Wanted: A CEO for the Central Board of Film Certification

(After we discovered that the new CBFC CEO walked straight out of a teevee soap opera set in a tiny village in Northern India, we asked our sources to find out how this happened. After all, if there is anyone who stands up for liberal values and an artist’s right to express themselves, it’s the Central Board of Film Certification. Our source sent us the following job listing posted at ActualHumanMonster.com by the CBFC to fill the position.)

Situation Wanted

Seeking a self-motivated, highly capable candidate who loves to seek new challenges.

Candidate must have loads of free time on his or her hands. Former government bureaucrats will be given preference. If he or she hasn’t worked for the government, candidate must show job experience where they have been needlessly mean and condescending to people for no reason whatsoever.

Candidate should have no self-awareness. Should have no qualms in forcing his or her own worldview onto other people. Candidates who blame the state of the world today on young people without any irony whatsoever will be given preference. Under no circumstances should the candidate even try to think ‘outside the box.’

Having an artistic sensibility is a strict no-no. An exposure to real art will interfere with the candidate’s job of telling people who were born with a camera in one hand and a three film UTV pictures contract in the other how to make their movies.

Candidate should not have seen any human genitals willingly or unwillingly in the last fifty years. Must be such a prude that he or she even covers up firm tomatoes or really long cucumbers/bananas. Candidate must have a disdain for people who wear provocative things like jeans or fastrack watches.

Candidate must constantly live in fear that someone, somewhere might actually enjoy his or her movie watching experience. The Central Board of Film Certification frowns upon that and will not allow it to happen under any circumstance. Letting adults make their own decisions is against our culture.

After two rounds of interviews, candidates will be required to find things to censor in the following movies: Jai Santoshi Maa, Any random Rajshri movie, Mother India

Compensation: A huge salary and the satisfaction of preventing literally dozens of people from seeing a nipple because they haven’t yet heard about the internet.

Interested candidates may send their application to:

CBFC@nosexpleaseweareindian.com

Thank you for your interest!

UPA Ministers Say The Darndest Things (Part 2)

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

(Click Here for Part 1)

As we were discussing last week, the members of our federal council of ministers are a barrel of laughs. It’s not that they aim to be such a rich source of hilarity. It’s the only positive outcome of their actions! In fact, the biggest threat to the UPA isn’t any political opponent; it’s dementia and osteoporosis. So let’s go back to reminding ourselves of their greatest hits:

Our fourth contestant is none other than our Law Minister and a man who hasn’t met a sentence on the internet that he didn’t want to censor, Kapil Sibal. Mr Sibal is man of many talents. He showed us his epic skills as a magician when, as the then Telecom minister, he made the notional loss on the allotment of spectrum disappear. It was all a misunderstanding, he declared. A simple mathematical error. All you had to do was carry the one, subtract a trillion and voila, everything would make sense again. What many people don’t know about Mr Sibal is that he is also a writer of science fiction! In fact, last year, he read out an extract out of one of his fantastical stories on the floor of the Rajya Sabha. In his story, he imagined an India which is more liberal than Europe and America. An India in which the government doesn’t act like a nanny and tells its citizens what they cannot watch, read or think. An India in which the government doesn’t spend a significant amount of its resources clumsily trying to stifle dissent. If only Mr Sibal was in a position to make this possible! Anyway, let’s not forget that Mr. Sibal is also an amateur poet. In fact, his poetry is so moving, it inspired us to write a small ditty of our own about this master of many trades:

                                             There was once an old minister,
                                      Whose every intention was sinister,
                                                               His need to censor,
                                          Made his eyebrows grow denser,
And he liked to silence protestors using a tear gas canister.

Our next contestant is Home Minister and the first person ever to ask for a red pen of any colour, Sushil Kumar Shinde. Until recently, Shinde was so unknown outside his home state, even his wife thought he was Vilasrao Deshmukh. Shinde took a big dive into public consciousness last year when under his watch, the northern grid failed and cut power from half of the country for almost three days. A more self-aware person would’ve been humbled and might have voluntarily decided to lower his profile for a few months. But this is the UPA council of ministers. There is no rock bottom here! So, naturally, Shinde called a press conference to announce that he would rate his stint as power minister as ‘excellent.’ And as a reward for his belligerence in the face of reality, he was promoted to the Ministry of Home, because, what could go wrong? Turns out, a lot! But Shinde faced every obstacle with the humility of an IIM graduate who just got hired by Goldman Sachs and the grace of an arctic penguin participating in a hurdle race. Shinde’s stint in the home ministry has been so disastrous, his name is now a verb. For eg: “The look of relief on her face when I dropped her off at her house made me realize that I had totally Shinde’d our date.”

Now, there are men who are born to a life of mediocrity. Men who are born to work, eat and wither away. Men who spend their whole lives without being noticed at all. Men who fall by the wayside, never to be heard from again. Then there are those men who are born into greatness. Men who have destinies to fulfil. Men who by the sheer force of their willpower end up changing the world. Men who are the true heroes of our time. Our sixth contestant – the Minister of Rural Development and ‘cousin Itt’ from the Addams family – Jairam Ramesh, is one such hero. Whenever he has been called upon to shower the less knowledgeable with his golden stream of wisdom, he has always delivered. In fact, he has done that even when he hasn’t been called upon to offer his opinion. Hair Force One – as his friends fondly call him – is kind like that. You know what they say – If opinions are like assholes, then Jairam Ramesh has one for every occasion! No matter what the problem, Jairam Ramesh is always on it! Like when he first denied the existence of global warming and then suggested solving it by getting people to stop eating beef. That’s classic Jairam Ramesh! See, now you don’t have to do anything concrete like closing factories or cutting down on carbon emissions. Doesn’t matter that a vegetarian asking other people to not eat beef is like an Eskimo asking people living in tropical climates to not use air conditioners. Once, Jairam even dared to take on a crazy, cultish breed of human beings who believe that a certain bespectacled boy wizard would be their saviour. No, not the Congress party, silly! He took on fans of Harry Potter. He blamed them for the decreasing population of owls, despite their being no actual evidence to support his claim. Look, he doesn’t really need your “comprehensive” research to know things. If he thinks something is true, then it is. This is what separates him from the less knowledgeable. That, and the dense rainforest on his head.

(. . . To be continued)

UPA Ministers Say the Darndest Things (Part 1)

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

In these modern times, there are not a lot of activities that can be classified as a ‘sure thing.’ Heroes have turned into villains. Villains have turned into heroes. Nothing is permanent anymore. Even death and taxes aren’t the pillars of surety that they used to be. However, in this darkness there is one tiny speck of light that is always shining. A small aberration that fills you with hope. Whether it is day or night, rain or shine, you can be confident of one thing: That somewhere in this vast land of ours, there is a minister belonging to the central government who is publicly saying something unintentionally hilarious. This is a bet that comes with its own money-back guarantee. Never before have so many incompetent people been part of the same body. They might have made things worse than they found them and choked the Indian dream even before it began, but when it comes to saying stupid things, they provide us with an embarrassment of riches! Now, as the General Election from Hell creeps upon us, let us take a gander at some of these great men that history will not have kind words for.

Our first contestant is the Minister of Petroleum and the generic south Indian villain from every Ram Gopal Varma movie, Veerapa Moily. He recently took over the news cycle by storm when he declared that the best way to save petrol is to close down petrol pumps at eight p.m. every night. Apparently, that will make sure people will use less petrol because as we all know, when the government makes something illegal in India, there is no way anyone can get access to it! That is why there is no alcohol sold for more than three times the price on dry days. Even though a better way to save petrol would be to try to cut at least one vehicle from every government cavalcade, or, I don’t know, encouraging investment in alternate forms of fuel. But hey, none of these are out-of-the-box non-solutions masquerading as a reasonable idea.

So, after saying something so ridiculous that even Manmohan Singh was pissed off enough to deny that any such proposal existed, Moily said that the suggestion didn’t come from him, it came from the people. Yeah, someone hacked into his brain and made him say things. Previously, when he was law minister, he said that the government was finally closing down the ‘Bofors’ case file since ‘nothing’ turned up after twenty years of investigations and no one wanted to celebrate the golden jubilee of the case. This made lady justice cry like a regular Nirupa Roy.

Our second contestant is our Minister of External Affairs and human bobble-head, Salman Khurshid. He recently dismissed the NSA’s spying on Indian citizens and our embassies as ‘a study of computer patterns.’ All the US is doing is monitoring every activity of every internet user! Nothing to see here! Invading the privacy of citizens of a sovereign nation is not as important as, say, detaining a movie star for questioning for a couple of hours. He also burnished his credentials as a civilized member of society when he threatened Arvind Kejriwal with bodily harm. Back when he was Minister of Corporate Affairs, he warned corporate India against 'vulgar salaries & perks.’ Because if anyone knows about not indulging in vulgar salaries & perks, it’s a professional politician. Maybe he should bring this up the next time his colleagues in Parliament pass another resolution to triple their salaries and benefits?

Our next contestant is Health Minister and the poor man’s Avtar Gill, Ghulam Nabi Azad. This great scholar once suggested that the best form of birth control would be to provide villages with enough electricity so that they can watch late night teevee and stop worrying about making babies. To be fair, watching Indian teevee at any time of the day kills everything from brain activity to hunger. So who needs condoms and birth control pills and education when you can just scare people into limiting their sexual activity to platonic hugging?

However, his pièce de résistance was his ignorant statements calling homosexuality unnatural. Before you get angry at him, remember, it’s not his choice to be daft. He was born this way! He’s just trying very hard not to contemplate what homosexuality means. They told him that it’s wrong. It has to be! Otherwise, his whole life has been a waste. Whenever he sees a happy gay couple, it stirs up certain feelings in his heart. He is reminded of what his life is really missing. He wasn’t always this dead on the inside. Back when he was in school, his heart used to fill with starburst whenever he laid his eyes on Pershad, his best friend. Pershad was the boy who made him a man. All he wanted to do was spend his life staring into those deep blue eyes and caressing that innocent face. But that wasn’t to be! One day Pershad’s Dad caught both Ghulam and Pershad physically expressing their love for each other on the banks of the lake. Instead of trying to understand them and letting them be who they are, Pershad’s dad thrashed both the teenagers. And then he took Pershad and moved to another city. The next time Ghulam saw Pershad, twenty years had passed. That innocent face had all but disappeared, replaced with a constant expression of sadness and despair. They didn’t have to say anything to each other. The look of longing they exchanged said it all. So, no. Homosexuality isn’t natural. If it was, it wouldn’t have caused the most precious gift in his life to be taken away from him. Forever.

(. . . . To be continued)

Hey Sister, Leave the Kid Alone

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

If you’ve ever watched a movie in a theatre in Maharashtra – India’s premium supplier of sub-inspectors and autocratic assholes – then you would know that every theatre is required to play the national anthem before every show of every movie. Last week, at a nondescript theatre in a nondescript part of Mumbai, a brave patriot ladyee was busy standing in solemn attention, honouring Tagore’s most popular poem the way our forefathers intended when from the corner of her eye she saw that a young, fancy lookin’ fella hadn’t bothered to stand up for the anthem. Incensed at this unforgivable blasphemy, she naturally did what the constitution says is the duty of every citizen: she slapped him. Now, some people might react differently, like giving the young man disapproving looks, or by rolling their eyes whilst tut-tut-ing the state of the youth or maybe even ignoring him because as long as they’re not harming you then what other people do is none of your business. But those people are amateurs. Real patriots choose violence!

Turns out, the disrespectful young man wasn’t even an Indian citizen. He was an Australian citizen of Indian origin. And that is the excuse he gave our brave patriotic ladyee. Thankfully, she was having none of it. She was sure he was Indian! He looked vaguely brown, had a fake accent and after being physically assaulted by some weird woman for no logical reason whatsoever, did not take the next available flight to a saner country.

The incident came to light (and was front page news for a Mumbai tabloid) because the lady in question is married to a mildly famous actor who was in that thing that one time. On twitter, while there were a few people mocking her for her idiocy, there were also a lot of them defending her. We don’t condone her actions, but we agree with the sentiment.

Recently, a BJP MP demanded that the next NDA government take back Amartya Sen’s Bharat Ratna because while answering a question asked in an interview, Sen said in his opinion, you-know-who is not an appropriate candidate for Prime Minister. The BJP was shocked – shocked! – that someone didn’t think that their dear leader wasn’t the greatest thing since the knife that was used to invent sliced bread.

Meanwhile, a restaurant in Mumbai had to close down temporarily after “allegedly” being threatened by youth congress ‘workers.’  No, they weren't protesting the restaurant's pledge to serve only “pure-vegetarian” food (because the sad, lonely, and boring group of people called ‘vegetarians’ also have a right to gather with their own kind), rather they were protesting the restaurant's practice of serving a satirical dig at the UPA along with the bill and no mouth freshener. (Maybe this is how vegetarian restaurants work? I wouldn’t know! In fact, I am pretty sure asking someone to eat at a restaurant which only serves vegetarian fare is a violation of the Geneva Convention against torture.) The youth congress workers went back to bullying some other helpless law abiding citizen only after the owner of the restaurant “voluntarily” apologized. The Congress was shocked – shocked! – that a person badly affected by their idiotic policies would express dissatisfaction with how they were running the government.

Maybe it’s because I interrupted my busy schedule of learning how to sleep with my eyes open to pay attention in civics class, all this doesn’t seem right? Maybe forcing people to show superficial respect for things that you hold in high esteem for some reason is a little, I don’t know, twisted? Or physically harming someone for not paying obeisance to a man-made symbol of reverence appears to be a little umm, excessive?

Our collective compulsion to make everyone agree with us and see things our way all the time is an indication of a much deeper malaise. We’re never short of things to be chauvinistic about: patriotism, religion, sports teams, phone companies. Anything to prove that I’m better than you! Those who have the courage of their convictions don’t need random strangers to validate them. The point of living in a free country is that if you don’t want to stand up while they’re playing the national anthem, then you don’t have to. Other people don’t get to decide for you.

It boggles the mind that most of our debates come around to trying to make people understand that not everyone shares their worldview and that’s okay. We adopted a democratic system of governance so that random douchebags couldn’t impose their will on us. Leaving people alone to do their own thing is one of the major features of democracy.

Now please excuse me as I go back to writing a series of strongly worded letters to the government asking them to ban the evil practice of vegetarianism.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

If you haven’t been paying attention to whatever sad excuse for news that we have in this country, then let me enlighten you with what is going on. Not only has Warren Buffet refused to endorse us on LinkedIn, steel industry giants POSCO & ArcelorMittal have stopped believing our oft-broken promise to change our ways if they gave us one last chance and are now looking for an easier, much better looking country to invest all that money in. In fact, financial analysts say that these developments will have harsh consequences for our economy.

How did this happen? Till about a few years ago, we were like the shiny new shopping mall that opens up with huge fanfare. The sort of place everyone wants to go to all the time. The type of capitalist heaven where even small investments yield huge results. We were the centre of attention for a while! The consumers were glad to have so many options at their disposal and the businesses were glad to be able to tap a huge, underserviced market. And all the jobs were taken up by educated, pleasant sounding youngsters fresh out of college who were able to put their various talents to good use.

Nowadays, we’re like a sad, almost abandoned mall. The whole structure looks like it has lost its sheen. The paint is peeling off. The elevator has stopped working. All the investors with deep pockets have cut their losses and gone back to wherever they came from. Most shops are closing and the ones that are open are stocked with sub-standard products while most of the staff is surly and inefficient. Each set of empty lots is punctuated with an espresso bar selling cheap, undrinkable coffee. The only visitors are those who either have nowhere else to go or have no idea what they’re doing.

I, for one, am glad that all those people who get so spooked easily have decided to leave. We’re not the sort of country that does easy. No siree, Bob. Like that irritating commercial for that dry fruit infested chocolate says, you have to earn the ability to do business in this country. Who needs multi-national companies investing millions of dollars to create thousands of jobs anyway? Our political parties are already working overtime to increase the availability of jobs in this country by hiring hundreds of illiterate people to tweet on their behalf. That is all the stimulus that we need!

There was a song that Asha Bhosle sang with 90’s boyband Code Red. (This was a thing that happened. Asha Bhosle sang a song with a mildly popular, flash-in-the-pan British boyband and all of us collectively yawned and acted like it was the most normal thing to do. By giving her a pass on what should have been a serious blotch on a storied career, we made her believe that the song was something that she shouldn’t have been embarrassed about. Yes, kids, everyone was smoking some good shit in the 90’s. Even Asha Bhosle.) The song’s lyrics went something like We can make it if we try/We can make it you and I. The UPA seems to have adopted this as their theme song. They probably play it all day long at the Prime Minister’s office. Similarly, whenever we get bad news that could potentially harm the economy, they put their playlist of excuses on repeat, hoping that people will swallow their bullshit one more time.

Not that we could have a public discussion about this! Our current most popular topic of debate is a feud between two ‘leading’ economists. We’re not debating any of their theories, mind you. That would be the smart thing to do. But we didn’t drive out the British so that we could do sensible things! We drove them out so that we could f*ck up everything in our own way, because freedom. 

So, naturally, we’re discussing which of the above economists carries around a ModiBoner™ in their pants and which of them is a pinko commie socialist who wants to empty all the money in our treasury and give it to the poors. Overnight, people who wouldn’t know a demand curve if it punched them in the face were suddenly able to encapsulate a person’s body of work into a sixty word sentence. I can parse complex economic theory because I gave a stats exam that one time. The discussion is so stupid that every minute you spend thinking about it, you lose a couple of I.Q. points.

If our public discussion were a character in a movie, we would be at the scene where the actor portraying us looks in the mirror and sees the mess that he has turned himself into. Then he tries to turn his life around, seek forgiveness from all those he has inadvertently wronged, gaining the approval of the audience by the time the movie is over.

However, unlike the life of a movie protagonist, there doesn’t seem to be any hope for redemption in our collective future.

The CIA Ate my Homework

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As we head towards the General Election from Hell, all the participants are working overtime to ensure that the ride is as nauseating as possible. From the trash talk between the political parties, the social media food fight between their supporters, to the issues that our news organizations imagine we are having a ‘national conversation’ about, we are really rich in things to feel embarrassed about.  In fact, the Met department predicts that we are in for a torrential downpour of stupidity and irregular dust storms of hypocritical behaviour.

Continuing his election blitzkrieg, three time ‘Gujarat Idol’ winner Narendra Modi recently gave a speech about education. One of the things he railed against was western education. Because that’s the problem with our education system! Not a system which lays more emphasis on learning rather that understanding. Not a curriculum that makes people literate instead of educated. Nope! Hey, Nalanda university was #1 in Time magazine’s list of ‘best universities to send whichever offspring of yours is designated to be a monk’ of 1197 A.D., so the only reason our education system is suffering now is because the CIA is eating our children’s homework and we’re not doing anything about it.

Seems like even the guy who highlights the ability of his state to attract foreign investment as one of his major achievements feels the need to vaguely blame ‘the west’ for our country’s woes.

Remember Edward Snowden? He is the whistleblower who revealed how the NSA is like a cute and hilarious LOLCAT because it is in your computer, watching you watch your porn. Well, he applied for asylum in India. That’s right. He left a country whose government illegally spies on its own citizens under the guise of national security and sought asylum in India. That is like leaving Canada to seek asylum in France because you don’t like to speak French.

The government gave such a swift reply to Snowden’s application that even Usain Bolt was jealous. The Indian embassy in Moscow didn’t have to wait for an official confirmation from the relevant authorities in New Delhi to know what to say. However, they still spent one hour pacing around their offices impatiently to pretend that they have ‘given the matter due consideration.’ In case you’re wondering, the answer to Snowden’s request was an emphatic ‘No,’ followed by the rhetorical question, “You Mad, Bro?” This wasn’t because Snowden made them work on a Sunday, but because the embassy officials are answerable to a government whose head treats the American President with the same reverence that farmers in UP treat their Zamindars. Yet this same government always blames any sort of citizen protests against it as being funded and encouraged by a mysterious ‘foreign hand,’ usually found hiding in the western hemisphere.

And then there are our leaders of regional parties. They rally against the use of the English language and oppose economic measures that would benefit the country by couching their opportunistic actions in banal declarations against the west. In fact, our socialist and communist leaders hate the west so much, that a majority of them send their children to study there. Want to turn our state capital into London but hate the west because something something neo-colonialism!

Somebody tell all these idiots that ‘the west’ is not some homogenous and monolithic entity that is united by a single aim: to cause our downfall. Whenever we have a public discussion about a problem we are facing, there will be some genius who will find out a way to blame the west.  Whether it is ‘western culture’ or ‘western education’ or ‘western media,’ they are always causing us some imaginary trouble. An all weather straw man for every belief system!

Most of the problems that we face in our country are not because there is a secret cabal of shady foreigners meeting every week to decide upon a new way to humiliate us and bring us down. It’s easier to blame outside entities for your problems because then you don’t have to introspect or take any responsibility for your actions. I’d try to do something, but what is the point when some foreign entity is going to swoop in and destroy whatever I’ve built.

Any elected official who uses this rhetoric as an excuse to not do anything should have his position taken away from him.

If only there was some sort of western import that allowed us to do that.

Too Young to Matter, Too Old to Care

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As the monsoons sneaked upon us with torrential rains so devastating that they could only be interpreted as Mother Nature’s version of ‘we need to talk,’ the sun wasn’t the only ancient object that was being forcefully made to fade into the background. That was also the fate of BJP leader and UNESCO World Heritage Site, LK Advani. Always the optimist, where others saw a barely filled glass crowded with cobwebs and hardly able to sustain its own weight, he saw a glass that was brimming with leadership skills powerful enough to lead other glasses to victory. In a span of a few days, Advani’s narrative went from ‘look at how they’re bullying the elderly’ to ‘grandpa just took all his toys and went home,’ to making people ask the question, ‘ZOMG! Does he have dementia?’

Not to be outdone, the UPA dug up old Egyptian mummies, sent an urgent telegram to Transylvania asking all vampires to report for duty, found a few dozen zombies roaming the rabid wasteland of theatres still playing After Earth, and inducted all of them into its Cabinet of the Undead. The members of the UPA’s council of ministers are so old, their average age is ‘quadruple AK Hangal.’ From now on, all their meetings are going to take place in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy room, so as to save on the cost of individual oxygen tanks. After all, their catheter bills are already through the roof! Apparently, individuals who were born when all the continents on the planet were one single land mass are supposed to reinvigorate the government and help their party avoid its impending electoral implosion. The last time so many old people came together to save a messianic bloodline from disaster, they were called the Priory of Sion.

Infosys, one of the leaders of India’s technology boom, has had a lacklustre few years. Their stagnant growth had a negative impact on their earnings, which further eroded the value of their stock. So, to energize the employees and put a lid on the rapid attrition, the management of the company decided that they needed to hire someone with fresh ideas to lead the recovery. Someone with a new approach to doing business. A dynamic go-getter who dances to his own tune. Naturally, the only person who fit the bill was their former chairman who formally retired a few years ago. 

One of the major myths that has persisted for centuries in this country is that the higher your age, the more wisdom you possess. The old are always right and the young are supposed to follow them blindly, because chronology!  Even if the old person in question has nothing more to offer than banal nostalgia about how things were better in their day. The past is always perfect, even if it wrought discrimination, bigotry, ignorance, disease, and unnecessary hardship. Remember when you had to send a letter before the internet became widely accessible? Things were so simple! First you bought stamps, paper, envelopes and an adhesive. Then you sat down to write the letter. Once you were done, you put your letter in an envelope, sealed it, wrote the address on the front, calculated the postage and then stuck a stamp of appropriate value on the right hand corner. Afterwards, you would post the letter at your nearest mailbox. Your letter would reach its destination in three to eight weeks, depending upon the weather conditions. It would take another three to eight weeks for a reply to come back to you. And then the whole process would begin again. Nowadays, you can click a button and send a letter anywhere in the world in a couple of seconds. Where’s the romance in that?

Despite our fixation with the past, we have refused to learn anything constructive from it. Most of our important institutions - just like the people who run them - have become lethargic, ineffective and of no use to anyone. Neither do they possess the capability to understand the multitude of problems that we face, nor are they interested in solving them. You can’t get people who studied science before the invention of electricity to understand the importance of combating climate change. Or make those who were brainwashed since the day they were born into believing the superiority of their group over everyone else understand the importance of equal rights. The fact that in this day and age some people still think that the best way to ensure the safety of a large percentage of our citizens is to treat them like prisoners is proof enough that they shouldn’t be in any position of authority. And yet, our obsession with deferring to a person’s age keeps them there. 

I, for one, still yearn for the time when we weren’t faced with evidence of the looming shitstorm every single day and could take refuge in ignorance and lack of access to proper information.

Things were so much better in my day.

Sigh.

How to Win Fake Friends and Pretend to Influence People

Welcome to Mindfest ThinkPalooza 2013! Today’s sessions include ‘Did we Really Pay a Hundred Thousand Dollars for This’ with Sarah Palin; followed by ‘If We Say Eight Percent Growth Enough Times it Will Magically Come True’ with Economic Einstein Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Tomorrow morning, we discuss ‘Banal Delusions of Grandeur’ with Shah Rukh Khan. We end our exciting weekend with a speech by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi titled ‘Is That a Riot in Your Pants or Are You Just Development to See Me?’

Recently, Kapil Sibal, our Union Minister of making-Chidambram-look-less-douchey-in-comparison gave a speech at a public forum. In his address, he said that the government shouldn’t be blamed for all the problems that plague the government. He then referred to himself as a poet. Even though Kapil Sibal is a poet like Uday Chopra is an actor, no one in the audience objected to this assertion because it’s cruel to contradict the self-deception of the elderly. After the speech, Sibal turned into a bat and flew back to his lair on a remote island in the Arabian Sea.

Our patron saint of cultivating eyebrows using pubic hair was speaking at something called ‘adda.’ It was one of those conferences organized by news organizations to create a ‘buzz’ about their ‘brand.’ They could commit actual journalism to achieve the same result without spending so much money, however, that would mean losing this huge opportunity to get together with their peers to get drunk and gossip ‘ideate’ and ‘strategize.’  

Thinkfluence this! Hosted by people who like to think that they’re influential and attended by people who take themselves way too seriously, these conferences are full of Very Solemn People who have Come Together to Deliberate on and Solve All The Issues Plaguing the World Today. You can determine each forum’s degree of uselessness by the amount of fancy corporate jargon contained in their title. Whether it’s a ‘conclave’ or a ‘thinkfest’ or an ‘ideas festival’, these conferences have become an unintentional parody of each other.

As seen on teevee! These conferences are what would happen if all the usual busybodies populating our news shows go on tour. It’s the same trite panel discussions, except with tepid applause. Even their structure is the same! You get one session with whoever is the fascination of that week’s newscycle. One session with a bollywood ‘star’ not  currently shooting a movie, one session with whichever Indian politician is not involved in a scam that week, and one session with war criminal Pervez Musharraf, whose knack of showing up at places where he isn’t wanted never seems to fail him. There also has to be an appearance by at least one American guest, so as to lend the conference the ‘respectability’ it so desperately seeks.

Some of my best friends are rich and famous! Now, the purpose of the sessions is not to ask any hard questions, because then the guests will stop showing up. The real purpose is to make the proprietors of the news organization or their editors feel important. So most of the sessions end up being nothing more than an exercise in stroking egos. Real questions are for people who don’t accept invitations to your dinner party.

My question is more of a statement. However, the most hilarious/awkward moments of these conferences happen when, after a session, the moderator invites questions from the audience. We’re one of the few countries where audience members asking questions have to be told that they shouldn’t use their time with the microphone to go off on a large rant. Most of the time the moderator has to interrupt the audience member trying to hijack his Q&A session and then try his best to translate whatever froth the person spewed into a coherent question. And when they’re lucky enough to get an actual question, it’s usually something the moderator and his guest have already answered. That’s because members of the audience have spent the weeks leading up to the event figuring out – what they think – is a clever question to ask, and they’re not going to let all their hard work go to waste by trying to come up with something more relevant.

If only there was some sort of event or venue where all of us could get together to discuss this and find a solution.

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

United Nation of Ban-a-ton

Dear faceless bureaucrats, elected and/or appointed government officials, and other sundry idiots,

Firstly, I hope you’re getting an adult to read this to you, so they can explain what I’m trying to say in whatever ancient language you speak. And by adult, I don’t mean any random person over the age of eighteen, but an actual human person who (a) does not giggle/get angry when they see human reproductive parts and (b) does not-when faced with an opinion contrary to their own-throw a tantrum like a child of a double income household who just discovered that parents on a guilt trip will literally buy you anything. However, as past experience shows, there is unlikely to be any such individual present in any one of your ‘august organizations,’ so we’ll make do with whatever we have.

Now, you must be wondering, because I presume you have the worldview of a new born gnat, why anyone would write you a letter, much less an open letter? I get that the word ‘open’ scares you because you’ve neither opened your mind nor the files on your desk. So don’t worry. Open letters are not really for the person they’re addressed to. They’re for the author of the letter and other like-minded individuals. Writing an open letter is like farting into the wind: it might add to all the noise, but at least it makes you feel a whole lot better.

When I first heard that someone in the I&B ministry banned Comedy Central’s humour intolerant Indian channel for ten days, I was relieved. Finally someone who shares our comic sensibilities, I said to myself. How long could all the channels broadcasting English language teevee shows in India pretend that it was still the 90’s and no one had access to things like the internet or ‘Indian Netflix.’  Personally, I thought it the punishment was a bit harsh for the petty (but blasphemous) crime of claiming that Dharma & Greg was comedy. But, you have to start somewhere and I figured that people of your age really believe in tough love. However, I was in for a rude shock. Turns out, the reason you banned the channel was because they violated some arbitrary standard of morality.  

This is not the first time you’ve banned a channel for offending you. Every few months we hear someone in your ministry banning FTV because of some perceived slight or the other. Like when some pretty ladyee shows her woomabachumbas, or a fine looking gentleman shows his ‘Manmohan Singh.’ (What? It was small, docile and had an uncircumcised head.)

We get it. You're Indian. Someone gave you power to lord over somebody else and you’ll be damned if you don’t use that. Show ‘em who’s the boss. We all know that if you really started to ban content to protect ‘public morality and decency,’ they’d be nothing to watch on teevee. And now that you’ve banned a low rated channel-whose primary purpose is to run in the background in the sort of espresso bar where the barista thinks that ‘macchiato’ is an abusive word-public decency has been restored. And if there were any remaining thoughts of indecency festering inside anybody’s mind, they were erased by the proposed ban on lingerie store mannequins introduced by members of Mumbai’s municipal corporation.

You must have loved common sense a lot because it seems like you set it free a long time ago and it never came back. You guys still don’t get it, do you? You think doing these things is going to have any effect on society at large, whatsoever? Did you ever stop to think that maybe you’re the problem? That you’re so obsessed with what other people get aroused by that you’re the weirdo you want to protect people from?

Banning something to positively change society is perhaps even worse than writing an open letter and expecting things to change.

At least I have the decency to couch my stupidity in self-awareness.

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Death at a Funeral

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

You know what is the worst part of hearing that someone you know has been visited by the grim reaper? No, not the part where someone you know has stopped existing forever; that’s something you deal with much later. The worst part is the realization that now you have to attend their funeral. 

If the funeral is for someone you shared an emotional connection with, then you’re probably too zoned out to notice what’s going around you. However, if the person being mourned is an acquaintance you didn’t meet often, like a ‘facebook friend’, you become a party to the farce that most funerals are. All our rituals are useless and horrible anyway. People do things they imagine would help the dead wherever they are, but it only helps them feel better about the situation. The dead don’t care what you do after they’re gone! They’re not coming back.

Firstly, the deceased is suddenly turned into a saint. Even if it is that old fascist relative who not only judged you for wearing jeans but also blamed you for putting a scratch on their precious Ming vase.  And despite the fact that everyone who has spent their life bashing them is relieved that the object of their disdain is finally visiting the big gulag in the sky, they still have to find something nice to say. He was a creature of routine! She really believed in old fashion values! At least he died doing what he loved; sucking the innocence out of young children.

Secondly, a lot of the people who populate these shindigs are kind of terrible human beings. They are not there because they feel any sadness or remorse over the passing of the deceased. They’re there because it’s a social obligation. Because they imagine that if they don’t show up and pretend to mourn, people are going to hold it against them and won’t show up when their own time comes. If I wanted to see people put up a false show of emotion while also trying very hard to look forlorn, I’d watch an episode of KBC.

Then there is the compulsive Indian need to put food into people. We’ve been programmed to be so social that even during a funeral we have to take care of people who are supposed to be comforting us. When you go over to give your condolences and mumble empty platitudes that offer no real solace whatsoever, members of that family will cry and force you stay for lunch. You feel like shaking them and telling them that you just lost a family member! Mourn, for cripes sake! Stop asking me if I have eaten. Instead, you nod and awkwardly agree to do whatever they say, because you know on the inside they’re thinking: here, have some lunch. A single serving contains vegetables, salt, tears, despair, and a compelling feeling of running away somewhere, anywhere, just to get away from all these expressions of artificial grief and phony concern that I have to endure for no logical reason.

We even take this with us wherever we go. For example, after the horrific shooting at a Gurdwara in Wisconsin last year, while family members waited outside with a smattering of friends, relatives, police personnel and journalists, some of them got together and were serving food and beverages to all the people who were waiting. I’m so worried about my family still trapped inside, but here, have a bran muffin.

According to most of our traditions and religious customs, the official mourning period ends after the deceased’s family has fed a few hundred of their closest friends and relatives one last time. But people don’t get the memo! They still keep coming over or calling you on the phone. And everyone wants to know what happened! So you keep reliving your trauma each time you need to answer that question. By the time the last vestiges of ‘well wishers’ are done darkening your doorstep, you start wishing that you were the one who died instead of the lucky bastard who escaped this daily dose of fresh hell.

A common reaction to hearing of someone’s demise can be summed up as it could have been me! Death, even if it happens to someone we barely know, reminds us of how thin the thread of life really is and despite what our favourite self-help guru says, we’re not really in control.

Hey, at least we don’t have to attend our own funeral.

Mind Your Elections: Clichémageddon

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

While the rest of the country was busy shouting expletives at their favourite IPL teams on teevee and hoping that Sachin Tendulkar wouldn’t injure his ‘brand’ by pulling a ‘Ganguly’ and overstaying his welcome, the people of Karnataka were busy electing a new set of porn addicts to darken the legislative halls of ‘India’s weather capital,’ Bangalore.

Elections in India bring out all the clichés to the yard.

The clichémageddon begins before even a single vote is cast. Most days leading up to the election are spent talking about the gaffe of the day. Some unpolished leader will say what is really on their mind and people will be shocked and outraged that an Indian politician is a horrible person on the inside. If the person is a senior leader of their party or are instrumental to the election campaign, they will begrudgingly release a terse statement saying that they didn’t mean to cause any offence; a sort of non-apology in which you can sense the gritted teeth and the unstated contempt. If the leader is a disposable sycophant, their party will leave them to fend for themselves and they will disappear from the election campaign for a few days.

There will also be a lot of puffy teevee and print profiles in which a reporter spends a day or two with one of the star campaigners for a party in which they show how hard the leader is campaigning for the elections by addressing multiple meetings in one day, clocking thousands of miles in a helicopter and/or chartered jet. You can tell which leader is being setup for the electoral success-failed government-eventual comeback narrative by the amount of news coverage they receive.

The most common refrain that we hear from every second person covering the elections is that in India people vote their caste and do not cast their vote. Which is a horrible thing to say because not only is it a bad pun, it reveals a casual acceptance of racism. Nope, nothing to see here. Everything’s a-okay! Just a large percentage of people being bigots. It’s a feature of Indian democracy, not a bug! We are like this only, etc.

On the day of the elections, we get to see exciting pictures of party leaders casting their votes for the “political leaders: they’re just like us except they get to cast their vote accompanied by security personnel and hundreds of flashing cameras!” segments. After the polls close, they release the voter percentage. Without any exception, the most prominent urban city in the state is revealed to have the most appalling percentage of voter turnout. That city becomes the object of everyone’s disappointment. Celebrity panellists chide the eligible voters who didn’t bother to show up at a polling station and question their commitment to civic engagement because, apparently, casting a vote once every few years is the answer to all your problems. Low voter turnout also helps people on the internet play a round of their favourite game: my third world, dystopian shithole of a city is better than your third world, dystopian shithole of a city because more of us show up to stand in a line to select our next ‘most corrupt government yet.’

Then there are the exit polls. From the moment the last vote is cast to counting day, we are on the receiving end of analysis, debates, arguments, plausible scenarios, hypothetical coalitions, and bad metaphors based on these famed ‘polls,’ even though they are seldom accurate. But no one ever takes any responsibility for being wrong! Instead, we end up hearing paeans to the Indian voter who suddenly turns out to be ‘smart’ and ‘wise.’ Hey, the gypsy lady with a crystal ball who writes our poll predictions was having an off day. What can we do about it?

However, the major impact of clichémageddon is felt on counting day. If you turn on NDTV, you get to see a panel of experts who were popular and respected in the 1990’s but have spent the last decade being exposed for the hacks they are. Times Now will have more old people on its panel than a ‘yoga shivir’ in Haridwar so they spend all their time shouting at each other. IBN makes it clear that no matter what the results show, the real winner of the election is always their coverage, which has won every award they have printed out on Rajdeep’s personal ‘dot-matrix’ printer. Headlines Today is the popular destination for all the analysts no other channel invited - like the world’s premier writer of erotic Rahul Gandhi fan fiction, Sanjay Jha. Headlines Today is the “linked-in” of Indian news channels; people join it just to get a better job somewhere else.

The reaction of the political parties was also quite predictable. The BJP was pretending to be shocked that changing names of cities, banning beef every few months and beating up people trying to get a drink after a bad day at work didn’t make them popular. Deve Gowda’s party wrapped up all its dry cleaned jackets in plastic, put on its pyjamas, and got ready to go back into hibernation for the next five years. And the Congress ‘outsourced’ the election of its chief minister to the party’s ‘high command.’

If only there was some way to determine what the people really wanted.

How to Survive Result Season

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

In a few days, as we finally say goodbye to angsty April and waddle into marshy May, we will be reminded why May is one of the most important months in the children’s calendar. While for most of them it is the beginning of the summer vacation - a lovely time which they make forced memories of happy times with their families by heading out to overcrowded vacation spots full of other families wanting to make forced memories - for some it is the month of nervousness and anticipation.

That’s because in May the board exam results are announced. For some students it’s a culmination of years of hard work. A moment in time, which if goes their way, would vindicate all the sacrifices they’ve had to make since they were nothing but a mere twinkle in their parent’s eyes. For others, it’s an indication that getting a decent result by pulling an all-nighter is a metaphor for the rest of your life. A life which you will spend ignoring that pesky voice in your head which fruitlessly keeps asking you to stop procrastinating. Now, since we once skimmed through a book in which a minor character was a child psychologist, we feel that we are qualified enough to offer our counsel to all our young friends out there to help them cope with the aftermath of such a game-changing life event. (We call them ‘friends’ because that makes it easier to speak to them in a condescending tone. You see, that’s how we old people talk. We also answer every question about our age by saying I am __ years young in a faux-inspirational voice.  We even use the plural ‘we’ to refer to ourselves. Why do we do that, you ask? Simple! Because we’re a terrible person! As you kids say, Like duh.) Also, since we don’t know how to communicate with teenagers because the present lot of them seem to suffer from some sort of a mystery ailment that makes them talk and write without using any vowels, we’re hoping that one of our kind readers would translate this article into teenager-friendly things like a “facebook status update” or a “sext.”

Now, kids, the most important thing to remember is that your board exams do not define you. They do not decide the trajectory of your life. One of the objective of a well rounded education is to make you try a lot of things to find out what you really want to do in life. “LOL j/k.” Kidding! Your board exams results are the most important thing that will happen in your life. They are the only thing that will determine how successful you will be in the future. They are so important, that years from now when you’re old and haggard, and your half human/half-Pandorian grandchild asks you why you and the rest of your family are not allowed to enter the ‘gangnam galaxy,’ you will have to tell him that it happened because you weren’t successful enough and that this downward spiral started when you only scored a measly 95% in your board exams. His innocence shattered, he will look at you with disgust as you hang your head in shame and drown yourself in a puddle of sadness and humiliation.

The best course of action is to just follow the path your parents want you to walk on. This way, you don’t have to take any personal responsibility for your own actions and can spend the rest of your life being resentful towards them. Also, by pretending to be the sort of person who “obeys” his parents, you’re automatically set for the road to sainthood. In this country, the sort of children who cannot think for themselves and blindly do everything their elders tell them to are every parent’s dream accessory. Other parents will cite you as an example for their children to emulate. People will assume that you’re an honest and trustworthy person, for some reason. And once your parents decide that you’re old enough to make a lifelong commitment to a random stranger of their choice, your stock in the ‘arranged marriage’ market will be higher than Microsoft in the 1990’s. 

If you get good grades then you’re in for a lifetime of success! All you have to do is continue the same routine you had before. Just spend all your time working. You can sleep when you’re dead! And keep fooling yourself into believing that this is only temporary and that you will finally be able to really start living once you reach your goal because you will keep shifting the goalposts. And then, in a blink of an eye, ten years will have passed and one lonely Saturday night when you’ve finished work early and have had too much to drink, you’ll let your mind travel to that dark place where you finally ask yourself whether it was worth it. But nothing will come out of it because even though you know the answer to that question, you’re too much of a coward to actually do something about it and on Monday morning everything will go back to normal.

Hope that helps!