establish eye contact.