These Are the Days of Our Lives

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Somedays, it feels like we’re all living in a soap opera. No, not because we have a non-identical evil twin bent upon spending its whole life trying to destroy us –Hi Pakistan!–but because whoever is writing the story of our lives keeps using the same tropes and storylines. I’m guessing that the ‘god’ in charge of determining the direction of all our lives wrote one good thing – which he stole from a more deserving candidate anyway – and got promoted to Head of Operations (Asia Pacific) and now keeps making the same things happen again and again because that’s all he knows. Which suits us fine because we hate change anyway. We avoid it like we avoid the bubonic plague. We like to see movies with the same script. We prefer to elect politicians who make the same promises. We give our money to people who have cheated us before. We even cheer for the same team repeatedly hoping that this time they won’t disappoint us and will finally win the match, giving us the validation that comes from cheering for a bunch of people we have no personal connection to achieving an arbitrary goal. As they say: the millionth time is the charm!

A familiar trope that has been recycled more times than a gay joke at a bollywood awards show is the suppression of free speech. This is one storyline which brings with it a lot of ‘buzz.’ All you have to do is get one viewer to post a tweet and voila, you’re all over the newscycle.  No publicity is bad publicity, right? Currently, this storyline is being used for the ponytail loving cult leader called Arindham Chaudhari. This character suffers from what people in the medical profession call a classic case of ‘being an Indian whose orders must be compulsorily followed by a few minions due to unavoidable circumstances.’  He’s paranoid (the IIM mafia is out to get me), narcissistic (refers to himself in third person), misstates facts (free laptop!) and suffers from delusions of grandeur (gives himself grandiose titles which don’t mean anything outside the confines of his diploma shop). Like so many other characters on the show, Chaudhari misused the law put in by the government to make it easier for people who have something to hide to censor all criticism. What else can you expect from a character whose megalomania even outdoes last year’s breakout star, Mamta Banerjee. Not to be outdone, Ms. Banerjee has begun to bring back the focus on herself by ramping up the craziness quotient of her antics from ‘this is terrible but hilarious’ to ‘can we airlift everyone but her from West Bengal?’ In fiction, usually, things don’t end well for such characters who are on a trajectory of a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. But in our world, the only people who suffer from consequences are those who are trying to do the right thing.

This week’s ‘bharat bandh ’ special episode would have been a  flop if at the last minute goons from various political parties hadn’t bullied people into enacting a ‘spontaneous protest.’ It’s the thought that counts, even if the thought appeared in your brain once you saw someone else not thinking the same thing getting punched in the face.

For the next fortnight, we will have to also sit through the reruns of ‘Parliament Adjourned.’ These are broadcast so frequently because they are the easiest to produce. All they have to do is record a bunch of people rushing to the ‘well of the house’ while shouting indiscriminate slogans for ten minutes while the speaker tries to silence them with her vulcan death stare failing which she rolls her eyes and ends the session. They get this footage on the first day of every term and put it on loop for the next five years.

But the storyline I can’t bear to follow anymore is the one in which they declare a curfew in Kashmir and cut off their access to the rest of the world. I am so bored of that! Just because we keep treating them like they’re our colony doesn’t mean we have to keep hearing about how we’re denying them their fundamental rights. Why can’t they stop crowding the streets and turn their angst at being treated like prisoners in their own home into art? Hell, I know I’d be more sympathetic to their cause if one of them made a nifty graphic novel which showed the day to day indignities they have to suffer through. They need to realize that if it wasn’t for our stabilising influence, they’d descend into chaos.

Now, where have I heard that one before?

The Times They Are A-Changing

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

When the grand mufti of Kashmir heard about Pargaash, an all girl rock band from Kashmir, he was livid. A woman following her passion? Who does she think she is, a man with enough money or power to buy off any threat of religious persecution? He then issued a ‘fatwa’ directing the band to quit, an instruction which was promptly followed. “Our tradition doesn’t allow it,” he whimpered. ‘Tradition,’ of course, is a polite word for saying that one should be ‘acting like an idiot for no logical reason.’ You mean the only reason I shouldn’t be doing this because thousands of years ago, some superstitious asshole wrote something down on paper-like material with a quill pen? Okay, that totally makes sense! Going to take all the important decisions of my life according to the ‘Five Point Someone’ of 102 B.C. What could go wrong?

We don’t send tweets to each other through birds, even though they were its traditional carriers. We don’t need to digest a billion ‘traditional’ herbs to cure a headache anymore. We don’t even need to rub two stones together to make a fire when we can use an overcharged phone battery. However, we insist on listening to a person barely educated in anything-other-than-religious-dogma on how we should live our lives, even though most of their edicts are – traditionally – pulled out from where the sun doesn’t shine. For example, do you remember a time god threatened to burn the earth down because of a really wicked rock band? Yeah, me neither. Hey, if he didn’t banish the group ‘Nickelback,’ to an eternity of hellfire and brimstone, then all the other bands are quite safe from his wrath.

Yet, the one thing the grand poobahs of all religions agree on is that we must strive to preserve gender roles forever, because it makes it easier to determine whom to discriminate against. It’s not misogynist if it’s written in the book! Stop complaining. What are you, a girl? Their basic grouse with the modern world is its snail-like journey towards equality. They are nostalgic for a time when men were men and women knew their place. Like during the stone age when men were gruffly, emotionless neanderthals who had the fashion sense of Tarzan and the wit and charm of the great Khali, and they ate anything they wanted to without even cooking it or washing it in boiled water (or as we call it in India, ‘Chinese food’). Meanwhile, the women stayed home in the cave combing their armpit hair while waiting for their man to bring home the uncooked bacon.

This discrimination also manifests itself in our culture of masculinity. We like our men to be like our most popular motorcycle: cheap, loud and using the same design since the Second World War. A ‘manly man’ must never drop his guard. If he makes one wrong move they can revoke his man card. It can be something as small as drinking the wrong beer or driving an SUV in a mountainous region while wearing a seat-belt. It can even be something simple like washing his hands before eating that can get him disqualified. And watching any teevee program whose description requires the use of more than one syllable qualifies him for instant self-deportation from Manlymanville. One would imagine that someone who wants to be perceived as a strong person with a will of steel wouldn’t be so subservient to society’s orthodox diktats. Turns out, the people who pretend to be the strongest always turn out to be the most afraid and paranoid.

We also like our government to be manly. We don’t like it when sissified college graduates lead them. An ‘education’ weakens you because it makes you do all those girly things like ‘thinking’ and ‘caring about consequences.’ Real leaders listen to their guts and only communicate in grunts and head nods. Diplomacy is for countries without a nuclear weapon arsenal! Why doesn’t our government just grow a pair and knead other governments in theirs? Man up and kill all those people whose mere existence makes us wet our pants.

Limiting your life to conform to other people’s expectations is an idea whose time has long passed its expiration date. We can only have real equality when people start looking at each other as individuals and a person’s gender won’t trap them into a life they don’t want. Being who you are is going to be the new normal. 

Now please excuse me while I spend the rest of the day learning how to make a sandwich.

Not Until You Say Yes

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Usually, we like to be quite tolerant on these pages. Accepting everyone for who they are and all that jazz. However, we also feel that it’s also important to speak up against those people who cause harm to society, no matter what the repercussions. The people I’m referring to are everywhere. They're your friends. Or your co-workers. You could even be related to them, thanks to the unfortunate accident of birth. These people are very smart and shrewd. They don’t care about you; they only care about spreading their agenda and increasing their numbers. They want to make the rest of the world believe that theirs is the righteous path. These people start brainwashing you from the day you are born. And they don't leave you alone until you become one of them.

You see them everywhere. You read about them in books & magazines. Or see them on teevee. They even have their own genre of movies. They shamefully continue to wave their decadent lifestyle in your face, without any care in the world.

You know who I am talking about.

Married people.

People in this country are obsessed with weddings. If you’re not having one of your own, then you’re asking someone else to have one. If you’re a single person, the most frequent question you get asked is ‘When are you getting married?’ even though what they should actually be asking you is ‘Why does your breath smell of cheetos and sadness?’ or ‘Is that cat hair on your jacket?’. Why would presuming that you are entitled to weigh in on someone else’s important, life-changing decisions be out of place in a country where letting relationships progress naturally by passing through different levels of commitment before taking the big plunge is frowned upon whereas deciding to spend your whole life with someone you met only twice is considered an idea worth emulating?

Even fictional characters are constantly encouraged to get hitched. The best way to get a ratings bump on Indian teevee is to stage a wedding. A large number of our movies are centred around weddings using familiar tropes like two star-crossed lovers who are so right for each other but don’t realize that they should get married or feuding families who are brought together by their youngest members falling in love with each other and getting married or a couple pretending to be married for some other reason besides love slowly falling for each other and then finally getting married before the credits roll in.

There is no news more important than a celebrity. They sent one lonely reporter to cover the demonstrations in Egypt but each channel had about a dozen reporters covering the Abhi-Ash wedding. Not many kids can recall the name of the President but they can recite the guest list for Vidya Balan’s ‘sangeet’ from memory. And celebrities encourage this behaviour because their weddings are now supposed to be a profitable business venture. When Raj Kundra married Shilpa Shetty’s name recognition while she decided to go into ‘holy matrimony’ with his money, they sold each sordid detail of the event to the highest bidder. There is so much pre and post wedding analysis that even the third cousin of the wedding photographer gets his fifteen minutes.

Of course, nothing is worse than the actual wedding ceremony. Let’s call everyone we know and have them congratulate us on the fact that we're going to spend the rest of our forlorn miserable existence together in faux monogamy. It doesn’t matter that most of our guests don’t even like us because we really enjoy standing around for five hours thanking strangers for their insincere wishes and crappy gifts. I’m old enough to remember a time when the most exciting thing you could do at a wedding was have a server put a scoop of vanilla into your cola-like beverage. Then there was a time when paying actual actors to perform at your wedding was a thing. Nowadays, people have cut out the middlemen and the “happy” couple and their families perform awkward dance routines while the audiences look on in horror and schadenfreude. The performances are choreographed to classic bollywood songs most of which express such wonderful sentiment like the groom taking the bride home forcefully because loving someone means treating them like your property or letting the groom know that he’s going to spend the rest of his life being miserable under the hitler-esque rule of his bride.

If that’s not an auspicious way to start your new life, I don’t know what is.

Sophie’s Democracy

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

A cheer erupted among the faithful as one of his minions gave the speech nominating him. He didn’t know which minion it was, though. He had so many of them that all their faces were just a blur to him. The cheers became deafening as he took to the podium. No one would fault you for thinking that he had moves like Jagger. He looked around at the hundreds of subservient eyes watching him with hope and mild trepidation. He scanned the podium. His mother smiled at him and nodded. The Prime Minister gave him the look of gratefulness that he usually reserves only for American Presidents. The country’s favourite man-child smirked on the inside. You might as well call him Buddha from now on because at that precise moment he finally understood why he was ‘The One.’

No one could stop him now.  .

* * *

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t recently run into that irritating person in your life who cannot stop talking about politics, you’d know that armageddon the general elections are nigh. They’re officially scheduled to take place next year but the news media would like them to happen right now so that they can regurgitate all their clichés (People only vote their cast and not cast their vote! A week is a long time in Indian politics! The voters are quite smart even though they keep voting for assholes!)  and make some money (Would you like the positive coverage package or the no news is good news package?). The UPA doesn’t even want to think about the election because it’s tired of running one of the most corrupt, undemocratic and clueless government in the country’s history and all it wants to do is lie down and close its eyes for a minute. The BJP believes that it has already won the election and the vote is just a formality and despite plenty of evidence to the contrary its going to do a better job than the UPA, ‘god promise.’ And the people can’t wait to invest their hopes and dreams in yet another government that will be worse than its predecessors so that they can vote them out too.

Even though most political parties have been preparing since last year (‘To govern’ refers to distributing freebies to your base, doesn’t it?), the campaign began in earnest this year when the Congress officially crowned its reigning prince as the Next Big Saviour and set him up for spectacular failure and/or mild success, while the various factions of the BJP were busy negotiating with each other to decide upon the most impotent and least harmful person who wouldn’t ruffle any feathers or do anything that his job entails so that they could make him President of their party.

The elections are going to give us such a stark choice. One of the parties consists of a bunch of unelectable regional satraps whose lust for power is only matched by their subservience to their favourite family and who would willingly elect a monkey if they were directed to do so by their dear leader. The other is a cauldron of Prime Ministerial ambitions bursting at the seams and barely held together by its members’ increasingly fleeting loyalty to a bunch of religious octogenarians who still wear shorts to work. Here’s a pro tip: If none of the political parties in your country hold elections to fill their leadership positions, then their commitment to 'democracy’ might not be as strong as they want you believe.

Let’s face it. The next election is going to be a contest between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi. The Gandhi political machine meets the Modi juggernaut. The public image both of them have constructed for themselves over the past few years are going to battle each other in an election campaign that will make you want to curl up in a fetal position and cry softly into a pillow.

Rahul Gandhi is neither this salt-of-the-earth politician who pretends to be obsessed with uplifting the downtrodden nor is he a ‘youth icon’ who wants to change the very system from which he draws his power. He will never be the ‘man of the people,’ no matter how many choreographed visits to homes in rural villages or ‘spontaneous’ train rides he goes on.  The speech he gave at his coronation didn’t seem to come from a man whose family has been pretty much running the country since independence (except for a few commercial breaks in between). It was more like a speech given by a naive, sanctimonious character in a movie who ascends to power and then proceeds to lecture the villainous establishment on the advantages of virtue.

Narendra Modi likes to present himself as a larger-than-life leader with the ability to appear everywhere via hologram allowing himself to solve every problem in the country simultaneously. The false back-story he pretends is part of his non-existent folksy charm is that he’s a simple man who reluctantly took on the task of leading the state government - because he was a good soldier of his party - and then proceeded to make the state the economic powerhouse it is today. Who even cares that he is a vindictive megalomaniac possessing disdain for democratic norms who won’t let anyone stand in the way of his ultimate goal because development, development and development?

So that’s your choice, India. It’s either going to be a nincompoop scion who will get played more times than an air guitar at a Brayan Adams concert or a polished propagandist who has successfully papered over his machiavellian rise to glory. And even though both of them want to be Prime Minister real bad, they’ll act as if they’re only taking up the position in the ‘service for the country’ because the first rule of a Prime Ministerial campaign is that you don’t talk about your Prime Ministerial campaign. In fact, they’re going to act like they’re doing us a favour! How noble! We are indeed quite lucky to have such leaders who would scuttle their personal ambition for the welfare of others and become the second most powerful person in the country.

The most powerful being, of course, the host of Times Newshour.

* * *

Meanwhile, somewhere in Gandhinagar, a smug, bearded man sat alone in his house watching teevee. He saw this pip of a boy giving a speech. They think this young whippersnapper can take him? This is going to be easier than he thought. Normally, the bearded man didn’t allow himself to feel any emotion, but today, he let half a smile appear on his face. This was a special moment in his life and he would always cherish it, even though he was sharing it with no one else but the cold wind coming in from the open window. Today was the first day of the rest of his glorious life.

No one could stop him now.

Requiem for a Republic

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of our favourite national pastimes is to invite people into our home and put all of our best wares on display. Whether they’re material or human, doesn’t matter. We’ll brag about whatever makes us feel superior to our guests. Oh, the chair you’re sitting on smells of cheese and body odour because it’s an original Louis XV. No off-the-rack mass market furniture for us, please! Yes, that chunk of drywall proudly residing on the mantelpiece used to be a part of the Berlin Wall. I’m so embarrassed you saw that picture of me with the Dalai Lama. No, I don’t like to talk about our ‘close friendship’ that is why I put the picture on display where everyone can see it. And now, for dessert, I’m going to spend the next half hour trying to coax my four year old child to recite all the passages from Shakespeare I made him learn while your shitty child just sits there playing with his own spit.

We do that collectively as a country when we invite a leader from a foreign country as the ‘chief guest’ to witness our Republic Day parade. Oh that little thing? We picked it up while on a shopping excursion in Russia. Yeah, you see, we like our fighter planes like we like our politicians: old, decrypt and of no use to anyone. Those pencil-shaped missiles - pointed towards you for some reason - are from last quarter's Sears Ballistic Missiles Catalogue. Those large guns you saw at the entrance were an impulse purchase. We bought them after the Swiss offered us a ten percent ‘cash back offer.’ No you’re not crazy! That smell of glue is coming from those tanks passing by right now. We made them ourselves, using nothing else besides hard work, ingenuity and lots of papier-mâché.

At least all the cultural floats participating in the parade are a truthful representation of the country. Did you see them yesterday? They were awesome! The parade began with the float from Chandigarh, which consisted of college students shouting the f-word at each other, representing that city’s contribution to our reality show heritage. The float from Rajasthan had a beautiful replica of an ancient fort under whose shade two children who hadn’t even achieved puberty yet were getting married. The Travel Ministry float showcased its dedication to tourism by letting a few unsuspecting members of the chief guest’s delegation fleeced by touts. The north-east was well represented by the float from Mizoram which had six hundred men with goatees playing the guitar. The float from Chhattisgarh was simply an appeal from its government asking you to hire its citizens to paint your house. The actors in the float from Delhi had no idea what they were supposed to represent because all of them had bribed their way onto the float. This wasn’t a problem for the political party activists in the float from Maharashtra because all they had to do was pelt stones at the float from Bihar. Everyone appreciated the edgy float from Goa which depicted a couple of mobsters’ wives snorting cocaine. There was just one awkward moment in the whole parade when everyone realised that in lieu of sending an actual float, West Bengal had sent their chief minister to shout at all the dignitaries.

Unfortunately, some floats were conspicuous by their absence. There was no float from Haryana because the idea for the float was killed as soon as it was conceptualized. The UP float was kidnapped by ‘dacoits close to the administration’ and is now the feature performer in a seedy bar in Kanpur. The float from Assam was erroneously deported to China. The Andhra Pradesh float went nowhere because both its drivers couldn’t decide on a common route. The float from Kerala was the first to arrive at India Gate but was still not able to participate in the parade because it stopped at the entrance and was handing out tea and ‘light snacks’ to the spectators throughout the festivities.

On Republic Day, we celebrate the official adoption of our constitution. A constitution is perhaps the most important document in the life of a Republic. Being part of a Republic is like being part of an arranged marriage. You get grandfathered into making this huge commitment with someone you don’t know anything about and you spend the rest of your life being passive aggressive towards them. And even though the sex is sad, awkward and unenjoyable, you still stay together, not because you want to but because all the better options are already taken and you’re too old to find someone new anyway.

A republic’s strength does not lie in its symbols. Nor does it lie in the number of weapons it has. It lies in the ability of that republic to tolerate dissent, to have arguments without resorting to violence and to creating a safe environment for all of its citizens. A strong republic doesn’t need constant validation from its peers. A strong republic strives to create equal opportunities for all its citizens. A strong republic realizes that denying even a single person their freedom enslaves the whole country.

Most importantly, a strong republic doesn’t celebrate the anniversary of its foundation with a dry day.

Hey, if you don’t believe me, ask the constitution.

Baby, it’s Cold Outside

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

The saviour of people caught in awkward situations who have nothing else to talk about, the weather, has been a ‘hot’ topic of conversation lately. Unless you’re a hibernating bear languishing in a remote cave, you’d notice that the weather seems to have gotten a tad bit cooler. In fact, it was so cold, Shashi Tharoor said something controversial just to be in hot water again. However, nothing really says winter is here than when people start questioning whether global warming is real. Apparently, some folks like to keep warm by shrouding themselves in ignorance.

The fact that we’re still debating the reality of global warming does not bode well for our future. In simple terms, this is what happens: Human activity causes a large amount of gases to be released into the atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere traps these gases as well as the heat generated by them. This causes our glaciers to melt at a faster rate than the natural process can replenish them. Glaciers deflect about eighty percent of the heat from the sun. So when the glaciers start disappearing, this heat is instead absorbed by the earth. This increases the temperature of the planet, thus leading to ‘global warming.’  The expected outcome of global warming is an increase in extreme weather conditions. So the cold weather will get colder, the rains will get more torrential, hurricanes will get more powerful and volcanoes will erupt more frequently. Basically, the weather will be more chaotic than closing hour at the stock market.

Denying climate change is like denying gravity. If you don’t want to believe the scientists (because why would you want to believe thousands of smart people who have conducted comprehensive research and have released study after study presenting overwhelming evidence to support their claim?), the erratic nature of the weather is visible to everyone. There is nothing “natural” or “cyclical” about having a cold wave and a heat wave in the same year. The past decade has been the hottest decade since when we started recording temperatures. Each natural catastrophe seems to be the ‘worst ever’ in a long time. Earlier this month, Jerusalem was hit with the worst storm in twenty years. The storm was so bad that Jesus turned to God and said “Hey Dad, next time drop me off somewhere warmer. Like Siberia.” Luckily, the city and its surrounding area is full of mature adults known for their tolerance, patience and their apathy to overreaction so they handled the situation quite well.

Australia – which exists in a hipster hemisphere and usually spends its time relaxing on a beach in summer while the countries in the northern hemisphere are freezing in winter – is witnessing such unprecedented high temperatures this season that they had to add new colour codes to the weather map. This has finally woken up their government which is now urging greater global action to combat climate change.

Climate change is exactly the sort of area that needs governments to step up. Not only do we need governments to pass laws to decrease the amount of harmful gases and radiation we release into the atmosphere, we also need them to actually enforce those laws stringently. We need governments to invest in renewable energy. We also need them to use the tools available at their disposal to subsidise the adaptation of technology which uses renewable resources as an energy source. We also need the government to protect whatever remains of our ecology and not cede them to corporate interests’ intent on mining every inch of the planet. But that doesn’t seem on the cards. Developing countries like India and China don’t want to take any major steps to combat climate change because they feel that they just started to pollute the environment and it’s their turn to ruin the planet. Hey, I just got the party, at least let me snort a couple of lines of coke before you call the cops. Most of Europe is busy trying to stay afloat in a large pool of debt using German life-jackets so they don’t even want to think about anything else right now. And half of America thinks that the earth is getting warmer because god is giving us a hug.

One of the reasons of global warming that we seldom talk about is our increasing population. I don’t get people who still insist of procreating. The earth is crumbling, habitable land is decreasing, the climate is getting harsher and living conditions are getting slowly becoming unbearable. Yet, we insist on introducing another life onto this earth, even though there are millions of children without anybody to care for them suffering in orphanages or out on the streets, A very common excuse people give for bringing new human prisoners for our computer overlords running the matrix (WAKE UP SHEEPLE!), is that they want to create life which is “just like themselves.” Someone who carries on their “family name.” Because we’re still like primitive tribal folk on the inside! I mean, really? Do you think that you’re so special that the world needs more copies of you running around? Holy extreme rise in ego, batman!

In the future, when we’re living in unshapely, sterile soviet-esque ‘barrack-homes’ while roaming around in space suits attached with personal air-conditioner units - because the heat outside would make even Mars seem bearable - we’re really going to regret our inaction.

Hopefully, I’ll be dead by then.

The Gods Must be Crazy

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the major myths of society that percolates into our subconscious from the time we are children is that growing old is a bad thing. It’s there in our conversations and in our popular culture. There is a whole industry built around making old people feel younger. You can fight ageing – an inevitable process that has been taking place for millions of years – by applying some chemical cocktail on your face. Why age gracefully when you can make your face look like Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb? We are constantly told that growing old is a horrid event that we must endure until we are able to escape it through the sweet release of death. Being young is where it’s at! Yeah, because who wants financial independence and emotional maturity? Who needs to deal with small problems that can be easily overcome when you can just close the door of your room and blast a song full of profanity to show everyone how angry you are? I, for one, don’t subscribe to this fallacy and can’t wait to grow old. You get to say stupid things and treat people badly without any repercussions. You can make people squirm in their seats and puncture any serious conversation by releasing a loud fart. In fact, my spirit animal is AK Hangal. However, not everybody on twitter shares my enthusiasm about the ageing process. This is most apparent when something happens to someone people used to revere when they were children. People become more aware of their decreasing mortality whenever a childhood icon dies/retires/says something racist. Wait, celebrity x died of a heart attack? WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAPPEN TO ME???!

This was the case last month when Sachin Tendulkar announced his retirement from one-day cricket. Nothing makes you feel your age than when the guy you watched grow from an awkward child prodigy into an awkward adult genius decides to hang up his ill-fitting jockstrap for good. We could handle the exit of eternal bridesmaid Rahul Dravid or ungraceful retirement expert Saurav Ganguly because we still had Sachin. But now even he’s gone to spend more time not spending any of his money on his family.

If you weren’t born in the 80’s you can’t fathom how important Sachin was to his countrymen. Sachin Tendulkar was a hero to a nation in dire need of one. Who can forget his memorable innings as the brand ambassador of a popular soft drink brand! Or when he launched a thousand bankruptcies by appearing in a credit card advertisement and asking people to go get it! Who even knows how many kids’ lives he saved when he revealed the secret of his energy!

Sachin was the perfect poster-child for the post-liberalisation era. A great icon! He was proof that if you had luck, talent, humility and enough gumption to hire a ruthless businessman to manage your affairs, you too could become so successful that Parliament would pass a special act to prevent you from being exorbitantly taxed on a business transaction. That is also why he doesn’t have to spend his post-retirement years scrounging for money, unlike his predecessors. There are no low budget advertisements promoting ‘English speaking courses’ in his future. No humiliating interviews with Karan Thapar. He doesn’t need to participate in a reality show where he gets paid to be the butt of everyone’s jokes. The BCCI will not dare to even try to rein him in if he does something they don’t approve of. Even troll king and the talking tiger from ‘Life of Pi,’ Bal Thackeray, was more than respectful when criticizing his fellow exhibitor of Marathi machismo.

Living in India and not having had a conversation about cricket is like being a white person in a Karan Johar movie and not being racist. It’s easier to go along than spend the next few hours explaining to people that you don’t think that spending five days glued to a teevee screen watching 22 guys play a sport invented by bored royals so that they could pretend to be athletic might not be the optimum utilization of your time. Being able to fake a conversation about cricket also prevents you from being lynched because in this country, there is no other topic of discussion more important than cricket. We pretend that there is nothing wrong when the whole country stops any productive activity because some people are playing a match, somewhere. We are constantly fed bullshit narratives about how cricket “unites” the country and for a few hours, people take a break from making life miserable for each other in exchange for shouting cricketing advice at the teevee/radio/website hoping that the professionals playing on the field are able to hear them. We have to revere everything that happens on the field and worship those who play on it. Whether it’s movies, politics or sports, India doesn’t accept mere humans. We only have time for Gods.

Now please excuse me while I download a Nintendo emulator on my computer so that I can play all my favourite childhood games and try to recapture my youth.

Hell is Other People

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Whenever a horrific incident imbibes itself in the consciousness of the people of our country, there are various stages of grief we go through together. Now, these are not based on any trenchant analysis by renowned mental health professionals. Instead, these are based on our values, our ancient culture, and the wisdom that has been passed on from generation to generation since the Indus civilization.

First comes shock. We feel this when we first hear of the incident. We wonder what kind of animals would do such a thing. We are taken aback by the fact that such people live and breathe among us. We can’t really believe that this happened! Despite there being plenty of proof and a large number of incidents documented in the past. Yet we imagine that this is the first time a deer distracted by the headlights got run over by a car. Wait, the snowball turned into an avalanche? Did not see that coming!

We feel guilty that we didn’t do anything to make sure such incidents didn’t happen. We kick ourselves for suffering injustice silently; for being those monkeys made out of stone and not hearing, seeing or saying anything. But the thing that we find most scary is the thought that this could happen to us too. That makes us angry. We get angry at everything and everybody. And we want revenge! We want heads to roll and bodies to pile up. No time to stop and consider how we contribute to an environment which leads to such an event. We want scapegoats and we want them now!

While the people are angry, the government is in denial. They did nothing wrong. They were all doing their job. In fact, according to them, they did an excellent job. And no, they’re not showing any cowardice by getting the police to suppress dissent using British Raj era tactics. They just retreated into their guarded palaces because they wanted to give the people some space. They aren’t holding onto to power within an inch of their life or anything. And refusing to meet people because of the misbelief that they aren’t going to vote for you anyway is not hubris. Neither is comparing people asking for justice for a fellow citizen with terrorists wanting to overthrow the state. And the advisory issued to news channels covering the protest, was as harmless as advice from a friend. No one was threatening anyone with dire consequences. Whatever gave you the idea!

Of course, it doesn’t take long for any discussion to devolve into a partisan food fight. Everyone stews in their righteousness, because they sincerely believe that this is just another event which happened because people don’t listen to them. Just another example of why the world is screwed up because of the other guy. If only more people would listen to us! You also can’t just be sad and upset about something by itself. You have to retroactively be upset about all the events that took place in the past. And simultaneously be upset about whatever is going to happen in the future.

Then we become mired in farce. Politicians want to make symbolic gestures towards the dearly departed. News channels want you to never forget until the next big story comes along.  And the rest of us just want to go back to our busy lives after someone assures us that we will be able to meander through the rest of our days in peace. Why don’t you just leave us alone, troubles of the world?

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Life in India can make you quite cynical. When you see democracy being sold in packages of various sizes everyday, it’s quite hard to believe that words like “freedom,” “rule of law,” or “justice” mean anything.  Yet, there seemed something different about the current protests. When it started, it was a spontaneous expression of anger. It didn’t have the cold, calculative machiavellian organization of pasts protest. Nor were the protestors made up of the rent-a-mobs used by most political parties. They were outraged citizens who weren’t dead inside like the rest of us and still thought that they could change the world. They were also naive and so blinded by anger that they were not even sure of what they were protesting. They were in dire need of a civics lesson and those among them wanting to do unspeakable things to the accused should probably see a shrink.

We were trying to have a national discussion about things we need to do to make the country better for its female populace but we got caught in the same trap we always do. We lost our way somewhere between chemical castrations and mentally dented presidential scions.

Let’s hope it’s not too late to find our way back.