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.

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.”

Fahrenheit 2012

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

The streets of the internet filled with rumours. The news went viral faster than a video of a cat bungee jumping over the Potomac River while lip-synching to that irritating Carly Rae Jepsen song. The internet service providers in India were on a blocking spree again. Their actions brought various opposite camps on twitter together in their disgust and paranoia. The message the twittersphere wanted to send to the powers-that-be was clear: Steal our tax money and generally wreck up things to make our life harder, but don’t you dare try to take away our right to download free stuff from the internet or we’re going to HULK SMASH our keyboard and protest against internet censorship by posting things on the internet. And the powers-that-be did what they always do whenever legitimate users of something complain that their rights are being infringed upon - ignore them.

One of the parties involved in this iteration of block-a-mole has used the internet very successfully to create a buzz around their movie through a viral video. Now the producers of that very movie have turned on the very people who made them famous. Though they are not the only ones to do that. A large number of corporate entities try to clamp down on the internet by claiming that their forthcoming big-budget movie is allegedly being pirated online. They think that the reason people don’t want to see their movies is because they are pirating it on the internet. Not because they make terrible movies that have no stories but are just scenes of things put together haphazardly based on a focus group of one. Even though most people will not see these movies even if you paid them money, but, yeah, let’s pretend that the internet is the problem.

They keep trying to fight the internet instead of embracing it. If you make it easy for users to access your content, they would not need to pirate it. Trying to block torrent sites on the internet is like sending a hundred year old tortoise to catch the energizer bunny. Not only were they not able to achieve what they set out to do, in their haste, the movie producers even had the ISPs block, websites which had nothing to do with piracy. For example, they blocked Pastebin, a website whose sole function is to allow users on the internet to share pasted text, and Vimeo, a website which mostly contains time lapse videos of the remaining five picturesque locations on earth and indie movies made with such an austere budget that even P. Sainath would approve. By blocking these websites, they are actually hurting the people who want to showcase legitimate content.

In the end all the parties involved in this orgy of ignorance and ineptitude passed the blame for this to one another. The government could proudly claim that after a long time, it was relieved to not be the one trying to trample on its citizens rights. All we did was make these arbitrary and vague rules which can be willingly exploited by anyone to censor things they don’t want you to see. Don’t blame us! The corporate entities which sought to block the websites simply shrugged in response. We just cynically used our corporate heft to censor things that might hurt our business. Who is going to stop us? You? Or those government institutions who are so deeply embedded inside our ass that they can taste what we had for lunch?  And the internet service providers - who used this opportunity to block popular torrent and video sites to preserve their precious bandwidth - not only acted like they did not understand the court order and instead of blocking specific URL’s, blocked complete websites, and as of the time of writing this column, they were still pretending that they didn’t really understand how to completely unblock them. Sorry, court order! Our hands are tied behind our backs, giving you the finger. Meanwhile, the regulators responsible for protecting the consumers were AWOL as usual. Wait, are you talking to us? Are we supposed to do something in such a situation? Let us think about that for a while and come back to you with a whitepaper in 3 to 5 years. Hope that helps!

The internet is a problem for a lot of powerful groups in this country. Various governments and government institutions are unable to fathom the freedom of expression the internet offers. It is hard for them to accept the existence of a medium of communication which they cannot bully, cajole, or bribe into submission. Most politicians do not view the internet as a tool which can empower their citizens; rather they think of the internet as just another part of the vast conspiracy to destroy them. Instead of embracing it at every level, they resist it like white blood cells resist an infection. Corporate India does not like the internet because they can’t buy off all internet users by sending them on junkets or paying their child’s school fees. And the entertainment industry does not like the internet because it is full of “h8trz” who are “hatin” on them all the time. How can you allow a place where celebrities are not treated with the love and respect they deserve to exist? Sounds spooky, like something out of the Twilight Zone. 

On the bright side, at least they let us armchair critics feel like martyrs.

Fear and self-loathing in New Delhi

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Members of constant anti-democracy infomercial, the Indian parliament, were going through an existential crisis recently. They were searching hard for their place in the world. They looked around and wondered: are they just another degenerating life form in the senior citizen play pen that they belong to? Are they simply disposable pawns in the hands of their party high command? Serving at the high command’s pleasure, not having a voice of their own, doing the same thing day in and day out, burying their aspirations, their needs, and their principles for the larger good of the party. Are they just biding their time until they go back into the abyss thanks to the sweet release of death? Will they ever matter? Will they ever be able to look themselves in the mirror and not feel repulsed at what they have become? Will they be able to go back one day to the people – who keep electing them in the hope that maybe, maybe, this time things will be different – with their heads held high? Our elected representatives were having a morbid crisis of morality. The air inside Sansad Bhavan was full of melancholy. Lawmakers were searching for answers to which they did not even know the questions. And then, as the fellow once said, seek and ye shall receive, they finally found something that would not only unite them with purpose, but also redeem them in the eyes of the cynical electorate. No more tarring all of them with the same brush because of a few bad apples; they would get back the respect they deserve. The clouds of dread were replaced by the unseasonal spring as the honourable members finally found the source of all that ails this country: cartoons.

Yes, cartoons. You better believe it! Apparently, those terrorists at NCERT, a government department whose original mission was to develop a cure for insomnia, dared to print in one of their textbooks about politics, cartoons depicting our esteemed politicians in a non-positive light. Outrageous! Our great leaders are nothing but beacons of justice and propriety. Those self-proclaimed ‘esteemed educationists’ at NCERT are misusing their government-given positions to damage Indian democracy. As Pranab Mukerjee – the nearest thing the UPA government has to an adult – said the other day, cartoons are not for children. Yes, exactly. They might be old enough to learn about hoohas & peepees (I would have known the actual scientific terms for them if they had bothered to teach my class the chapter on reproduction and not deemed it ‘out of syllabus’), learn about how history was full of monsters who killed millions of people on a whim, and might even be expected to comprehend how until six short decades ago they were second class citizens in their own country, however, showing them mildly amusing cartoons about politicians will ruin their innocence and mentally scar them for life. And that is just not cricket, old chum.

This is not the first time the hard working parliamentarians have had to defend the very roots of our democracy from egregious outside attacks. Recently, they have been metaphorically pulverized by powerful forces like 80’s hindi movie villain ‘Baba’ Ramdev (He’s got his own private island, thousands of followers who subscribe to his every diktat and lots of financial backers in foreign countries. ZOMG! HE’S MOGAMBO!), famous actor & king of the pox people, Om Puri and former policewoman and current fake teevee judge who prevents irritating people from divorcing each other, Kiran Bedi. These three dared to insult and question the very dignity of our parliament by making somewhat truthful assertions about our MPs in a public forum. So our fair and balanced lawmakers took the only recourse available to them. (No, they did get any of the goons they have on a retainer to beat up these people! Those are for people without ‘friends’ in the media, silly!) They passed a censure motion against them. You may think this is not appropriate use of our lawmaker’s time, but who cares what you think anyway? You’re an elitist having access to basic necessities like education, clean water and electricity. The only opinion that counts is of the caricatures of poor people that live in our politician's heads.

Now some say that our MPs sully the very institution they pretend to revere by pulling various idiotic stunts like tearing bills they do not agree with. That is nonsense! The sanctity of parliament is not disturbed when the MPs frequently stage a walkout. They are just setting an example for the rest of the country to follow. Walking is good for your health. Keep walking! Neither was the dignity of the parliament affected when our MPs rushed to the well of the Lok Sabha with large amounts of currency. This was proof that India has finally arrived. We’re not that socialist country whose MPs can be bought for trifle amounts of money anymore. Now our MPs have ‘fuck you money,’ and only actual dollar billionaires can afford to temporary lease their integrity. If that doesn’t say progress, I don’t know what does. The parliament also maintains its status as a temple of democracy when the speaker of the house flouts the very rules she has been sworn-in to uphold by giving special consideration to a prominent leader of her party. Even real temples give preference to important people! It’s the rule of nature. If god wanted poor people to get any importance, he would have given them money.

If only there was a medium which we could use to illustrate the absurdity of this whole event.

Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the most vulnerable minorities in this country are people with what you heathens call ‘religious sentiments.’ This small group consisting of millions of saintly souls is being oppressed by the thousands of tyrannical unbelievers. People experiencing these sentiments are so delicate, so fragile, and so defenseless, that they need to be protected at all costs. You need to realize that their feelings are natural. They cannot help it, they were born this way. To a neutral observer it must look like that these people were indoctrinated by their parents and others around them, but they were just being slightly nudged to express a devotion which was already existed. Pity that your bigoted eyes cannot see that. So what if their intolerance is slowly eroding the small set of freedoms that you enjoy? Just because they use loudspeakers at odd hours, block traffic as they please, use their position to diddle little children  bless little children with their holy seed, immerse environmentally unsafe products into the sea, you think you have a right to judge them and or call them names? If you feel so left out and helpless, why don’t you pray to your god? Oops! Sorry! Didn’t remember that you didn’t have any. Don’t worry; you’re probably going to hell anyway so why bother at all?

As the world grows more open, religions have turned more dogmatic and stringent. Instead of letting them evolve and adapt with modern life, the human race has turned religion into something complex and grotesque. These days religion is less about finding the meaning of life and more about competing with each other.

Religious people take real pride in being more pious than the other guy. Look at me; I’m so pious I only eat living things sprouting out of the soil. Screw you, you amateur! I’m so pious I don’t eat anything unless it has been regurgitated in the bowels of an animal. You call that being closer to god? I sneer in your general direction. I’m so pious I survive on rainwater and the raw bark of a dead tree.

Even religious festivals have turned into a competition to determine who can be the biggest asshole. Holi used to be about decorating your house with temporary graffiti, putting some non-cancerous chemical colour on each other and spending the rest of the day eating and drinking until that old uncle who cannot really hold down his alcohol starts to create a ruckus. Now it’s about starting to throw balloons at unsuspecting strangers a fortnight before the darn festival and then turning to eggs or paint or whatever you can get your hands on to use on the day itself. Diwali used to be about playing light Indian Poker, praying for more money and drinking and eating until that old uncle who was jealous of everybody’s success started to create a ruckus. Now it’s about gunfights over lost houses, destroyed families, gold idols and the race to produce the largest amount of noise and the most expensive toxic fumes. Christmas used to be about giving birth in unusual places without any medical assistance whatsoever. Now it’s about buying useless expensive gifts for people you don’t even like. 

People defend their religion from critics with the same fervour they defend Manchester United or Steve Jobs’ luxuriously autocratic mobile operating system. Nirvana is for people who have access to the most well stocked app store. Also, pretending to defend god is also pure human hubris. What the self-appointed defenders of faith are essentially saying is that not only is their god the most omnipotent, the most powerful, the king of every other god, but this very same powerful entity needs them, the average Joe-the guy who gets confined to the bed for five days because he was dumb enough to leave home without an umbrella even though it was drizzling outside-to defend them. Talk about your delusions of grandeur.

Not that I am a person who wants religion banished from the earth. We need religious people for the same reason we need the Kardashians; to make us feel better about ourselves. Everyone is entitled to their own delusion. I, for one, believe in the divine powers of a bottle of Jack Daniels and no amount of rehab can erode that belief. But I don’t go around legislating my beliefs or forcing them upon other people. In fact, I’d like as few people as possible to share my religion so that there is more ‘holy water’ left for me.

However, if you imagine someone is watching you every second of the day and keeping track of all your activities, then you’re right.

Although, I think you might have God confused with Kapil Sibal.

Hail to the Chief

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

India’s brother from another mother and the world’s #1 source of porn and engaging television shows, the United States of America, finally began its pivot to the general elections. Unlike in our country, being President in America actually means something. Not only do you get to live in your own palatial house, you can use your own personal plane to go on as many shopping jaunts as you want. Now, America takes its responsibility to elect a President very seriously. That is why elections for the next cycle begin as soon as a President is elected.

On the Republican side we have the guy who used to play Ridge Forester on the Bold and the Beautiful, Mitt Romney; representing the Democrats is the incumbent Fresh Prince of Washington DC, Barack Obama. Mitt Romney has been running for President since 2005. He never stopped running, even when he lost the nomination the last time to the guy who chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. This last year, even though Mittens was the presumed frontrunner, he still almost lost the nomination again, at various points during the primaries. The Republicans are as excited about having Mitt Romney as their candidate as bartenders in Delhi are excited about refusing a drink to Manu Sharma, so they tried all the other options-a crazy homeless lady from Minnesota, a guy who was once CEO of a pizza chain right out of a badly written SNL skit, a time traveller from the 1950s and the human personification of every ugly American stereotype ever-before settling for Mitt. In fact, Mitt Romney’s journey to the Republican nomination was littered with so many setbacks that bullied gay kids in small towns all over America were making ‘It Gets Better’ videos for him.

Mitt Romney is the bizarro Obama of this election cycle. The evangelist Republican base thinks his choice of religion is weird, the pundits who presume to speak for the American people would like to know who the real Mitt Romney is and everyone seems to be asking whether he is human enough.

Of course, our mandarins in South Block and their counterparts in the media will love Mitt Romney. Not only does he share their cold war mindset, he cannot stand up to powerful individuals in his own party because he has no real political base of his own. Romney is a feckless generic individual-with the charisma of a bottle of home-made disinfectant-who will say and do anything just to get elected. Where have I heard that before?

It is conventional wisdom in New Delhi that somehow Republicans are better for India. Which is strange, because as the last guy demonstrated, Republican Presidents usually break the world. An overwhelming majority of our foreign policy ‘experts’ and their ‘anonymous sources’ spent the first two years of the Obama Presidency talking about how the previous Bush administration was such a ‘good friend’ to India. Don't you remember how we could call ol' Dubya anytime of the night, to complain about how after gym class whenever we were in the locker room changing back into our casuals, Pakistan used to pick a fight with us to distract us so that China could sneak behind our back and empty a whole tube of Ben-Gay into our fresh, clean underwear. And Dubya used to huff and puff and threaten to blow someone's house down! Meanwhile, Chocolate Gandhi does not even bother poke us back on facebook.

However, the pundits stopped breathing fire and brimstone once Obama came to visit us to whisper nice romantic things into our ear while we relaxed on the back seat of his plush limo. No one even remembered President Woody the Cowboy anymore. That is because we conduct our foreign policy with the same combination of neediness and brooding that Bella from the Twilight series conducts her love-life. And just like her, our only objective seems to be getting a very old, pale white guy to give us his undivided attention.

The most hilarious part is watching Indian analysts grapple with American elections. Their usual habit is to pay attention to it only when someone says something bad and truthful about Pakistan, which helps our news channels spend a week gloating about how we are not hyphenated with you-know-who anymore or when someone says something racist about outsourcing, which helps our news channels spend a week gloating about how America is now scared of India’s growing economic prowess. Watching Indian analysts interpret American politics is like watching the tele-tubbies interpret complex mathematical equations.

What we need is a reality check from someone who has been there, done that – a commentator who really knows how American elections work.

I hear that a handsome soap opera protagonist might be free after November.