We don’t need no stinkin’ FDI

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

It was déjà vu all over again. Manmohan Singh staked the future of his government on a policy measure. A regional party with a government in Bengal threatened to withdraw support unless the decisions was rolled back and then went ahead and withdrew it when the government refused. And the government was bailed out by the Samajwadi Party. It felt like we had seen the same sequence of events take place before. Now I know how people who watch a Madhur Bhandarkar movie feel.

There was also a lot of fake tension in the air and the oft-repeated drum of ‘mid-term elections’ was being beaten again. Everybody knew there was no chance of that happening, but it didn’t stop them from pretending that it can. There was a smörgåsbord of disingenuity to choose from. Teevee channels cut into their heated discussions about who would form the new government to show various groups of politicians exiting from each other’s houses while the b-roll displayed animated graphics about how many seats each party had in the Lok Sabha. Well placed newspaper articles seemed more interested in the third-front than the political parties who would actually constitute it. The only person who they were able to convince was ‘tragedy king’ LK Advani, who thought that all his efforts of sending positive vibes into the universe so that it may one day grant him his one wish were finally coming to fruition.

After flailing about for the past few years, taking one hilariously stupid decision after another and throwing everything they could think of at the wall in the hope that something sticks, the Congress was finally able to deliver a genuine one-two political punch to its opponents. The BJP, as always, was more clueless about what to do than a blind, legless kangaroo trying to manoeuvre a four-wheel drive. They were so disoriented, they even asked for a special session of Parliament so that they could disrupt it again. After that didn’t work, they brought out another useless political weapon from their arsenal, the ‘Bharat bandh.’ Apparently, the BJP wanted to send a message that it cares so much for the common man that it is going to make life difficult for him to protest against the government making life difficult for him. Blocking the roads, making people late for work, getting passengers stuck in trains and at the station, bullying people into not earning their daily wages, breaking shop windows; being an asshole towards people for no logical reason is great political strategy. Even the BJP’s current Indira Gandhi & future LK Advani, Narendra Modi, got into the mix. He made jokes about how the government’s decision about FDI in retail had been taken to benefit Italian businessmen. This ‘joke’ would have been hilarious if not for the fact that there are currently no Italian ‘retail chains’ clamouring to get into India. In fact, Italy is not exactly known for its ‘retail giants.’ And really, the central government is getting heat about foreign investment from the guy who has logged more frequent flier miles than Amelia Earhart touting his state as an attractive destination for foreign investment? Maybe he should talk more about how much he hates foreigners and their dirty neo-colonial money at the next ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summit.

The Congress & the TMC proved that they were no Ross & Rachel. Their ‘will they/won’t they’ tension was getting on everybody’s nerves. If Mamta Banerjee thought that the Congress would run to the airport singing “Please Don’t Go” to stop her from leaving like the last dozen times, she was mistaken. The Congress was sitting in its apartment, looking at photo albums of happier times, telling itself that it had to finally put an end to all the abuse. It could not spend its life with someone who treated it like a doormat.

Unfortunately, the Congress repeated past patterns by aligning itself with another high-maintenance regional ally, the Samajwadi Party. Its leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav told the press that even though he hates the Congress and thinks that it’s a blot on the face of humanity itself, he is still going to align with it because he wanted to keep ‘communal forces’ away from government. That familiar trope is always used by mortal enemies in Indian politics when they want to form governments together. Yeah, let’s get the old secular band back together again, for one more terrible performance. And who is more secular than the guy who claims to be an honorary 'Maulana’ so that everytime elections roll around he can patronisingly pander to the most fringe elements of a minority community?

Being made to witness the same things again and again. Now I know how people who watch a Madhur Bhandarkar movie feel.

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?

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.”

People like us are people too

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Parents all over the country sighed in relief this week when famous never-nudes at the I&B ministry issued a fatwa against broadcasting a national award winning movie because it was too ‘bold & mature’ (bureaucratic euphemism for ‘portrays sexual intercourse in terms other than the abhorrent sin it is’) for mainstream audiences. This was strange because the main message of the yanked movie was that if you sex too many people, everyone will shun you and you will end up killing yourself. This is also the kind of message most adults want to send to their children. Because if there is one thing most people in this country loathe, it’s talking about things with their children like a normal person. What should be a short, breezy conversation about the facts of life turns into an awkward conversation of epic proportions. Why talk and smooth things out to make life better for everyone involved when you can emotionally blackmail your children into suppressing what comes naturally to them?

The thing is, we need to protect our children from real life because we don’t want them to get strange ideas. This is a slippery slope. If you let them make decisions based on their own judgement, they will want to try things for themselves. Its better to pretend that things don’t exist rather than risk them doing stuff you don’t approve of. That is why nobody on those foreign shows on television eats beef and Brokeback Mountain was a documentary about drilling for minerals. Our national motto should be “Nothing to see here, move along.” Don’t you know that reality is against Indian culture?

Speaking of being alien to reality, rejected ‘Bengal Idol’ contestant and ongoing train-wreck Mamta Banerjee was busy trying to impress her fraternity members at the ‘South Asian Dictators Club’ while her government continued its slow troddle towards La La Land. This week, Bengal’s ‘eternal Chief Minister’ issued a diktat warning people against fraternizing with the CPM. Members of her party and their supporters & family members are not supposed to be friends with, be married to or even be seen in the vicinity of any known communists. The last time someone issued a warning like this, Germany was still two separate countries. Of course, since she lives in a padded room where no contrary thoughts are allowed to enter, a lot of the criticism online was directed towards her Man Friday, Derek O’Brien.

Everyone was surprised how this holy quizmaster could let them down by not speaking out against his paranoid boss. Maybe it’s an effect of putting my brain through various experiments which involved ‘medical marijuana’ (What? It was a sacrifice! For science!), I don’t remember O’Brien ever being an outspoken proponent of free speech. Do you think he hosted that quiz show because he cared about children knowing silly trivia?  

Did we assume that he would be a free speech ayatollah because he is one of the presumed future saviours of Indian democracy, the saintly ‘people like us.’ Its accepted gospel that unlike those poor, deprived souls from villages and other have-not communities who plunder the government’s treasury like a regular Mahmud Ghazni, people like us will stand up for what’s right! They would rather quit their posts than be a party to something utterly despicable. Wouldn’t we do that too, if we were in the same position? Even though in our own lives we do everything we don’t think other people should do. We lie because that’s a necessity of modern life. We bribe because that’s the cost of living in India. We break laws which don’t suit us because, let’s face it, most of them are ridiculous. We laugh at the horrible (and borderline racist) jokes our bosses make because we want to get ahead and playing the game is one way to do that. In this country, you give someone even the tiniest bit of power and they’ll show you who is boss. Everyone is the king of their castle, even if their castle is a broken down shack right next to garbage dump. And yet! We are shocked and appalled when our politicians exhibit the same behaviour.

Yes, like us, they are a shitty excuse for a human too. 

Just don’t tell my future children I said that. 

No privacy please, we’re Indian

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

On a brave January morning in the fifty-fifth year of the last century, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Poschim Bongo witnessed a miracle that would change its future forever. The clouds parted, the birds lined up in the sky as if practicing for a parade and the guy who plays the background music during such occasions put on some Rabindra sangeet. The stork responsible for delivering Bengali babies punched in his card and began to start making his deliveries. When he reached his workstation, he saw that the first baby he was to deliver was giving a fiery speech to the other babies around her who were crying and peeing in appreciation. He tried to get the baby to stop talking so that he could get on with his day but the baby threatened to go on a cerelac-strike until the conditions in the baby producing machines were not improved. After 26 hours of hard negotiations, the stork was finally able to deliver the baby. While the Gods watched this journey live on GodTube, they all nodded in agreement that this baby was one day going to lead her people onto the light. Then they all went back to their day job playing supporting characters in Rajnikanth movies.

Flash-forward to 2012. The fiery baby has now turned into the chief minister of Poschim Bongo. You can recognize her thanks to her old-school tantrums. Some things never change! This week she committed the most egregious crime in the history of the world; she tried to punish someone for posting stuff to the internet. How dare she! Didn’t our politicians get the memo? You can lie, cheat, steal, rape, pilour our taxes, bend the rules for your own personal benefit, but don’t you dare try to take away our ability to make semi-amusing jokes about you or we’ll treat you the same way the United Nations Security Council treats rogue countries who repeatedly violate international law: send you a strongly worded letter requesting you to stop.

Governments in this country have always tried to censor its citizens under one lousy pretext or another. They passed a draconian act making themselves kings of the internet, even though they did not need a new law to stifle dissent. Whether it is through tax raids or humiliating enforcement directorate ‘interrogations’ or using their stooges in the media to brand someone ‘anti-national’ to negate their criticism, they love making examples of people who ‘cross the line’ so that others self-censor themselves. However, their old methods of censorship are useless on the internet. Even if they manage to get something removed from a particular website, it will pop-up at a dozen other websites. Just like you can’t keep an alcoholic away from his drink no matter how many ‘dry-days’ you announce, you cannot keep information hidden on the internet from those who seek it.

Since they can’t get rid of the content, they do the next best thing. Punish the person who posted or shared it. And like with everything else they don’t understand, they try to ban it. The commitment of our government and government departments to make things difficult for legitimate users of things never falters. Simplicity is for countries with a weak digestive system. Tough countries complicate everything beyond recognition. If you like it then you can’t put a ring on it. A few people have a drinking problem? Raise the permissible age limit to get a drink to a number so high that it only makes sense to a person too drunk on power. Some people are using paypal and other online payment services to cheat on their taxes? Ban paypal. Are service providers refusing to share information about every user citing privacy concerns? Threaten to terminate their services until they budge. Privacy in India is treated with the same contempt that is usually reserved for an uninvited dinner guest who likes to share details of his bowel moments while everybody else is eating.

And if they can’t find any real reason to censor something, then they can go back using their most faithful excuse. National security. Those two words are a pre-emptive strike against every question. Sorry buddy, we need access to all your emails, text messages, tweets, facebook status updates and details about every second you spend on the internet. What do you mean your privacy is important to you? National security, boss. What are you, some kind of communist? Or a terrorist supporting liberal hippie? Privacy is for important people whose drivers accidentally record them in compromising positions. Not for schmucks like you.

Now please excuse me while I politely deal with this nice police officer at my front door who wants to know why I was using ‘private browsing’ between 4 and 5 am last Friday.

See you next week.

I hope.

The cherished myth of the Noble Dictator

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Ever since Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, almost every subsequent election in other parts of the world has had a candidate promising ‘change.’ Like in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, LK Advani tried to be that candidate. Because nothing says change like an octogenarian politician who has spent the last four decades as a member of parliament and has been a prominent member of three governments.

Then it was Nick Clegg, who after a good performance at a debate was hailed as the UK’s version of Obama. Even though Clegg has the wit of a bottle of home-made disinfectant and the charm of a stale box of Pringles. Nobody in England even wants to have a drink with him as constantly hearing about how mass-marketed alcohol beverages are causing malnutrition in Somalia is a real bugger. And 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, Nick. Even insane asylum escapee and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinajad wasn’t impervious to borrowing cheap marketing slogans from the leader of the great Satan. Thanks a lot for ruining all elections, Barry. 

As in everything else it does the Indian media’s Obama obsession borders on the creepy. What they don’t realize is that if Obama was born in India (maybe he is? All irrefutable evidence may point to his being born in Hawaii, but who am I going to believe? My lying eyes or a racist & kooky con artist?) he’d get an engineering degree from an IIT, go abroad to work for an MNC and come back to India ten years later and write a terrible book about the whole experience. And even after Obama has jumped the shark, the media continues to look for a person to fit into their pre-existing narrative. Is it Mayawati? No, she’s turned into a megalomaniac dictator whose goal is to put a statue of herself in every house in the country. Is it Anna Hazare? No, he was already a megalomaniac dictator before most of the popular journalists could misinterpret their first fact. Is it the chief minister of a prosperous state who shall remain unnamed? Never mind. I don’t want letters from those people.

The latest messiah who was unable to deliver us from all evil was Mamta Banerjee. Last year, her ‘poriborton’ campaign was all over the news. She was going to bring change to her home state after three decades of misrule! She was going to turn Calcutta into London! She was going to use her powers to change the axis of the earth and force it to revolve around West Bengal! However, what came as a surprise to no one but the hard working men and women who ask silly questions on television, Ms. Banerjee turned out to be a megalomaniac dictator. Even a horse wearing blinkers could have diagnosed her malignant dictatorship. All the symptoms pointed in that direction: Erratic behaviour. Disregard for public opinion. Paranoia. Not allowing any other leader in the party to develop a following large enough to challenge her authority. Denying reality. Blaming all the problems the people are suffering from on the previous regime or a more powerful outside entity. Her relatives treating the state like their own personal fiefdom. And now, she wants to paint the capital city in her favourite colour! That usually happens when politicians get that funny feeling in their stomach and decide that they are in this for the long haul. Though most dictators come from very diverse backgrounds, they all end up as graduates of the dictator school of hard knocks.

Of course, in India, we love leaders who pretend to be strong and decisive. Nothing gives our emasculated populace a bigger boner than a leader who doesn’t care for other people’s opinions. Consultations are for weak people! Real men take decisions impacting a large number of people based on what they feel in their gut! A large swathe of the country continues to want a benevolent dictator. When history has taught us that those two things do not go together. Even with all the current nominal checks and balances in place, most governments in this country commit highway robbery in broad daylight. Yet, somehow, people believe that a person with unchecked powers will be inclined to combat corruption.

So what if Indira Gandhi placed her sycophants in every position of consequence and sowed the seeds for the systematic rot we see now and every action of hers was determined by the need for self-preservation, but hey, at least the trains were on time.