The Anatomy of a Moment

(An abridged version of this article first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

We never heard the door open. Swati and I had been going at it for more than two hours. We were having so much fun that we did not see her Mother entering the room. Swati’s mother shrieked when she saw what we were up to. She told us to stop and we did as we were told. She slapped her daughter and threw me out of her house. As I walked home, I wondered what we had done wrong. After all, we were only doing what kids our age have done for centuries. It came so naturally to us! And if we had done something wrong, why was Swati the only person to be punished, when both of us were consensual partners to the alleged crime?  Of course, when you’re eight, you don’t realize that gender politics enables people to find something sinister in even a silly game of ‘house.’  (Hey, it was the 80’s! Time passed really slow back then. It was either this or watching bored doordarshan anchors give farming advice).

Whenever I hear bigots like NCW chairperson Mamta Sharma blame the victims in the aftermath of horrific incidents, I am filled with the same thought that I had on that lonely walk home almost three decades ago: But the victims did nothing wrong!  According to ‘Logic for Assholes 101,’ the victim of the assault must have done something to bring this upon herself. She must have dressed provocatively! Remember ladies, If you don’t cover yourself properly then you’re just tempting people to invade your space and touch you inappropriately. If you go in front of a man dressed in a skirt, do you expect him not to rape you? Ha! Men who rape are fine upstanding members of their community who are blinded by a woman in a skirt to such an extent that they lose control of their mental faculties and automatically start raping anything they can get their hands on!

Maybe it’s the pubs! These dens of depravity which dare to serve decadent western values along with each portion of chicken wings. It is because of them that girls today know more about different types of Tequila than about different ways to cook eggplant. Only a person who hasn’t ever been to a pub or nightclub would say that. They base their opinion on what they see in the media. When the leading female protagonist of a movie or a teevee show goes to a club, something bad always happens. Some guy will spot her, drug her and then poke her with his penis.  And then everyone around her will throw a hissy fit and blame her for everything. She will then proceed to get pregnant (what are the odds!) and become the shame of her family until the valiant male protagonist - who was silently brooding in the corner until now - will offer to marry her. Or she will find herself waking up naked next to a black guy whilst having no recollection of the events of the previous night. (In a Hindi movie, that’s when you know a woman has gone too far. When she intercourses a black drug dealer. This way, we’re able to simultaneously dehumanize two sets of people: women and drug dealers). The moral of story is that going to any place which has strangers and alcohol will ultimately lead to rape.

Maybe we’re just old-fashioned! We prefer our women to realize they are second class citizens and were sent to this earth to cook, clean and put out whenever their husband wants to fall asleep on top of them. It’s our culture! No! You’re not old fashioned; you’re a bigot. Old-fashioned people collect vinyl records or still subscribe to the yellow pages. Bigots use “blindly aping western values” as a code for saying “Put down that drink, throw away that cigarette, and head back home, you filthy whore!”

We rarely assign responsibility where it really lies: on the men who commit such crimes or who contribute to turning any place into a toxic environment unsafe for women. Everything is dismissed with a simple sweep of boys will be boys! You can be as inconsiderate as you want to other human beings as long as you can pee standing up! Hey, ladies, if God wanted you to have freedom and the ability to make decisions affecting your own life, then he would have given you a useful, nifty appendage - instead of whatever gross ladyparts you currently possess - which most of the time would function as your primary brain.

A couple of years ago, a best-selling author who claims to be a ‘youth icon’ was handing out dating advice to young men who were having trouble in the search for a companion. However, he did not extend this privilege to women because according to him, all a woman has to do is say make herself available for dating purposes and then men will flock to her like worker bees flock to their Queen. Because women can’t be be horny, needy, ugly, geeky, emotionally unavailable, unfit for human companionship. They’re simple creatures who must be spoken about in patronizing terms! According to this douchebag, the best way to build a permanent residence in a women’s heart is to irritate her. Pull her ponytails and she will literally marry you on the spot!  If you have feelings for her, irritate her. If you really like her, quit your job and follow her around wherever she goes. If she calls the police, she probably likes you back and wants you to follow her even more. Do not stop, continue to follow her around and this time, make obscene gestures. And if you really, really love her, just go ahead and punch her in her face. Nothing says "I love you long time" like a broken frikin' jaw!

Once, in violation of the Geneva convention against torture, I was made to witness a Hindi teevee show. During a particular harrowing scene, a woman’s face was being blackened by a group of other, larger, angry women. Apparently, her crime was “stealing” a married woman’s husband. Because that’s always the woman’s fault! The men are just like footballs who can be kicked around by various women. They don’t want to have an affair! In fact, they’re being forced to have sex against their will by the hot lady on whom they conveniently always had a crush!

Perhaps that is the greatest trick the patriarchy ever pulled. Convincing successive generations of women to be it’s enforcers.

It’s the law, stupid!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifty Shades of Brown

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Famous teevee channel for old and censored shows, Star World India, is currently in the middle of broadcasting the latest season (this is a rare event; the words “latest season” and “Star World India” being used in the same sentence!) of Masterchef Australia. This is one of the most watched shows on Star World India because it involves ordering around people making the food and then being an unappreciative asshole when they present the final product. Finally a show on teevee most Indian men can identify with!

This season Star World’s marketing department has given us another reason to watch the show. The show finally has a contestant of Indian origin! So all their promos about the show are centred around said contestant, a Ms. Dalvinder Dhami. Because they know that the only thing – other than badly recreated dramatic representations of real life crimes or fake reality shows about people torturing each other for no fame and mild fortune – that we love to see on teevee is a brown person make it in white people la-la land! And this Masterchef contestant is going to be very popular. She’s a professional woman sharing her three kids, her husband (by arranged marriage!) and house with her parents-in-law. She is like every popular, ‘prim and proper’ female soap opera protagonist on Star Plus.

Unfortunately, she got eliminated from the show because of her inability to make a Greek salad. We have failed you again, King Porus. Thousands of years later and we still get foiled by the Greeks! Damn you, descendants of Alexander. Why couldn’t you have been happy with eating a ‘green salad’ like normal people? This is why you have no money, Greece. Because not only do you insist on fancy ingredients for even inconsequential parts of the meal, you also keep breaking your plates after you finish it. 

When she was eliminated, Ms. Dhami not only lost the title of Masterchef, she also lost her impending ‘Indian of the Year’ awards that our news channels would have bestowed upon her had she won. Now, instead of gracing Indian Idol with her presence and being felicitated by Anu Malik as a ‘true Indian’ – even though the last person in her family to set foot in the country was born more than a hundred years ago – she now has to remain contented with being recognized and mobbed at the very Indian weddings she is going to cater.

We love to cheer anyone with a remote connection to us even before we ask if that person wants to be hero worshipped or not. Not everybody wants to be the representative of India’s ‘soft-power,’ which is carefully taking over the world one reality show at a time. People like Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Jindal was the first Indian-American politician to become the Governor of an American state. But Bobby Jindal feels the same way about being Indian like Mitt Romney feels about being a moderate Republican. They both pretend that it never happened even in the face of indisputable evidence.

Bobby never fails to remind his constituents and pretty much everybody else he meets that he is just like them. Just another normal! He also doesn’t fail to recount the lucky break his parents got when they escaped to America from their poor frail home in Punjab where fifty people shared a single room apartment and when you went outside to the bathroom you had to sing while you occupied it because locks were a western concept!

When Obama held his first state dinner in honour of the Indian Prime Minister, Bobby Jindal was one of the prominent invited guests. While everybody else dressed in their best exotic Indian regalia, Bobby Jindal and his wife both came dressed like rich hicks from Small Town, USA. Really, guy? You’re named after a movie character portrayed by Dimple Kapadia! You do know that you’re brown on the outside, don’t you, Bobby? The last time I saw a person going to such desperate lengths to deny who he is, a certain scientologist was jumping on Oprah’s couch while declaring his love for Katie Holmes.

It’s okay to be Indian now, Bobby! We’re in these days! Everyone loves us now even if they keep asking us to fix their computer! We’re so popular that lovable douchebag and human wikipedia Aaron Sorkin included an Indian-American character in his latest libtard fantasy teevee series (through which Sorkin speaks truth to stupid while being mean to women). We might not have the roughish charm of the British or the sexual openness of the French or the raw, suppressed cold war resentment of the Russians, but we will always own awkwardness. Be yourself, Bobby. And who knows! Maybe one day you might even be the first openly-Indian President of the United States of America! If that ever happens, Arnab Goswami will be so happy that everything in a 100 kilometre radius around him will be deluged in jizz.

Speaking of overreacting, our national discourse this week consisted of discussing the Time Magazine cover which called Manmohan Singh an underachiever! Great insight, Time! Only in India can people take something which has fewer readers than LK Advani’s blog at face value. Who else would know more about the zeitgeist than a magazine which, a few weeks ago, had an over-age toddler suckling on his Mom’s breast on its cover? Beats me!

We still celebrate every non-achievement an Indian makes in foreign lands and/or are upset by negative foreign press because we put so much cache in what others think of us. Specially those who live in the great, big, white hope. We are constantly seeking validation from other father figure countries. Our country has more daddy issues than a ‘Playboy Playmate’ dating Hugh Hefner. 

The thing is, we haven’t arrived until we stop trying to prove that we have. It is a terrible state of existence if you spend all your time trying to meet someone else’s expectations of who you should be.

Hey, if you don’t believe me, ask Bobby.

Hundred Percent or Bust!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Usually in July, the monsoons help colleges all over the country piss on the hopes and dreams of recent high school graduates. This year, since the monsoons are delayed thanks to a letter written by Subramanian Swamy asking the Himalayan Mountains to block any clouds of foreign origin, the colleges had to perform this task alone. And, as always, the colleges performed the task with enough cruelty to pass this test with flying colours, unlike the students whose applications they rejected.

Every year as we hear about cut-off percentages hovering between the 99 to 100 percentile zones, we try to have a trite national debate over the state of education in the country. Even though we’ve all contributed to the boiling down of the essence of a thirteen year education into a double digit percentage, we somehow seem to be surprised to see our handiwork in action. Look what people who’re not us have done! How did this happen? All we did was pressurize our children to compete with others like an element in a Darwinian equation fighting for survival. What do you mean asking them to get a hundred percent or die trying is not good parenting?  

We teach children that their life’s mission should be to lead a zombie-like existence wherein the only thing they should dedicate their energy to is to getting a perfect score in their exams. Don’t try to be creative! Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t look for things outside the syllabus. Don’t read chapters your teachers aren’t comfortable teaching you. You don’t have to understand it; you just have to learn it!

We make our children define their self-worth by their marks. People who get near perfect or perfect scores are treated like royalty by parents and teachers. If you get good marks life will be so good that even the air you breathe will not have been sullied by the inferior nostrils of someone who has never even been in any honour roll! No need to talk to your friends, they only want to distract you from your goal!

People are obsessed with getting perfect or near-perfect scores because these are important for students to get into a ‘prestigious college.’ Even though the most important lessons in college are learnt outside the classroom, which college you go to does have an impact on your future. For example, it helps determine the level of douchiness you will exhibit for the rest of your life.

While our prestigious institutions are busy churning out alumni who spend the rest of their lives producing large number of badly written campus novels, there is a whole industry built around trying to exploit the people who want to get into them. From the neighbourhood tuition centres who charge an exorbitant amount of money to ‘guarantee’ admission into one of these institutions; to touts who promise to get you in if you reward them with a cut of the ‘donation’ you plan to give to your favourite educational institution.

We need good colleges for everyone. Even for those whose don’t get ‘good’ marks in high school. We cannot leave their education to pontytail-ed conmen – whose only purpose of existence is to raise their own profile while they fleece large swaths of students who join their diploma shop – to fill the gap.  Or to fake foreign universities with prestigious sounding names which only exist on websites filled with stock photos. (I’m looking at you, Belford 'University.)

There should be more actual options for people who want to pursue things that interest them (like literature or alcohol). Like me in college, they might just scrape by the passing mark by pulling an all-nighter, but, hey, all’s well that ends well! 

Come to think of it, maybe I should open my own college and let people study whatever they want.

Will you sign up if I offer free laptops and a diploma from a fancy college in England?

Don’t break my glass house, bro!

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Everybody’s favourite failed state and South Asia’s #1 source of terrorism and the sort of music which makes you want to rip your heart out, throw it in the air and shoot it with an AK-47 just to make yourself feel better, was having a ‘crisis of democracy’ again. Pakistan has had more crises of democracy than the number of dossiers the Indian government has sent them.

The Pakistani Supreme Court thought that the best way to preserve democracy was to kick it in the nuts and bloody it’s face with a sledgehammer. Prime Ministerial careers were dying faster than a North Korean rocket. Just like a superhero franchise losing popularity, Pakistan rebooted its government and appointed a new – allegedly corrupt – Prime Minister. What are the odds! If a guy who looks like Ratan Tata mated with Killer Khalsa cannot restore the trust of the people in democracy, I don’t know who can.

Speaking of failed states, Greece, the birthplace of democracy and toga parties, also got over it’s weird Nazi phase and elected a semi-coherent government. Since the new government is made of coalition partners diametrically opposed to each other, this bodes well for the Euro. Because if there is one thing coalition governments are good at, it’s taking tough, unpopular decisions.

Which brings us to Egypt. For the first time in modern history, Egypt has an almost-popularly elected President who is not beholden to the army. Since he belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, right wing nutjobs all over the world are wetting their pants in both fear and gleeful anticipation depending on their chosen theocracy of allegiance. Are you saying that a ruthless dictator supported by the United States who was lording over a middle eastern country with an iron hand and who – among other things suppressed religion, and was overthrown by a revolution led by young people – has been replaced by religious parties? If only history had given us some indication that this would happen!

People presume that just because they ‘liked’ that photo of all the people gathered in Tahir Square and re-tweeted actual revolutionaries, that they have a say in who Egypt elects as President. They don’t! It’s like we’re telling them, Hey Egypt, you can have a democratically elected President as long as we get to approve who it is! Even if the new government goes south very soon, having had even a small say in the policies of the government which lords over them is a big step. The old system is not going to give way so easily. And democracy is not something you get right from the get-go. You’re always striving to be better at it. Democracy is the ability to choose which road you want to pave with your good intentions while you lazily saunter towards hell.

Back home in India, we still continue to try different combinations even after sixty four years. Our current head of government is a man who started playing ‘statue’ when he was five years old and till this day ignores everyone who asks him to ‘stop.’ The last President of America did not know his way around a pretzel. Democracy in Pakistan has had more false starts than a Scooter manufactured in the 80’s. Even people in Greece behave like amateurs when you send them to the voting booth. 

Dictatorships are like the iPhone. They may look good and have a controlled environment nearing perfection, but the slave labour required to achieve such a state remains invisible. Democracy is like Android. It’s messy, it’s chaotic, and nobody who makes it agrees with each other and it’s always in need of improvement.

Electing religious parties to government is not all that bad. Many countries have had governments led by parties which have religion deeply embedded into their DNA. It’s not like these governments started killing members of other . . .  

Uh-oh.

Be afraid, Egypt.

Be very afraid.

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

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ladies & Gentlemen, your new Messiah will see you now

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Every time the new Aamir Khan teevee show comes on, it divides people on twitter into two bitter groups. Although, that is not saying much. People on twitter are usually waiting for an opportunity to chastise each other, with each trending topic being just a small, disposable cog in the wheel. Every issue is just another way to prove that you are right, and those people opposing you, those straw men and women with their stupid arguments, are nothing but the scum of the earth. On twitter as in real life, everything is defensible, even the ‘band’ Creed, which all sane people agree is worse than a hundred Hitlers. (For those not familiar with this unit of measurement, a hundred Hitlers are equal to one Akshay Kumar movie.)

One group wants to mock everybody for their naiveté and the other one wants everybody to shut up, leave their cynicism for once, and give the man a chance to heal the world and make it a better place for you and for me and the entire human race. On one hand there are people who think that this is another publicity hound doing things to make himself feel better while hogging the limelight; on the other we have people who think he is finally highlighting issues we refuse to talk about and that he should be applauded for doing this instead of hosting yet another bollywood circle jerk.

One of the chief criticisms of the show is that the host takes a large amount of money to perform his duties. A lot of people seem to believe that a person with good intentions would do good things for free. However, anyone who has ever worked on even a small welfare project will tell you that volunteers who work for free are the most erratic.

When I was ‘studying’ in college, at the beginning of each one of my semesters, I used to promise myself that I would attend all the scheduled classes this time. I would even be seen attending a class on the first day of every semester. Thankfully, I would be back to my senses by the next day. For a teacher, spotting me in class used to be an event whose occurrence was rarer than the transit of a celestial body, and the next time they would be hearing from me would be either during the exams or after them, when I used to bribe them to give me more marks than I deserved.

Most people who like to ‘volunteer’ their time, do it with the same enthusiasm that I used to bring to rehabilitating my attendance record. When you’re doing something out of guilt or to make yourself feel better about yourself, your enthusiasm will wane as the going gets tough. Compensating people for their time, their hard work, their opportunity cost is one way of ensuring that their enthusiasm is maintained. A bribe to show up everyday, if you will. As I told one of my teachers when she chastised me for my not-so-exemplary attendance record, you get paid for this, I don’t. Even though she tried to get me suspended, she wasn’t successful because just like the majority of the people in this country, my college principal also needed a ‘small’ incentive to do the right thing. Or, to my benefit, to not do it.

Meanwhile, Aamir Khan has been turned into yet another saviour we were waiting for. The old ‘at least he is doing something!’  symptom of overcompensation for ignoring our problems. And that something instead of being a placeholder becomes a substitute for doing anything. You don’t actually have to do things anymore; the mere fact that something is being done is good enough.

Our whole culture is geared toward waiting for ‘the one.’ Our religions keep telling us that God is missing this crappy planet so much that he will be back one more time for shits, giggles and to use those fancy planning commission bathrooms everyone keeps raving about. A large amount of our movies which pretend to be about social causes are about how the lead protagonist was so burned by the system that he took revenge – by completely eradicating the systematic rot that has been gnawing away at the roots of this county for hundreds of years – and solved all our problems in three hours.

Last year, some well meaning folks in my neighbourhood were pulling a double whammy and going to hold a candelight march and ‘token hunger strike’ to support some vague campaign against black money. I asked them if they hated black money so much, why don’t they actually keep their accounts in order and pay tax on their real income? They looked at me with the bewilderment and disgust usually reserved for fiends who put a gun to a baby’s head and make it fingerbang a cute puppy. We have a system we don’t follow? Whose problem is it? Not mine! TELL SOME MAGSAYSAY AWARD WINNER TO RISE UP AND SAVE US!

There is going to be no messiah that is going to suddenly appear out of nowhere  to save us. While we keep waiting for one, shit keeps hitting the fan. You don’t go to war with the weapons you want, you go to war with the weapons you have. The solutions to our problems do not lie with one person. They lie with all of us. A serious person willing to solve our problems will never get ahead in our polity. They will remain on the sideline, writing well researched articles for academic journals.

You can’t order “good leaders” on the internet. You have to make them. We have to use the cynical a**holes who currently lord over us and get away with bloody murder (because they can!). We have to hold their feet to the fire. These people have no core and will go anywhere the blowing wind takes them. If we want better governance, if we want better law & order, if we want better management of our national resources, then we need to make our so called leaders do that. There are no free lunches. You don’t get things because you are entitled to them. You get them only if you fight for them.

If you think I’m right, please join the fight against rabid tokenism by ‘liking’ the Facebook group created solely to stem the growth of this epidemic.