The Great Indian Presidential Bash

(A shorter version of this appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Breakout the bubbly, toss the confetti and release some white doves. The Republic of India is about to elect a new President!

Not that most of the country gives a crap about the office of the President. Nobody besides news junkies and ‘general knowledge enthusiasts’ is paying any attention to this contest. The thing is, the President doesn’t really have any real power. He or she is not even the premier freeloader in our long list of freeloaders system of governance. We don’t really want to learn the names of people who we can’t blame for the malaise that has taken over our lives. The Prime Minister, yes. The buck stops with him! He is supposed to be the real leader of the government. The first among equals. So we can easily blame him. But the President? One of the main reasons that position exists is because our founders wanted to show a big, democracy-shaped middle finger to the British Empire. Look at you England, with your fake monarch wearing stolen jewellery. Real democracies have semi-elected titular heads-of-state! Suck on that, subservient realms of the commonwealth.

Most Presidents in our country have occupied that august office after a hard fought victory on ‘India’s Got Sycophants.’ The rules of this contest are simple: if you’re a good sycophant with at least a couple of independent opinions, you get to be a Rajya Sabha MP. If you’re a really good sycophant – with no independent thought process whatsoever and a disturbingly eager need to please – you get to become Governor of a state. And the most sycophantic of them all – a person who not only is incapable of having a pre-approved brain fart but doesn’t even go to the bathroom without prior permission – advances to the final round and gets to be President.

This year they must have raided an old people’s home for contenders to the Presidency. People were coming out of the woodwork to declare their candidacy. Though tragic Satyajit Ray movie character Pranab Mukherjee was the favourite, for a minute there it looked like his ambition would be thwarted again. Even though he had been campaigning for months, the sphinx of 10 Janpath remained unmoved. She only belatedly agreed to his candidacy when Mamta Banerjee showed once again that she is three colours short of a full palette. While PA Sangma continued to lose even the last shreds of his dignity, Abdul Kalam allowed himself to be used as a political football again.  Now that we’re done with the five-yearly fake national wankfest over him, the next time he will be all over the news is when someone frisks him at an airport. Hell, even the angriest man on Indian television, Ram Jethmalani, threatened to nimbly sprint for President. Jethmalani, of course, is the standard bearer for lost causes. He has fought and lost more contests than an IPL team led by Sourav Ganguly. In fact, he even lost the online contest for ‘the drunkest Indian’ thanks to some last minute strategic voting by confused Narendra Modi fans.

Since our press corps are always gunning for a crisis – these are the same people who literally spend days arguing over hypothetical events which most of the time never even happen – so if they get a whiff of even a remote possibility of a real political dogfight, they’re going to suck that puppy dry. They turned this boring contest into a staged WWE spectacle. Pranab Mukherjee was transformed into Hulk Hogan: all hype and no substance. A man respected and lauded for his achievements, even though he has spent his whole career sucking up to his boss and trying to stop others from getting ahead. Abdul Kalam was Ric Flair: a man who has achieved a lot in his life but refuses to retire gracefully and keeps showing up to the arena even though no one wants him anymore. PA Sangma was the Brooklyn Brawler: a man who only exists to lose the match and make the other guy look stronger than he actually is.

Even the left parties made a cameo appearance in this extravaganza. The left parties are the Ultimate Warrior of Indian politics: they could have almost been in the main event, but thanks to their own warped sense of reality, they are so far away from the mainstream that no one even remembers who they are.  

The winner of this Presidential summer slam was Pranab Mukherjee. Let this be a lesson to all the children – if you’re a sycophant to enough members of the Gandhi clan, if you spend your whole life thwarting your ambition and then use all your surrogates in the media to spend months promoting your candidacy – then you too can ascend to the highest office in the land!

In all this hullaballoo, we might miss giving the current occupant a proper send-off. Although in a gallery full of individuals even history will not bother to remember, Pratibha Patil stands out as ordinary, I, for one will miss President God Whisperer. The hilarious thing about making an alleged conwoman President is the blatantly hilarious highway robbery she continues to (allegedly!) commit. I’d be more outraged at the stadium sized house she planned to build, or her outrageously inappropriate foreign jaunts in which she took along everyone who even shared a small atomic fraction of her DNA, but living in this country if there is one thing I have learned, it’s that if you can’t arrest them and put them in jail, at least make terribly unfunny jokes about them.

Every time the Presidential elections roll around, one is reminded of what a strange fellow once said, never have so many fought for something of so little value. Why does anyone want to be President anyway? You have no real duties. People come to you with complaints you have no powers of addressing. The government will saddle you with clemency applications which are a political time bomb. However, you can pretty much do whatever you want while somebody else pays for it. You get to tour the world like a person of actual importance. You get to live in one of the largest palaces in the world. You get to host people who actually are capable of re-making the world. You can get every useless member of your family a job for life. And you get a salary while you do all this.

Wait; is it too late to throw my hat in for consideration?

If Nick Clegg is Obama 2.0, then Gordon Brown is definitely Joe Biden!

 
O Blimey! We are in serious shite now!

The British are still having elections!

Things got terribly exciting for the British journalists yesterday when Gordon Brown committed a ‘gaffe’.

He was talking to a sweet old lady (sweet by British standards. In Britain anybody who doesn’t get drunk and beat up their husbands or have bad teeth is referred to as ‘sweet’.) who asked him “All these eastern Europeans are coming in, where are they flocking from?”.

Instead of answering her by saying “East Europeans? They come from Africa, of course!” or telling her to shut her gob, the Prime Minister said some boilerplate about immigration and then asked her about her grandchildren.

Well, that was that.

Afterwards, while heading back to his car, the following happened:

But Mr Brown was still wearing a microphone provided by Sky News, which recorded him turning to his aide Justin Forsyth, and pronouncing: “That was a disaster.”

He added: “Whose idea was that?” He then blamed “Sue” – Sue Nye his longest serving aide and friend.

He was then asked by the aide what Mrs Duffy had said.

He replied: “Everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour.”

Basically he called his whole base (working middle class who are worried about “them immigrants stealing me job” ), bigots.

Although, when I first heard that Gordon Brown had called someone a bigoted lady, I thought he had run into David Cameroon. 

This is probably the first mildly interesting thing to happen to Gordon Brown.

Now, since anything that happens in this election has to be compared to the 2008 US Presidential elections, because that was the only election that happened on earth ever, the sweet racist lady is now Britain’s Joe the Plumber. Damn. I hate that guy!

Anyways, sweet racist lady, Mrs. Gillian Duffy, now has an agent. and stands to profit to the tune of £250,000.

That will buy her a lot of East European maids, won’t it?

Strangely, for the first time, all the brown people in Britain are going “Wait, someone said something racist and it wasn’t about one of us? That’s a bloody miracle!” In fact, the were missing racism so much they decided to go to the airport, just to be racially profiled, for old times sake.

While the rest of the world does something important, it's election season in England!

   From L to R: Peter Pan, Gandalf  the Grey and the Wizard of Oz

Everyone in England has got their knickers in a knot these days. No, not because some rogues in some far-off colony want their independence, like in the good old days, but because in three weeks they have to stop drinking for a bit and go to a bloody voting booth and caste their votes to elect one of those sorry arse politicians to the sodding parliament.

In three weeks, Britain might even have a shiny, new Prime Minister!

Now, they had a brilliant idea. To have a debate on teevee, with all the candidates, just like they do in America. Thankfully, they didn't take other ideas from American Democracy like having a two-year election for a four year term or choosing Vice-Presidential candidates through the reality show Project Running-mate.

The British debates were boring, compared to their American counterparts. Not one person winked or shouted "Drill, baby, drill" and apparently, they don't give a broken tooth about Joe the Plumber! And no one was offering a kilo of rice at 2 bucks a pop. 

Here are the top three contenders:

1. Gordon 'Big Ears' Brown

He is the current incumbent Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. This is the first election the Labour is fighting under his leadership. The last three were fought with Tony Blair at the helm. Unfortunately for him, neither is he as charming nor can he lie as well as Blair. Analysts predict that he is going to lose badly, because the economy is shite and after thirteen years of Labour, the people want a change (Yeah, you're gonna be hearing this word a LOT. Better get used to it). He has a huge man-crush on President Barack Obama and wants to bone him very badly, as all British PM's are constitutionally mandated to have unrequited feelings for their American counterparts.  If he loses the election, he'll probably retire into some remote British village with his wife & kids and open up a bed & breakfast, since due to his insanely boring personality, he really can't make that much money on the lecture circuit. 

2. David 'David' Cameroon

He is the front-runner for this election, and current leader of the opposition. It is his election to lose. And since he has been acting like he already won the election since last year, he is probably going to come up short. He is a 'compassionate conservative', which means a conservative who does not say racist things in public. If he were writing this blog post, he would have thanked you for reading it. He would have also reminded you that he loves all minorities, even those poor, gross Lesbians who live down the street. He understands how difficult this economic recession has been for everyone, as he has had to fire his fourth butler too, which has made things very difficult at Cameroon manor. Thank the lord for his own personal fortune, otherwise he would have had to live like an immigrant. Which would have been an absolute travesty! Unthinkable, innit?

 3. Nick 'The Kidd' Clegg

As the leader of the Liberal-Democrats, he is the 'wild-card' in this whole shebang. Due to Gordon being such a fuck up, and David being, well, David, experts are predicting that Clegg might be instrumental in deciding who forms the next government, because the election results might yield a hung parliament. Nick is famous for always spewing facts at anyone who cares (or for that matter anyone who doesn't care). He is sort of a wanker. That is why no one in England wants to go drinking with him, as constantly hearing about how mass-marketed alcohol beverages are causing malnutrition in Somalia is a real bugger. I mean, for fucks sake, all a bloke wants to do after a hard day's work is sit in a pub, make some jokes about how the fat chick flirting with the bartender looks like Wayne Rooney and watch some bleeding Rugger on the telly, so shut your pie hole and pass the crisps.    

Anyways, after yesterday's debate, everyone and their grandmother thinks that Nick Glegg is going to be the Prime Minister, because not only is he supremely confident & speaks 'truth to power', all the grannies and single mums in England want to take him home and do things to him which you absolutely do not mention in polite society. Also, since he talked about hope & change, he is being billed as the next Obama because after Nov 4, 2008 every election has to have it's OWN Obama, otherwise no one will care. Thanks, Barry, for ruining all elections, forever. 

Gordon Brown got some good reviews too because he managed to get in a few zingers and was also endorsed by Dr. Who (aka The Doctor. Because I don't want to get hate mail from those people.)  and the only working person in the whole of England, Harry Potter's mom.

These three got another two debates before they finally go to the polls after which everyone in Britain can go back doing whatever they do, like spreading sex diseases through the bookface and then stabbing each other to death.

Ah, Blighty. What would we do without you?

(No don't answer that. It was supposed to be a rhetorical question.)

Lastly, if anyone manages to 'steal' this election, just remember, I AM NOT GOING TO CHANGE MY TWITTER DISPLAY PIC.

Right, ho!

 

[All pictures via Reuters]