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.

Welcome to the Offense Economy

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the most irritating human habits is to inform a person who you have just bumped into about a changed physical attribute.  “You’ve gained weight!,” or “your hair’s gone all white” or “your face looks a bit orange, Speaker Boehner.” Its one of the most unhelpful things one can say to another person. Thank you for noticing that I’ve grown all fat! All the clothes that don’t fit and the large amounts of food I’ve been consuming didn’t tip me off. Oh, my hair’s grown white, you say? I seemed to have missed that! No, it didn’t cause my mid-life crisis at all. That’s not the reason I bought a sports car and started dating my daughter’s classmate. I’m just doing research on being a douchebag for an article I’m writing.

That unhelpful insight was provided by the Indian twittersphere this week. All of a sudden, everyone seemed to have discovered that we’re turning into an intolerant country. Which was strange, because it wasn’t as if on Friday we were a beacon of freedom and tolerance and then, on Monday, we were suddenly transported into the dark ages. We have been travelling down this road for many years. The fake assassins from the Mumbai underworld did not kill free speech, we did. 

Here is how this offense economy works: Take a passage in a book or a scene in a movie or a crude interpretation of a painting. Pick a slow news day, hire a mob, make some noise and voila, a star is born! As if on cue, every other actor in the farce will be ready with their lines. The news channels will play the tapes of the protest on loop, interspersed with condemnation of the object of offense by politicians of all hues. The BJP members will blame the government and call for its resignation. The government ministers will pick straws and the unfortunate loser who draws the shortest will be sent to make a statement condemning the creator of the object of offense and caution against ‘offending people’s sentiments.’ Javed Akthar and Mahesh Bhatt will defend the creator of the object of offense, first on the phone and then in the studio. The Congress party will issue their own condemnation, and one of its patronizing spokesperson will go on each prime time news show and will alternate between sneering at the anchor and inaccurately quoting Shakespeare to condemn the object of offense and its creator while maintaining the logical fallacy that their party supports artistic freedom. The news anchors will be too busy grandstanding to actually cross question their ‘guests.’

After a week of un-helpful & inconclusive discussions, the cycle of outrage will head to all the weekend shows. The same celebrities & politicians will be called to sit among non-celebrities and the same arguments will be made once again. Then someone in the audience will say something emotional & patriotic (e.g. "be an Indian first") which will be useless, bullshit-y and will garner lots of applause. The anchor will then close the show on a sombre and surprisingly happy note. Afterwards, everyone will go back home, until they are called on to do the same thing all over again.

Our government also made us proud this week by registering an official complaint against a Jay Leno joke. The reply they got from the US state department was the diplomatic version of ‘stop being such a whiny little asshole.’ Our national self-image is so weak that we get offended by everything! We’re like the old patriarch in an Indian joint family who insists that everybody else listen to him. And everybody does, not out of any real respect, but just to humour the old man. We never put our weight behind anything positive. When countries torture & kill their citizens, we dismiss it as an ‘internal matter,’ but when it comes to scoring brownie points with a domestic constituency, we’re ready to even interfere in their court proceedings. If our foreign policy were a sitcom character, it would be the neurotic nerd who is in need of constant validation from his friends.

The offense economy is a dangerous game of poker in which each iteration of fame seeking offense-tards will try to outdo the ones that came before. We see your M.F. Husain and raise you a Salman Rushdie.

What we need is for someone to call their bluff.