Too Young to Matter, Too Old to Care

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As the monsoons sneaked upon us with torrential rains so devastating that they could only be interpreted as Mother Nature’s version of ‘we need to talk,’ the sun wasn’t the only ancient object that was being forcefully made to fade into the background. That was also the fate of BJP leader and UNESCO World Heritage Site, LK Advani. Always the optimist, where others saw a barely filled glass crowded with cobwebs and hardly able to sustain its own weight, he saw a glass that was brimming with leadership skills powerful enough to lead other glasses to victory. In a span of a few days, Advani’s narrative went from ‘look at how they’re bullying the elderly’ to ‘grandpa just took all his toys and went home,’ to making people ask the question, ‘ZOMG! Does he have dementia?’

Not to be outdone, the UPA dug up old Egyptian mummies, sent an urgent telegram to Transylvania asking all vampires to report for duty, found a few dozen zombies roaming the rabid wasteland of theatres still playing After Earth, and inducted all of them into its Cabinet of the Undead. The members of the UPA’s council of ministers are so old, their average age is ‘quadruple AK Hangal.’ From now on, all their meetings are going to take place in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy room, so as to save on the cost of individual oxygen tanks. After all, their catheter bills are already through the roof! Apparently, individuals who were born when all the continents on the planet were one single land mass are supposed to reinvigorate the government and help their party avoid its impending electoral implosion. The last time so many old people came together to save a messianic bloodline from disaster, they were called the Priory of Sion.

Infosys, one of the leaders of India’s technology boom, has had a lacklustre few years. Their stagnant growth had a negative impact on their earnings, which further eroded the value of their stock. So, to energize the employees and put a lid on the rapid attrition, the management of the company decided that they needed to hire someone with fresh ideas to lead the recovery. Someone with a new approach to doing business. A dynamic go-getter who dances to his own tune. Naturally, the only person who fit the bill was their former chairman who formally retired a few years ago. 

One of the major myths that has persisted for centuries in this country is that the higher your age, the more wisdom you possess. The old are always right and the young are supposed to follow them blindly, because chronology!  Even if the old person in question has nothing more to offer than banal nostalgia about how things were better in their day. The past is always perfect, even if it wrought discrimination, bigotry, ignorance, disease, and unnecessary hardship. Remember when you had to send a letter before the internet became widely accessible? Things were so simple! First you bought stamps, paper, envelopes and an adhesive. Then you sat down to write the letter. Once you were done, you put your letter in an envelope, sealed it, wrote the address on the front, calculated the postage and then stuck a stamp of appropriate value on the right hand corner. Afterwards, you would post the letter at your nearest mailbox. Your letter would reach its destination in three to eight weeks, depending upon the weather conditions. It would take another three to eight weeks for a reply to come back to you. And then the whole process would begin again. Nowadays, you can click a button and send a letter anywhere in the world in a couple of seconds. Where’s the romance in that?

Despite our fixation with the past, we have refused to learn anything constructive from it. Most of our important institutions - just like the people who run them - have become lethargic, ineffective and of no use to anyone. Neither do they possess the capability to understand the multitude of problems that we face, nor are they interested in solving them. You can’t get people who studied science before the invention of electricity to understand the importance of combating climate change. Or make those who were brainwashed since the day they were born into believing the superiority of their group over everyone else understand the importance of equal rights. The fact that in this day and age some people still think that the best way to ensure the safety of a large percentage of our citizens is to treat them like prisoners is proof enough that they shouldn’t be in any position of authority. And yet, our obsession with deferring to a person’s age keeps them there. 

I, for one, still yearn for the time when we weren’t faced with evidence of the looming shitstorm every single day and could take refuge in ignorance and lack of access to proper information.

Things were so much better in my day.

Sigh.

Your Call Is Important To Us

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

It was one of those weeks when the bad news just wouldn’t stop. However, one major event weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and ended up overshadowing everything else. An event which-years from now-will be considered the final nail in the coffin of life as we currently know it. An event which will be remembered as the starting point of the sordid state our future lives will be in. We are now marching towards the sort of nightmarish existence that all of our favourite ‘dystopian lit’ authors warned us about. The die has been cast, all the ducks are in a row and tyranny is knocking on our doorsteps. But enough about the elevation of Narendra Modi as his party’s campaign chief.

Earlier this week, whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald-confirming a lot of people’s vague suspicions and breathing life into a thousand conspiracy theories-released documents which revealed how deep the tentacles of the secret intelligence agencies of the US government are embedded inside the global communication system. They ‘allegedly’ monitor every text, every email, every chat, every phone call, every tweet, every ‘like’ on Facebook, every to-do list, every post-it note, every game of scrabble and every entry in your journal. (Even the ones that come with a lock. All the government wants to know is why you would not want to share your most personal, darkest, and most revolting thoughts with the rest of the world. What are you, an enemy of the state?)

The only groups of people rejoicing this news are (a) lonely people who finally have someone who is listening to them all the time and (b) the sycophants of the surveillance state. The people belonging to the second group are always excusing the government’s violation of citizens’ privacy with “if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be worried.” But then these people never practice what they preach and don’t make all their personal information available publicly. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?

Monitoring every activity of every citizen does not make us safer; it makes us more vulnerable. You may think you’re doing nothing wrong right now, but what happens when the state decides that something you do every day is now illegal or equivalent to treason. For example, what if they made googling “UPA Government + Achievements” a punishable offence? (Though the joke would be on them because they don’t have any, unless you consider ‘giving Manmohan Singh an ulcer’ an achievement). Binayek Sen was jailed by the Chhattisgarh government for possessing reading materials that were considered ‘sympathetic’ to the naxalite cause. In Iran in 2009, the government arrested, jailed and tortured thousands of protestors belonging to the Green Movement on the basis of their internet activity and GPS data placing them at the scene of the protests.

No politician or bureaucrat goes around wearing a “lose your freedom now, ask me how” button. Allowing a government to put their citizens under surveillance without any oversight will never end well. All the information they possess can and will be used against you. Being able to keep tabs on every movement of their citizens is the wet dream of most governments. Once you start giving up your freedom, there is no limit to what can be taken away in the name of ‘national security.’

Even the Indian government is working on a central control system which will be able to monitor its citizen’s activities across all communication networks. People who can’t get their shit together to make a website strong enough to let more than one person book a train ticket at a time are going to keep track of all our personal information. It’s totally not going to be misused because if there is one thing government departments in India are known for, it’s their ability to keep important information secure! Somewhere outside the big government office in the sky, standing in a line waiting for lunch break to be over, a dozen RTI activists are nodding in agreement.

As the leaked documents show, the NSA doesn’t even have to go through the formality of seeking a court order to access anyone’s personal information. They don’t even have to ask or inform the service provider because they have direct access to their systems. And they can do that for people who they don’t even suspect of any wrongdoing.

This march, the NSA collected ninety seven billion pieces of evidence from computer networks worldwide, six billion of those gathered from India.

We’re all now citizens of the surveillance state. Being a terrorist until proven innocent is the new normal

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

How to Win Fake Friends and Pretend to Influence People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

United Nation of Ban-a-ton

Dear faceless bureaucrats, elected and/or appointed government officials, and other sundry idiots,

Firstly, I hope you’re getting an adult to read this to you, so they can explain what I’m trying to say in whatever ancient language you speak. And by adult, I don’t mean any random person over the age of eighteen, but an actual human person who (a) does not giggle/get angry when they see human reproductive parts and (b) does not-when faced with an opinion contrary to their own-throw a tantrum like a child of a double income household who just discovered that parents on a guilt trip will literally buy you anything. However, as past experience shows, there is unlikely to be any such individual present in any one of your ‘august organizations,’ so we’ll make do with whatever we have.

Now, you must be wondering, because I presume you have the worldview of a new born gnat, why anyone would write you a letter, much less an open letter? I get that the word ‘open’ scares you because you’ve neither opened your mind nor the files on your desk. So don’t worry. Open letters are not really for the person they’re addressed to. They’re for the author of the letter and other like-minded individuals. Writing an open letter is like farting into the wind: it might add to all the noise, but at least it makes you feel a whole lot better.

When I first heard that someone in the I&B ministry banned Comedy Central’s humour intolerant Indian channel for ten days, I was relieved. Finally someone who shares our comic sensibilities, I said to myself. How long could all the channels broadcasting English language teevee shows in India pretend that it was still the 90’s and no one had access to things like the internet or ‘Indian Netflix.’  Personally, I thought it the punishment was a bit harsh for the petty (but blasphemous) crime of claiming that Dharma & Greg was comedy. But, you have to start somewhere and I figured that people of your age really believe in tough love. However, I was in for a rude shock. Turns out, the reason you banned the channel was because they violated some arbitrary standard of morality.  

This is not the first time you’ve banned a channel for offending you. Every few months we hear someone in your ministry banning FTV because of some perceived slight or the other. Like when some pretty ladyee shows her woomabachumbas, or a fine looking gentleman shows his ‘Manmohan Singh.’ (What? It was small, docile and had an uncircumcised head.)

We get it. You're Indian. Someone gave you power to lord over somebody else and you’ll be damned if you don’t use that. Show ‘em who’s the boss. We all know that if you really started to ban content to protect ‘public morality and decency,’ they’d be nothing to watch on teevee. And now that you’ve banned a low rated channel-whose primary purpose is to run in the background in the sort of espresso bar where the barista thinks that ‘macchiato’ is an abusive word-public decency has been restored. And if there were any remaining thoughts of indecency festering inside anybody’s mind, they were erased by the proposed ban on lingerie store mannequins introduced by members of Mumbai’s municipal corporation.

You must have loved common sense a lot because it seems like you set it free a long time ago and it never came back. You guys still don’t get it, do you? You think doing these things is going to have any effect on society at large, whatsoever? Did you ever stop to think that maybe you’re the problem? That you’re so obsessed with what other people get aroused by that you’re the weirdo you want to protect people from?

Banning something to positively change society is perhaps even worse than writing an open letter and expecting things to change.

At least I have the decency to couch my stupidity in self-awareness.

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

In God We Trust

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

There was once a young man called Sree,
Who wanted a lot of money for free,
He thought it was novel,
To fix a match using a towel,
But he was caught by the police before he could flee.

Last week, as the outrage cycle around the latest IPL scandal gathered steam, the match broadcast was eerily calm about the most popular breaking news of the day. For the commentators it was business as usual. There was no acknowledgment of the fact that someone they considered ‘one of their own’ had betrayed the very principles they purport to stand for. There was so much denial in that stadium that one expected the commentators to pay tribute to the glorious principles of the Juche republic. The only indication that something was amiss came when the camera spotted a young Aditya Pancholi flying over the pitch in a helicopter.

However, outside the stadium, almost everyone with a soapbox was having a staggering meltdown of epic proportions. While news channels called upon a veritable who’s who of who cares to bloviate, print magazines and websites were commissioning pieces in which the writer gave voice to the anguish they felt at such horrendous treachery. And some people on social media were shocked – shocked! – that an activity in India involving billions of dollars was embroiled in corruption.

This is sort of scandal everybody loves! The politicians got to rail against corruption and crony capitalism, the very systems that they derive their power from. The Delhi Police looks good because instead of holding a press conference to provide justification for trampling on someone’s fundamental rights, they’re holding one to announce something they’ve managed to accomplish. Hell, even the Mumbai Police got a piece of the action when they took a break from crashing private parties to actually arresting someone remotely related to criminal activity. And news organizations got someone new to throw under the bus. Someone who not only seems guilty enough but is also powerless to actually make them pay for their supposed ‘transgression.’ Welcome to the national orgy of ecstatic sanctimony. Angry people get in for free.

So now that we know that our police can follow the trail of illicit money and actually catch people, we should get them to use their superpowers for good - like arresting some of the big ‘kingpins’ who’re responsible for serious violations of the law. Maybe even a couple of people in positions of power who use our social resources for their own personal benefit, to begin with. They don’t have to try very hard to find these criminals. According to an unconfirmed survey by the Ministry of Statistics, every two seconds, a new scam is born in India. 

Let’s also stop pretending that participating in a sport is a noble pursuit that remains untouched by the corruption, deceit, double-dealing, dishonesty and trickery that exists in the world?  If you believe that, you probably also believe that all those businessmen who spent so much money to get elected President of the BCCI did so because they love the game. They don’t expect to profit from that position at all. “Surely.” I mean, they’re highly successful people who have amassed large amounts of wealth. What do they know about making money, anyway?

There are more cricket channels in India than the number of times Vijay Mallaya has hit on his team’s cheerleaders. If you get the five asshole kids from your neighbourhood to play a match on teevee, some fans will even watch that. However, most sports fans are addicted to the narrative. To them, a match means more than just a match; it’s an allegory for the human condition. It’s where mortals turn into gods, villains get their comeuppance, and the underdog comes out on top. It’s where miracles happen. If you remove the narrative around the sport, then it’s just a bunch of people standing around, throwing a ball to each other, following some arbitrary rules someone made up hundreds of years ago.

So when something punctures this romantic bubble that sports fans live in, they tend to take the betrayal personally. We want our sports competitions to have a picture perfect ending. And yet, we don’t realize that without these ‘outside influences,’ we’re not going to get one. There is no cancer-surviving seven time Tour De France champion without the steroids. There is no Tiger Woods without the sex addiction. And there is no ‘poetic finish to a great day of cricket’ without the betting.

The IPL is sports distilled down to its basic purpose: to make money. It’s a huge payday for everyone involved! People don’t play well because of idealistic notions like “team spirit” or “for the love of the game.” They play well because that gives them more money.  They play well because they want to be able to sell you fizzy drinks, washing machines, luxury sedans, potato chips, underwear and energy bars.

After this scandal broke, there were a few fans protesting outside stadiums hosting IPL matches, asking for a ban on the tournament. One of the banners they were holding said that cricket was their religion. 

Perhaps it’s time for these devotees to learn that even gods aren’t infallible.

Hallelujah!

Death at a Funeral

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

You know what is the worst part of hearing that someone you know has been visited by the grim reaper? No, not the part where someone you know has stopped existing forever; that’s something you deal with much later. The worst part is the realization that now you have to attend their funeral. 

If the funeral is for someone you shared an emotional connection with, then you’re probably too zoned out to notice what’s going around you. However, if the person being mourned is an acquaintance you didn’t meet often, like a ‘facebook friend’, you become a party to the farce that most funerals are. All our rituals are useless and horrible anyway. People do things they imagine would help the dead wherever they are, but it only helps them feel better about the situation. The dead don’t care what you do after they’re gone! They’re not coming back.

Firstly, the deceased is suddenly turned into a saint. Even if it is that old fascist relative who not only judged you for wearing jeans but also blamed you for putting a scratch on their precious Ming vase.  And despite the fact that everyone who has spent their life bashing them is relieved that the object of their disdain is finally visiting the big gulag in the sky, they still have to find something nice to say. He was a creature of routine! She really believed in old fashion values! At least he died doing what he loved; sucking the innocence out of young children.

Secondly, a lot of the people who populate these shindigs are kind of terrible human beings. They are not there because they feel any sadness or remorse over the passing of the deceased. They’re there because it’s a social obligation. Because they imagine that if they don’t show up and pretend to mourn, people are going to hold it against them and won’t show up when their own time comes. If I wanted to see people put up a false show of emotion while also trying very hard to look forlorn, I’d watch an episode of KBC.

Then there is the compulsive Indian need to put food into people. We’ve been programmed to be so social that even during a funeral we have to take care of people who are supposed to be comforting us. When you go over to give your condolences and mumble empty platitudes that offer no real solace whatsoever, members of that family will cry and force you stay for lunch. You feel like shaking them and telling them that you just lost a family member! Mourn, for cripes sake! Stop asking me if I have eaten. Instead, you nod and awkwardly agree to do whatever they say, because you know on the inside they’re thinking: here, have some lunch. A single serving contains vegetables, salt, tears, despair, and a compelling feeling of running away somewhere, anywhere, just to get away from all these expressions of artificial grief and phony concern that I have to endure for no logical reason.

We even take this with us wherever we go. For example, after the horrific shooting at a Gurdwara in Wisconsin last year, while family members waited outside with a smattering of friends, relatives, police personnel and journalists, some of them got together and were serving food and beverages to all the people who were waiting. I’m so worried about my family still trapped inside, but here, have a bran muffin.

According to most of our traditions and religious customs, the official mourning period ends after the deceased’s family has fed a few hundred of their closest friends and relatives one last time. But people don’t get the memo! They still keep coming over or calling you on the phone. And everyone wants to know what happened! So you keep reliving your trauma each time you need to answer that question. By the time the last vestiges of ‘well wishers’ are done darkening your doorstep, you start wishing that you were the one who died instead of the lucky bastard who escaped this daily dose of fresh hell.

A common reaction to hearing of someone’s demise can be summed up as it could have been me! Death, even if it happens to someone we barely know, reminds us of how thin the thread of life really is and despite what our favourite self-help guru says, we’re not really in control.

Hey, at least we don’t have to attend our own funeral.

Mind Your Elections: Clichémageddon

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

While the rest of the country was busy shouting expletives at their favourite IPL teams on teevee and hoping that Sachin Tendulkar wouldn’t injure his ‘brand’ by pulling a ‘Ganguly’ and overstaying his welcome, the people of Karnataka were busy electing a new set of porn addicts to darken the legislative halls of ‘India’s weather capital,’ Bangalore.

Elections in India bring out all the clichés to the yard.

The clichémageddon begins before even a single vote is cast. Most days leading up to the election are spent talking about the gaffe of the day. Some unpolished leader will say what is really on their mind and people will be shocked and outraged that an Indian politician is a horrible person on the inside. If the person is a senior leader of their party or are instrumental to the election campaign, they will begrudgingly release a terse statement saying that they didn’t mean to cause any offence; a sort of non-apology in which you can sense the gritted teeth and the unstated contempt. If the leader is a disposable sycophant, their party will leave them to fend for themselves and they will disappear from the election campaign for a few days.

There will also be a lot of puffy teevee and print profiles in which a reporter spends a day or two with one of the star campaigners for a party in which they show how hard the leader is campaigning for the elections by addressing multiple meetings in one day, clocking thousands of miles in a helicopter and/or chartered jet. You can tell which leader is being setup for the electoral success-failed government-eventual comeback narrative by the amount of news coverage they receive.

The most common refrain that we hear from every second person covering the elections is that in India people vote their caste and do not cast their vote. Which is a horrible thing to say because not only is it a bad pun, it reveals a casual acceptance of racism. Nope, nothing to see here. Everything’s a-okay! Just a large percentage of people being bigots. It’s a feature of Indian democracy, not a bug! We are like this only, etc.

On the day of the elections, we get to see exciting pictures of party leaders casting their votes for the “political leaders: they’re just like us except they get to cast their vote accompanied by security personnel and hundreds of flashing cameras!” segments. After the polls close, they release the voter percentage. Without any exception, the most prominent urban city in the state is revealed to have the most appalling percentage of voter turnout. That city becomes the object of everyone’s disappointment. Celebrity panellists chide the eligible voters who didn’t bother to show up at a polling station and question their commitment to civic engagement because, apparently, casting a vote once every few years is the answer to all your problems. Low voter turnout also helps people on the internet play a round of their favourite game: my third world, dystopian shithole of a city is better than your third world, dystopian shithole of a city because more of us show up to stand in a line to select our next ‘most corrupt government yet.’

Then there are the exit polls. From the moment the last vote is cast to counting day, we are on the receiving end of analysis, debates, arguments, plausible scenarios, hypothetical coalitions, and bad metaphors based on these famed ‘polls,’ even though they are seldom accurate. But no one ever takes any responsibility for being wrong! Instead, we end up hearing paeans to the Indian voter who suddenly turns out to be ‘smart’ and ‘wise.’ Hey, the gypsy lady with a crystal ball who writes our poll predictions was having an off day. What can we do about it?

However, the major impact of clichémageddon is felt on counting day. If you turn on NDTV, you get to see a panel of experts who were popular and respected in the 1990’s but have spent the last decade being exposed for the hacks they are. Times Now will have more old people on its panel than a ‘yoga shivir’ in Haridwar so they spend all their time shouting at each other. IBN makes it clear that no matter what the results show, the real winner of the election is always their coverage, which has won every award they have printed out on Rajdeep’s personal ‘dot-matrix’ printer. Headlines Today is the popular destination for all the analysts no other channel invited - like the world’s premier writer of erotic Rahul Gandhi fan fiction, Sanjay Jha. Headlines Today is the “linked-in” of Indian news channels; people join it just to get a better job somewhere else.

The reaction of the political parties was also quite predictable. The BJP was pretending to be shocked that changing names of cities, banning beef every few months and beating up people trying to get a drink after a bad day at work didn’t make them popular. Deve Gowda’s party wrapped up all its dry cleaned jackets in plastic, put on its pyjamas, and got ready to go back into hibernation for the next five years. And the Congress ‘outsourced’ the election of its chief minister to the party’s ‘high command.’

If only there was some way to determine what the people really wanted.

You Know Who Else Was A Superpower?

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the most popular narratives of the late 90s/early aughts was the emergence of India as a candidate for this century’s “superpower.”
We were supposed to finally break the shackles of the past, realize our full potential, and take our natural place among the world’s most powerful countries. But then reality intervened and everyone realized that we weren't really ready for prime-time. However, despite being faced with a large amount of evidence to the contrary, the narrative still strangely persists.

We’re the ‘Ajit Agarkar’ of superpowers. The only reason we’re on the team is because someone with actual power pulled some strings to get us in. A real superpower shouldn’t have millions of malnutritioned children going to bed hungry every night. A real superpower shouldn’t have a complete electricity grid failure for more than half the country because some idiot overloaded the system by switching on his toaster. And the primary objective of a real superpower’s foreign policy shouldn’t be to get every country in the world to like them.

When someone says that they want their country to be a ‘superpower,’ what they’re trying to say is that they now want their country to be the world’s ‘decider.’ The sort of asshole country which tells other countries what to do and where they can stick their ‘sovereignty.’ What they mean is that they want to be the guy in the room who has the remote to the teevee and will continue to watch a documentary on the drainage system of the Aztec civilization even though everyone else wants to watch that show which has ‘everyday people’ eating bugs for money. 

What jingoistic patriots don’t realize is that being a superpower is not all that it is cracked up to be.

Superpowers have to keep fighting wars; even those which they have won. Did you know that there are still more than fifty thousand American soldiers stationed in Germany. Why? Probably just in case Germany gets that funny feeling in its stomach and wants to try to take over the world again. In India, we don't like wars. No, not because of the millions of lives that would be fruitlessly lost. No one cares about hippie things like “human lives” in our country. The reason we don't like wars is because they clash with the cricket season.

The various spy agencies of a superpower need to be powerful enough to engineer a coup in unstable countries. Our spy agencies can’t even organize a dinner party successfully.

Superpowers have huge empires. Do we really want to be like the people Tom Alter portrays everytime he is forced to speak Hindi with a bad accent? We’ve always maintained that our country doesn’t want someone else’s territory. We’re happy with what our Mama gave us. Plus, we satisfy all our colonial urges by acting like an occupying force in Kashmir and the North East.

Superpowers need a constant supply of straw enemies to keep a large portion of the country’s populace so terrified that the government could do anything in the name of national security. Okay, I’ll let you have that one.

The demise of empires like Ancient Greece, the Romans, Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, and the USSR are proof that no superpower stays on top forever. Being a superpower means spending a few years at the top and then eventually fizzling out. Being a superpower means penalising future generations by making them live in a country whose best days have passed but whose people still have delusions of grandeur. If superpowers were people, they’d be the 1983 Indian cricket world cup team - a bunch of has-beens hanging on to every last shred of glory for something which happened decades ago. Maybe it's because I never stayed in a hostel or participated in an NCC camp, but I don't see the point of playing the geographical version of "mine is bigger."

I’m not saying that we should burn all our weapons in a bonfire and invite all our neighbouring countries to hold our hands while we dance around the pyre singing ‘kumbaya.’ However, we could tread a saner yellow brick road. Maybe we could try being the superpower of space exploration (Think of all the “ring view” apartments in gated communities they can build on Jupiter!). We could try to be the superpower of not letting foodgrain rot in government warehouses. If we’re not expending all our energies enriching Israeli defence equipment companies, we could try to be the superpower that provides its citizens with quality healthcare (Most of our current healthcare plans involve asking people who cannot afford treatment to ‘walk it off’). We could even try to be the superpower of not trying to ruin the environment at such a rapid speed that mother earth finally loses her cool and cancels ‘the human race show’ forever.

Or we could just spend all day dreaming about punching China in the face.