For Whom the Fans Troll

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

There was a feeling of sadness permeating through the air. The streets were empty. Families gathered together to lean on each other for support. Those without anyone reached out to others like them so that they wouldn’t be alone. A dark cloud had descended over the country. The sun had been eclipsed by an even bigger star. No one was ready to say goodbye yet. But they still had to. First there was the silence. Followed by the tears. And then, there was the chanting. A billion-plus people shouting his name. A nation whose citizens spend every day of the year fighting with each other was united for one short, solitary moment. In five, ten, fifty years, those who survive the nuclear winter will recall this day and let their radiated descendants know how time itself stopped to say goodbye to Sachin Tendulkar.

Okay, none of that actually happened. But if you were a fan of Sachin Tendulkar, then this is probably how you will remember the last day of the last match of his cricketing career. And if you were one of the unfortunate people who didn’t subscribe to the school of thought that proclaimed that he was the greatest thing to happen to this world since the oven that was used to bake the first batch of sliced bread, then you probably will remember that day for the elaborate system of passwords and secret handshakes you needed to use to find any remote safehouse that kept you away from the brainwashed masses.  

That must have been a difficult task because those people were everywhere. In your house, ruining what is supposed to be your haven away from the world. Or at your local cafe, disturbing your “me time” with their incessant need to discuss strange things like “batting average” while making snide insinuations about some chap called Bradman. They didn’t even spare your favourite bar, desecrating the holiest of holy places by boldly asking the shocked manager to switch off the ‘bacardi blast’ cd playing on repeat and putting on the match commentary instead. They took over all the newspapers too! Instead of reporting important salacious details about whom Ranbir Kapoor was dating, our broadsheets were printing interviews with all the important people in Tendulkar’s life, like that guy who once stood next to him at a school bus stop. All the news channels stopped focusing on silly political non-events for a while and instead held panel discussions involving various cricketing legends like Shobha De and Suhel Seth.

Members of the Sachin sect took over twitter too. Between tweeting links to youtube clips of Sachin’s best innings and blogposts that were supposed to make your eyes water while you swallowed that temporary lump in your throat, they spent the day of the final goodbye accusing those who did not agree with them of being dead on the inside. (When did being dead on the inside stop being a thing that should be encouraged? I, for one, highly recommend it!) They declared that anyone who didn’t feel an overwhelming sense of loss on Tendulkar’s retirement must be less emotionally equipped than the Frankenstein monster. They were shocked – shocked! – that not everyone talked about their lord and saviour with the same reverence that they did. They even wondered out loud why everyone else in world couldn’t see that he was the chosen one.

Recently, a court in UP banned the screening of a movie because some stupid people were faux-offended by the use of the words ‘Ram-leela’ in the title. A few months ago, a court in Malaysia banned non-Muslims from saying or writing ‘Allah’ in any form. Earlier this year, when the lead actor for the movie version of the Fifty Shades of Grey series was announced, he got death threats from some of the most obsessive readers of the ‘books’ because according to them, he didn’t resemble the version of the eponymous character that they had in their head.

We’ve let those who believe in the magical powers of ancient storybooks, fairytales, man-made symbols, octogenarian actors, politicians, sportsmen with a cinematic narrative for a life story and other fictional characters determine how we talk about their object of reverence. That is a slippery slope. One minute you’re agreeing to not make silly jokes about a way-past-his-prime cricket player to avoid a confrontation or to please his fans, the next minute you’re going to find yourself prostrating in front of his life-sized statue, as your life flashes in front of your eyes and you wonder how you got here.

I’m all for worshipping whomever you like!  We pretend it’s a free country, after all. We’re all entitled to our delusions. But the insistence that other people follow suit? We’re not entitled to that.

Now please excuse me as I make a change dot org petition asking Obama to sign an executive order banning Ben Affleck from ever wearing a Batman costume.

Welcome to Incredible India!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

I tried looking out the dusty window to get a look at–what I assumed–was a beautiful scenery, and not just a row of terribly made houses of various proportions. I shifted the weight of the bag to my other leg. There wasn’t any available space for me to put my luggage in the overhead compartment because by the time I reached the train all the empty slots had been occupied by bags belonging to my fellow passengers. Not one to cause any trouble or let such small incidents ruin my adventurous mood, I busied myself with trying to breathe in the atmosphere. It smelt like a communal toilet at an all-male college hostel, but, that is part of the charm of travelling by a train in India.

My mouth watered as I saw the steward distributing trays with packed goodies. The food was here! Finally, some relief for my famished stomach. As he threw the tray at my wobbly, make-shift table with the grace of an orphanage warden from a Charles Dickens novel distributing grub to his most hated wards, I shook my head at this endearing show of familiarity. I took one bite of the unrivalled delicacies placed in front of me and let out a contented sigh. It tasted like it came from home. Specifically, an old people’s home. Because it didn’t have any salt, grain, texture, flavour, or any other qualities that would let us classify it as an item fit for consumption by a living being of any species. As they say, that’s how the cookie crumbles. Or at least I thought that was a cookie?

* * *

Once upon a time, around the early aughts of the current century, the ancients used to share their thoughts with the rest of the world by what a majority of people referred to as ‘a blog.’ Short for weblog, this was quite a popular enterprise for a lot of people: parents wanting to share their experience with other parents, those with a lot of proverbial skeletons in their cupboard looking for an outlet, writers wanting to practice their craft, bar drunks looking for an audience to rant to, people willing to rally against conventional wisdom and those who felt that a certain point of view was being ignored by the mainstream media. The best way to identify a blog run by a person of Indian origin was to look at its title. If it contained either “random” or “confessions” or a Vedic reference, then there was a very high probability of that blog having at least some connection to the subcontinent. 

One of the most frequent occurrences on these blogs (and a meme that is still strangely popular on twitter) was nostalgic posts romanticizing the travel industry in the country. The beautiful sights! The amazing journey! The awkward moment when you realize that you’ve been had!

Travelling to our country is not for those who give up easily. We like to make everything much more difficult to accomplish! Trying to book a train ticket using the Indian Railways website is harder than trying to master bullfighting. The government sites that are supposed to provide information look like their developer hired a time travelling teenager visiting us from the 90’s who is colour blind and has only read the first chapter of ‘The World Wide Web for Dummies’ instruction manual to make them.

Not that privatising everything solves any problem. Most popular destinations now have more food courts than actual visitors. Private resorts think that adding a fancy Urdu word to the end of each menu item raises its value by at least a thousand percent. Try our Singaporean Fried Rice Zafarani, a bowel moment stopping exotic blend of two unique food cultures. Our Chicken Khwabgah has been marinated with flavoured yogurt and slowly roasted over a pit heated by the burning embers of the hopes and dreams that you had for your first born which disappeared the minute you realized that you spent all the money that you had been saving for their college education to pay your bill at our hotel. The mineral water being served with your meal was extracted from the bladder of a unicorn then injected with the weird liquid that turns even those sugar pills homeopathic quacks hand out bitter and then sprinkled with the bacteria living in the hands of your designated server.

Safety isn’t really an issue in our country in that most people don’t have any. Flying with our ‘national airline’ is like playing Russian roulette with five bullets instead of one. Our highways are like storage units for potholes. Most of our public facilities are so unclean that some of them probably still have strains of the smallpox virus embedded in them.

We’re also quite friendly to folks who are not like us. The majority of the people of this country are very accepting of those who are different. That is why they don’t stare and make the visitors feel uncomfortable at all. They don’t even treat them like exotic objects flown in for us to admire or treat with disdain depending on the pigmentation of their skin.

The whole tourism industry seems to be built on fleecing people. From the service providers responsible for transportation, to the officials who deliberately misguide those whom they are supposed to be providing help to, everyone is in on the take. Hey, this person is naive enough to trust us. Let’s stiff them for all they’ve got! In fact, getting fleeced is one of the most essential parts of your experience. Your vacation in India isn’t a success unless you’ve been overcharged, cheated, duped, misled, or taken for a ride at least once.

Now, please excuse me as I try to convince this American billionaire I ran into that he can legally lease the Taj Mahal.

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.

The Gods Must be Crazy

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the major myths of society that percolates into our subconscious from the time we are children is that growing old is a bad thing. It’s there in our conversations and in our popular culture. There is a whole industry built around making old people feel younger. You can fight ageing – an inevitable process that has been taking place for millions of years – by applying some chemical cocktail on your face. Why age gracefully when you can make your face look like Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb? We are constantly told that growing old is a horrid event that we must endure until we are able to escape it through the sweet release of death. Being young is where it’s at! Yeah, because who wants financial independence and emotional maturity? Who needs to deal with small problems that can be easily overcome when you can just close the door of your room and blast a song full of profanity to show everyone how angry you are? I, for one, don’t subscribe to this fallacy and can’t wait to grow old. You get to say stupid things and treat people badly without any repercussions. You can make people squirm in their seats and puncture any serious conversation by releasing a loud fart. In fact, my spirit animal is AK Hangal. However, not everybody on twitter shares my enthusiasm about the ageing process. This is most apparent when something happens to someone people used to revere when they were children. People become more aware of their decreasing mortality whenever a childhood icon dies/retires/says something racist. Wait, celebrity x died of a heart attack? WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAPPEN TO ME???!

This was the case last month when Sachin Tendulkar announced his retirement from one-day cricket. Nothing makes you feel your age than when the guy you watched grow from an awkward child prodigy into an awkward adult genius decides to hang up his ill-fitting jockstrap for good. We could handle the exit of eternal bridesmaid Rahul Dravid or ungraceful retirement expert Saurav Ganguly because we still had Sachin. But now even he’s gone to spend more time not spending any of his money on his family.

If you weren’t born in the 80’s you can’t fathom how important Sachin was to his countrymen. Sachin Tendulkar was a hero to a nation in dire need of one. Who can forget his memorable innings as the brand ambassador of a popular soft drink brand! Or when he launched a thousand bankruptcies by appearing in a credit card advertisement and asking people to go get it! Who even knows how many kids’ lives he saved when he revealed the secret of his energy!

Sachin was the perfect poster-child for the post-liberalisation era. A great icon! He was proof that if you had luck, talent, humility and enough gumption to hire a ruthless businessman to manage your affairs, you too could become so successful that Parliament would pass a special act to prevent you from being exorbitantly taxed on a business transaction. That is also why he doesn’t have to spend his post-retirement years scrounging for money, unlike his predecessors. There are no low budget advertisements promoting ‘English speaking courses’ in his future. No humiliating interviews with Karan Thapar. He doesn’t need to participate in a reality show where he gets paid to be the butt of everyone’s jokes. The BCCI will not dare to even try to rein him in if he does something they don’t approve of. Even troll king and the talking tiger from ‘Life of Pi,’ Bal Thackeray, was more than respectful when criticizing his fellow exhibitor of Marathi machismo.

Living in India and not having had a conversation about cricket is like being a white person in a Karan Johar movie and not being racist. It’s easier to go along than spend the next few hours explaining to people that you don’t think that spending five days glued to a teevee screen watching 22 guys play a sport invented by bored royals so that they could pretend to be athletic might not be the optimum utilization of your time. Being able to fake a conversation about cricket also prevents you from being lynched because in this country, there is no other topic of discussion more important than cricket. We pretend that there is nothing wrong when the whole country stops any productive activity because some people are playing a match, somewhere. We are constantly fed bullshit narratives about how cricket “unites” the country and for a few hours, people take a break from making life miserable for each other in exchange for shouting cricketing advice at the teevee/radio/website hoping that the professionals playing on the field are able to hear them. We have to revere everything that happens on the field and worship those who play on it. Whether it’s movies, politics or sports, India doesn’t accept mere humans. We only have time for Gods.

Now please excuse me while I download a Nintendo emulator on my computer so that I can play all my favourite childhood games and try to recapture my youth.

Down and Out on Hope Street

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Human beings love new beginnings. It makes for a great personal narrative! We want to leave our past behind and not be bogged down by it. We want to be a better person than we currently are. We want to have the perfect reply when confronted with a taunt -embedded with the truth - masquerading as joke. But we couldn’t think of anything at that time and now it’s too late. We can’t really change the past but we can always imagine living an inspirational life in a distant future. And there is nothing more inspiring than ‘a fresh start.’ And there is no better time than December to take stock of your life and convince yourself to begin anew. We seem to think that the year has only eleven months and December is the waiting period between the current year and the next. A whole month of being in limbo. December is like the child nobody cares about because he neither gets good marks nor can he play any sports.

There is something about December that turns everybody contemplative. We like to imagine that we spent the year actually doing something other than meandering through our life wondering where it all went wrong. So we try to quantify our whole year. We start making lists of everything that we’ve done. And coincidently, whatever we liked turns out to be the best the year had to offer. Top 10 things I could have done to improve my life instead of watching everything put out by HBO. Five things my grandmother said that were racist but I pretended were adorable. Thirty Thousand things I wanted to tell my boss but couldn’t because he’s a raving asshole and is the reason I die a little, everyday.

There is something about December which makes people overestimate their capacity for self-improvement. We make promises to ourselves that we know we won’t be able to follow through. And yet we still make them because hope is a flame which never burns out. Suddenly, we think that we’ll rise above our own mediocrity to start losing weight/quit smoking/stop re-tweeting compliments. We don’t want to begin the new year as ourselves. We want to spray some magic dust and turn into someone better. Even though the odds of that happening are even more remote than Sachin Tendulkar ever playing another one-day international, but hey, stranger things have happened, right?

There is something about December which makes everyone nostalgic. Suddenly, every old memory is drudged out and even people in their early twenties remember their childhood with a loud sigh and a fond head tilt. Did you really have the best time of your life when you were living in a socialist dystopia with one teevee channel, no internet and a twenty year wait for a telephone? Are you really sure that everything tastes better with a dash of poverty and a smidgen of desperation? Let’s face it. Everything seems better in hindsight. In reality, your childhood sucked. What’s so great about being a child anyway? Everyone tells you what to do; you have to pretend to feel guilty while blowing away your parent’s money on useless things like textbooks & tuition and you have to bribe your driver to make sure he doesn’t talk about all your recreational trips to your neighbourhood ‘Wine & Beer’ shop. If I wanted someone else to make rules for my life, I would have joined a religion.

There is something about December that turns everybody sincere. Maybe it’s the realisation that they’re getting closer to death or that they’ve already had a drink or two but even the most cynical people will sit beside you at a party and tell you about their hopes and dreams until you realize you’ve been listening to them drone on for an hour and you fake a phone call to get out of the conversation. It’s like everyone is going through the existential angst that you usually hear about in a Coldplay song.

There is something about December that makes people want to share its end with the whole world. For some reason a large percentage of people prefer to bring in the new year in a room full of strangers, eating cold food and drinking watered down alcohol, while being “entertained” by out of work performers. Sounds as exciting as a hernia operation! So many plans are made to be broken. And most of the time, even if you try to follow through on them, you end up not reaching your destination because of a traffic jam and you begin your fresh start with a road full of hostile, resentful strangers while trying to assure your empty stomach that you will be at your destination shortly as you calmly rue the day you decided to buy the tickets to your local rotary club’s “rocking” new year bash featuring some generic Punjabi pop song yeller. You sit there and contemplate how this came about and where it all went wrong.

Just like Mother Nature intended.

Have a great new year! Probably going to be just like the last one, but, whatever.