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.

From movie star circle jerks to statues that need to be covered

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Celebrities: They’re famous! They’re brave! They collect admirers like normal people collect calories!

Star World’s Luv 2 Hate U is a new show in which your favourite celebrities confront the biggest threat to their existence: someone on the internet. Welcome to another link in the daisy chain of movie industry circle jerking, in which yet another actor gets together with his friends and enemies and all of them reflect in their nauseatingly fake mutual admiration and conjoined awesomeness. Hosted by the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz (or as you humans call him, Arjun Rampal), the show is like a famous person’s wet dream come true. They get to meet someone, who, they perceive, hates them irrationally. If only they could just talk to their haters! Then they could show the hater the error of their ways and both the former hater and the celebrity can ride off into the sunset, basking in their new found love & respect for each other. A few weeks ago this show featured India’s most popular bad sentence writer, Chetan Bhagat. A man who is proud of the fact that he has never met a compound conjunction that he has liked. The show enabled him to showcase his two favourite versions of himself: a victim of the critics and the choice of the new generation, both of which are a by-product of his delusions of grandeur. Some people say that Bhagat has made non-readers interested in reading. That’s like saying the ISI has been encouraging local tourists to visit India.

Chetan Bhagat and the Mercedes Benz brand go together like SIlvio Berlusconi and a vow of fidelity.

Bhagat is the closest thing the Indian twittersphere has to an arch-nemesis. You can be sure of three things in life: death, corruption and the fact that Chetan Bhagat will tweet something dumb every few weeks and cause an avalanche of bad jokes. A Chetan Bhagat joke is like the teacher who asks for a “red pen of any colour”. Everyone claims to have one of their own. This week, however, he was more of a willing participant in someone else’s bad decision. Inexplicably, luxury car maker and the preferred brand of 80s era movie villains, Mercedes Benz, chose Bhagat as a brand ambassador. Mercedes spent all that money hiring a marketing team and this is the best idea they had? What’s next, hiring the penguin from the batman comics to be the mascot of a “save the penguins” campaign?

Hide your inaccurate television psephologists, it’s election season in India! The election commission, in all it’s wisdom, decided that UP’s various Mayawati statues have to be covered with tents so that they do not influence the voter in the upcoming assembly elections. Twitter was abuzz with various conspiracy theories, but it seems like this is just another government department treating the Indian voter as an impressionable little child. Everyone must be mollycoddled, because they can’t be trusted to make their own decisions! Just like imparting sex education to teenagers will make them want to spend more sexytime with each other, instead of helping them become well-rounded adults. This country is being governed by a generation which most probably still refers to bodily functions in numerical form. Such cognitive dissonance leads to absurd situations like when an English movie channel broadcasted a film about gay rights while censoring the words “gay” and “homosexual.”

Speaking of living in the distant past, this month the Madhya Pradesh government’s new draconian bill banning cow slaughter is scheduled to be notified. You got to hand it to the BJP government in power in that state. It takes real cojones to look at the problems this country is facing and think ‘there’s nothing that a cow-slaughter ban won’t fix.’ The BJP is a party of difference in that no matter what the problem is, it makes no difference to it’s policies. If the people who claim to revere cows really cared about them, then these holy bovine creatures wouldn’t have been roaming our streets like an orphan from a Dickens novel.

Of course, banning something in India means that it will not happen. That is why every 15th August I read a chapter from the Satanic Verses to paintings of naked goddesses whilst drinking whiskey and resting my feet on the bust of a revered ancient king.