How to Win Fake Friends and Pretend to Influence People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Free Speech

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Most of the time, whenever someone talks about supporting free speech in this country, they always end up following it with a qualifier. “I’m all for free speech, but we need to have some restrictions!” Even the constitution does the same thing. You can have freedom of speech and expression, but within reasonable restrictions. And that’s where the problem begins, when we leave those ‘reasonable restrictions’ up for interpretation. With each successive generation, the ‘reasonable restrictions’ keep expanding while the space for free speech & expression keeps getting narrower. You can take a walk in this park and get some fresh air, as long as you also breathe in all the toxic smoke coming in from the factory next to it.

This has been a banner year for all the free speech restrictionists. Whether it involves preventing writers from speaking at literary festivals, or stopping artists from displaying their wares. They even managed to turn something as mundane as posting something on the internet into an act of civil disobedience. Free speech is one of those things which are defined by absolutes. Either speech is free or it’s restricted. When you add a qualifier, it’s an invitation for other people to do the same.

The Internet has been one of the biggest battlefields in the war on free speech. Recently, when a couple of young adults were arrested for posting harmless updates on Facebook, the Minister of Communication and ‘India’s nanny,’ Kapil Sibal, said that he was quite saddened by the misuse of the IT act. He was shocked that a law put in specifically to suppress dissent, was being used to suppress dissent. That’s like putting a ‘for rent’ sign outside your house and then wondering where all the prospective tenants came from. He didn’t start the fire, he just wrote a vague piece of legislation which could be widely interpreted and misused even by those who apply the law using the most stringent standards. When you don’t trust another party with the law you’ve made, then there is something wrong with your law. You don’t leave the door to the henhouse wide open and then get to pretend that you could never even imagine that the fox would go inside.

People like Dr. Eyebrows would like you to believe that the internet is one huge quagmire of filth from which they need to protect the innocent and the impressionable. They portray the internet as some huge lawless wasteland where anything goes; a wild, wild west where duels are fought by drowning your opponent in a quick stream of sarcasm and won by the first person to be compared with Hitler. They don’t use the internet themselves so they imagine it to be somewhat of a virtual Bangkok where temptation lurks in each corner.

What they conveniently miss is the Internet’s ability to correct itself. Most of the properties in this so called wasteland are owned by huge corporations whose interest resides in removing malicious content. Even Reddit, the ‘Uttar Pradesh’ of the internet, has removed content deemed inappropriate or malicious.

Of course our elected representatives are not big on discussions. They spend all their life shouting over each other, whether in Parliament or on teevee.

But what about us?

Free speech doesn’t just involve being able to say what you want. It also means being able to say what you want without being intimidated to take it back. It involves being able to write a book without being placed on the wrong side of an angry mob. Free speech means being able to question a national celebration of death without being questioned about your patriotism. It involves being able to have a character in your movie call a city by any name you want. Free speech means not throwing a tantrum on national teevee because someone on the internet was mean to you. It involves being able to hear things you don’t like, no matter how angry it makes you. Free speech means keeping all your ‘hurt sentiments’ to yourself.

I, for one, think that people need to be more tolerant of other’s opinions.

Hey, if you don’t believe me, ask all the people I blocked on twitter.

Dial Di for Delusion

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As India’s favorite insane asylum outpatient, Mamta Banerjee celebrated the first year of her reign of terror and darkness, the kind folks at Sardesai TV had a bright idea. They decided to stop shouting for a couple of minutes and hold a Q & A session with the newish overlord of West Bengal. And then, in a scenario which even a casual viewer of a badly plotted sitcom could foresee, during the session, the minute someone asked her a real question, Ms. Banerjee not only refused to offer an answer, but for good measure called the person asking the question a maoist (as you do!) and then walked out. It takes real talent to share a stage with Sagarika Ghose and still come out looking like the crazy one, but, if anyone can accomplish this arduous task, then it’s the Commie Crusher of Calcutta. This is what happens when you surround yourself with yes-men and don’t allow any contradictory opinion to even wander near your frontal lobe. Maybe if she left the padded room they keep her in once in a while there would be hope that maybe one day she would have a tiny grip on reality?

It seems that delusion is an important part of public life in this country.

Perhaps it is why human tub of lard and Information and Broadcasting minister Kapil Sibal was able to stand on the ‘sacred’ floor of parliament and be able to claim, with a straight face, that India is perhaps more liberal than even America or Western Europe. So liberal it hurts! So liberal that we ban books without reading them. So liberal that we send the most number of takedown notices to Google. So liberal that we deny visas to foreign journalists who are critical of our policies.  Maybe he actually does believe the constant obfuscation he offers in lieu of real answers?

Although that was nothing compared to the travesty that was the ‘celebration’ of the three years in government of the second iteration of the UPA. That is like throwing a party to commemorate that drunken night three years ago when you had a one night stand with a random person and they gave you syphilis. Though no one was surprised because this government has turned tone-deafness into an art form. Not only have they spent each excruciating day in the past three years muddling from one crisis to the next, they are so barren that every time some wayward ally threatens to pull the rug from beneath their feet, a small part of you kind of wants them to go ahead with their threat so that this mass of diseased puss pretending to govern the country for the past few years can finally be put out of its misery. Only a deluded party would look at the drubbing it received in the assembly elections held in the country’s biggest state and try to convince itself that it was not a repudiation of its policies; that it would have won the elections had it not been for infighting. That it decided to stay the course is a testament to the long distance relationship between reality and the leaders of the Congress party.

Of course, if we had a proper opposition they would capitalize on such brazen incompetence. However, our principal opposition party is made up of a rag-tag bunch of jokers - bereft of any ideas - who cannot even stand the sight of each other yet still persist with the pretension of being a cohesive unit only because of their unmitigated and naked lust for power.  An opposition party which continues to offer nothing but empty, unproductive gestures instead of any legitimate debate or any useful policies. The opposition parties in this country are so weak and helpless that they forcibly ceded their space to desi Robin Hood and his merry band of tax evading, expense fudging, and invective throwing minions.

Now, nobody currently embodies the collective delusion of our political class more than P.A. Sangma. A politician who was important for a few minutes in 1996, and is on what many observers would describe – if they want to be really, really kind -  as a quixotic quest to be President. In his shamelessness, he has even managed to sell out the very people whose interests he claims to care for. According to Sangma, letting him mangle English words for five years in Rashtrapati Bhavan would right all the wrongs of the past. The profound distance the North East has felt from the mainland, the years of being ignored by the central government, it would all be fixed if they make a guy who even members of his own party aren’t aware of, the President. The most incredulous claim he has made is that a President Sangma would bring down naxalism and hurt the insurgency. Yes, a President Sangma would also find a cure for cancer, fix the imbalanced gender ratio, singlehandedly bring an end to the corruption that ails the country and make it rain cute puppies and edible confetti all the time.

Which brings us back to Mamta Banerjee. She ended her week by leading a protest against the government. This was an act of such bravado that it caused a fissure in the space-time continuum. Even though she is in government both at the centre and the state, she figured that the best plan of action would be to lead a procession against both these entities. Usually she is just judge, jury and executioner; however, this time she was both Chief Minister and the Leader of Opposition. There was even an awkward moment when she, in her capacity as chief minister, called herself, in her capacity as leader of opposition, a maoist.

Somewhere in famous people heaven, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are looking down on her and going “Even we can’t cure this.”

Eyebrow Olympians & Clerics: The Net is No Country for Old Men

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Last month, when the news broke that telecom minister and eyebrow Olympics gold medallist Kapil Sibal was trying to censor the internet, the twittersphere rose up in unison and protested. It was as if a million Manmohan Singhs were trying to move a rock by sending it multiple strongly worded letters. After all, twitter is for tilting at windmills.

These wounds were re-opened this week when the Delhi High Court warned search and social networking companies that if they don’t comply with its diktats, the court would block them like they do in China. The Indian twittersphere was exasperated! Trying to make us more like China! Who do these old fogies think they are, N Ram? They don’t realize that if we wanted some unelected, arbitrary authority to determine the boundaries of acceptability, we would have supported Anna Hazare’s fledgling political outfit. Somebody switch on the rusty Dell 486 sitting politely at their desks and show them that the internet is like a Cormac McCarthy novel: it’s no country for old men.

While the Delhi High court wanted to turn us into China, vapid television anchors turned to twitter to lament our growing similarity to Pakistan. Finding such tenuous similarity between two countries is as easy as finding a son of a deposed Nigerian prince who just needs your bank account number to turn you into a bona fide millionaire. Allow me to demonstrate: We’re similar to Italy because both our countries have renowned economists who, as head of state, preside over an establishment prone to corruption. We’re like Britain because a large amount of both our populations yearn for the glory of the past. We’re like Australia because bigots in both countries are prone to using ethnic slurs to taunt tourists from less developed parts of the world. We’re like America because both of our countries are home to a large amount of illegal immigrants who have come from a smaller, poorer neighbouring country. We’re like Japan because both of our countries treat washed-out hollywood hangers-on as entertainment gods. We’re like Afghanistan because both our cricket teams are currently struggling to win a match overseas.

Speaking of being lazy, we discovered this week that boycotting harmless human garden gnome Salman Rushdie is still a thing! Hadn’t everyone secretly decided to move on from that battle? In fact, our last international nightmare involving Rushdie was when he took to twitter to complain about being blocked from making a Facebook page. Sure, Facebook is evil too, but it’s still slim pickings for the man who fought and won a war of attrition against Ayatollah Khomeini.

Rushdie was scheduled to speak at a couple of sessions during the Jaipur Literature Festival being held this week. So when the high-priests of the Darul Uloom heard about his visit, they called for the central government to cancel Rushdie’s visa, even though he doesn’t actually need one to visit India. But when have facts deterred a fundamentalist bent upon proving that his religion has the biggest penis? Also, why are these high priests channelling American movie studios and rehashing stuff from the 80’s?  

Of course, now that UP is having an election to determine its next top statue model, and the Congress is practically grovelling for votes in that state–like a starlet in Mumbai who promises a horny producer that she’ll do anything to get her big chance–it needed to do something to appease the crazy people. Thus, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot, made some noises about the people of Rajasthan not wanting Rushdie to visit the state and then claiming that his government would not be able to provide adequate security to Rushdie. Firstly, we didn’t realize that Gehlot is just like the character Jim Carrey portrayed in Bruce Almighty, and can hear the thoughts of every person living in his state. Secondly, if his government cannot provide security to one single person, then what is the point of his government?

Not that any central or state government is interested in defending free speech even during non-election time. Most of them start shitting bricks at the mere thought of someone taking offence to something.

If we can't offend people who think a book of short stories written thousands of years ago contains instructions on how to live life in the 21^st century, then the terrorists have won.