Man, I’m loving this new term Nitish and Lalu have gifted us. In English, Grand Alliance sounds pretty pedestrian, but in Hindi, Mahagathbandhan is genuinely goosebumpy. It sounds so epic, and higher-moral-groundish and it gives such a lovely stamp of legitimacy to some very dodgy motives. Everybody else just gets married, but Draupadi and the Pandavas? They had a Mahagathbandhan! And Mayawati and Mulayam are not thinking of cobbling together a rag-tag opportunistic coalition to keep the BJP out, they’re deliberating over forming a Mahagathbandhan. Even as I write this, another Mahagathbandhan of mighty nations is bombing the hell out of suffering, civilian Syria. (This must not be confused with Adnan Sami’s rumoured stomach stapling, which, of course, was a maha-gut-bandhan.)
Another hotly debated term with dodgy motives and huge ambition at the moment is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. (Or the Levant.) The Islamic world is very rightly objecting to the word ‘Islamic’ being appropriated by terrorists so they would rather we drop the Islamic. And everybody should be objecting to ‘State’ because the group certainly isn’t anything as fully formed or legitimate as a state. Far from it. This regressive, murderous bunch of terrorists calling themselves an Islamic State is just a little bit like those grandiose accounts that Twitter abounds with. Called SalmanKhanWorld or PriyankaChopraUniverse, or AkshayKumarArmy which, on closer inspection, are revealed to be following 39,000 people and having all of seven followers, none of whom are Salman Khan or Priyanka Chopra or Akshay Kumar. It’s quite sad really.
Illustration: Bhaskaran
The correct word we should be using apparently is al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Or DAESH. But when I typed that one in, Google immediately asked ‘do you mean Dash?’ Which is worrying because every time some sick nutjob goes on a killing spree, news anchors around the world will say ‘The attack was carried out by — (because nobody knows who did it yet) and DAESH will get all the dubious ‘credit'.
Btw, is there any other line of work in which people can just randomly take credit for other people’s ‘work’? As far as I can tell, that only happens in terrorism. Try taking credit for the tune of a major Bollywood song, for instance. Or a road built by a previous government. Or even for the theme of a three-year-old’s birthday party. People will bay for your blood immediately. But in the terrorism industry, this seems to work just fine. Maybe because everybody who could take the ‘credit’ is dead, anyway. (Lesson in this for wannabe glory seekers—please don’t go out there with a gun and randomly shoot people and then yourself in the hope of becoming posthumously famous. Because once you’re dead, DAESH will probably claim the ‘credit’ for your work and thus add to its sinister, omniscient aura. Instead, work on that posthumous fame by studying hard and inventing a chewing gum that stays sweet even after four hours of chewing or something, okay?)
Finally, will Modiji’s fans please stop own-goaling him? The monogrammed suit length gifted to him by a fan was bad enough. Now another such fan (who directed a kiddie film called Bhoothnath) has made a video which could very well be called Bhoothnath II. It has neo-Nazi music, and a bunch of angry young people turning towards the camera, hissing ‘Dhikkaar hai’ (Shame! Shame!) at Dibakar Banerjee and Shah Rukh Khan and everybody else who had the temerity to return their awards. (Which Shah Rukh hasn’t, just btw.) It makes no arguments, it has no rationale, it presents no case. It’s unadulterated venom and intimidation, pure and simple. Truly, dhikkaar hai.
