Anuja Chauhan

when-festivals-fuel-division-not-devotion

Sat Apr 11 17:38:04 IST 2026

Celebrating the Hindu festival of Ram Navami, teenage girls in disturbingly deep maroon lipstick shake their unbound hair and still-developing bodies frenetically to disco beats and provocative lyrics, Bharat mein jo desh drohi hain, unki ma ka *********.

They triumphantly justify this lyrics by saying it is abusive only for traitors—and if Muslims are offended by it, then QED, they are traitors! It is bhakt math at its finest, and seems to completely miss the rather major point that chanting such abuses—especially on the day marking Lord Ram’s birth, before his idol, while waving a sacred saffron flag—is not just crude, but deeply disrespectful, even blasphemous.

Having said that, they are in powerful company. Donald Trump, recently, deployed expletives on a religious note of his own—“Open the f***ing strait, you crazy b****rds. Praise be to Allah.” I guess he was hoping to sound frightening, masterful and tough, but I am not very sure that landed.

When asked about the use of expletives in stand-up comedy and public speaking, lyricist Javed Akhtar observed: in places where there is poverty, people add chilli because the food is bland. Abusive language, he said, is the chilli of speech. If you speak good language and are witty enough, you don’t need this chilli. If the conversation is bland, you will put some abusive language in it just to give it some energy.

These teenagers, it seems, find their religion bland without the chilli—preferably directed at the community they have dubbed “desh drohis”, that is Muslims, or even better, Pakistanis. Hate—particularly of Islam—has become the hottest and most addictive spice. Nothing appears to galvanise a certain strain of hindutva fervour more than googling assiduously to see which-which Hindu festivals coincide date wise with which-which Muslim ones, and turning up in Muslim neighbourhoods or places of worship to loudly ‘celebrate’ with pointed slogans, hip-thrusting moves, beer parties.

This is a huge disservice to Hinduism—a tradition that is anything but pallid; it is layered, nuanced, complex and rich in philosophical depth, perhaps more so than any major religion. The same “green chilli” of anti-Pakistan sentiment flavours much of our cinema now. Remove it from films like Uri, Padmaavat, The Kerala Story or Chhaava, and many would struggle to stand. Pakistanis, increasingly, mock this fixation: the endless return to their faith, their slums, even fantasies about their women, contrasted with outrage when Hindu women marry Muslim men.

Speaking of hollow, Trump clearly used ‘f***ing’ to make his threat sound more um, threatening, but it didn’t quite work out that way. So much so that the Iranian embassy reacted to it with a cheeky “we have lost the keys”.

There’s a limit to the ‘energising’ power of obscenity or hating, clearly. Like all chillies, they need to be used in tiny, judicious doses. Iran isn’t using either to spike its propaganda, and, yet, it seems to be winning hearts the world over.

Meanwhile, Trump and the hindutva factory are such heavy grade users of it they may give themselves the s***s.

editor@theweek.in

from-memes-to-movies-how-iran-is-winning-the-digital-war-against-us

Sat Mar 28 16:24:39 IST 2026

Maybe it is AI peaking at just the right moment, maybe it is the long-lauded genius of Iranian cinema, or maybe it is simply that there is no better comedic villain-muse than Donald J. Trump—but the propaganda films, memes and roasts coming out of Iran are absolutely top-of-the-line.

And, this is when they were taken by surprise. Unlike Trump, who has gone on record to say he was presented with 20 options and carefully picked out Operation Epic Fury all by himself (Not a great choice, in hindsight, given it has been trolled as Operation Epic Fail/F***up, Operation McFlurry, Operation Epstein Files, or, when clubbed with Israel’s ‘Lion’s Roar’ branding—Operation Epic Furry.) Clearly, Macbeth’s “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” did not cross Trump’s mind while naming it. It probably is now.

Perhaps a name like Operation Cheapshot, Operation Quickie or Operation Regime Change would have been more apt—it might at least have helped him and his crew remember what their goals were going in.

Meanwhile, Iran, with no time to prepare, came up with Operation True Promise 4—a name that stresses truth, sincerity and continued self-defence against this (fourth) Israeli attack on its territory. It is a smart way of keeping tabs, and also reiterating the fact that Iran’s threats of retaliation are not mere sabre-rattling but promises meant to be kept. Every single time.

Then, there are films. With few friends left in Hollywood, the White House seems to be churning out its own propaganda—hammily mixing real footage of Iranian operations with Call of Duty-style graphics and clips from Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. Iran, meanwhile, has leaned into Lego-style animations—using a familiar, whimsical aesthetic to reframe intense geopolitical conflicts, turning propaganda into an art form so compelling. Even Aditya Dhar would applaud the craft.

These Lego films have a playful, childlike feel, but the music is dark—the starry nightscapes, heroic Iranian figurines and stories packed with emotion, death and righteous revenge over a cartoonishly evil enemy. The treatment feels almost manga-like—underdog retaliation narrative, siege mentality and moral higher ground echo themes from Attack On Titan, a manga series beloved by Gen Z. They need no translation and travel effortlessly across social media. I could watch them on a loop, just for the feeling.

And, then there are the memes. A robed Khamenei senior, sitting beside a barrel of oil in the desert, doling it out to world leaders who trot up eagerly, holding out buckets. There’s the toy steering wheel next to the real steering wheel in reply to Trump’s claim that “the Ayatollah and me will control the strait together”. Posters slapped on to missiles—“Stupid Trump”, “Help me open Hormuz”. A bathrobe-clad caricature of a blond hair surrounded by weeping rag dolls. The now-iconic pink schoolbag.

Finally, the spokespersons. To be fair, anybody sounds smarter than Hegseth and company—but these guys are running the entire gamut from trolling comments like ‘Hey Trump, you’re fired’ to explaining stock market manipulations very simply and damningly. “Rise up, come out on to the streets, and take your country back from the greedy, violent, sexist regime of religion-invoking opportunists that is running it into the ground.” Four weeks ago, this is what Trump was urging the Iranian public to do. But such is the cool, fearless propaganda war the Iranians have waged that today, this could very well be Iran telling the American public what to do.

editor@theweek.in

shahed-drone-the-underdog-weapon-thats-changing-the-game

Sat Mar 14 18:35:07 IST 2026

Surely the imagination and heart of every bargain-loving Indian (and that’s all of us—even the sons of billionaires sourced their brides from Chandni Chowk in our beloved K3G) has been captured, hook line and sinker by Iran’s Shahed kamikaze drone?

At a cost of only $20,000 to $50,000 per unit, the simple, homely “iron bee” Shahed can take down a sophisticated Patriot (PAC-3) interceptor which costs anywhere between $4 million and $12 million. Watching it hit a Patriot delivers the same schadenfreude as seeing some uncleji’s errant old Bajaj Chetak roll downhill on its own and slam full-tilt into the universally disliked rich neighbour’s new Lamborghini.

It can also be mass-produced quickly, unlike sophisticated missiles, which means a swarm of Shaheds can effectively bankrupt an air-defence system’s inventory. Perhaps, the Shahed is a very Gen Z kind of cruise missile—turning its back on conspicuous consumption, embracing thrift and cost-effectiveness, and offering conclusive proof of something we have long suspected: that expensive does not necessarily mean more effective, more satisfying, or better quality, or more likely to deliver happiness.

Basically, if the Shahed was a person, it would be Rajinikanth—the swaggering bus conductor who cooked all the nepo-kids. If it were a film, it would be the small, lovingly made indie gem that beat out cynical, bloated formulaic fare. If it were a wedding outfit, it would be a grandmother’s Kanjeevaram or Banarasi, lovingly preserved and simply draped—not a Rs10 lakh, 20kg designer lehenga with a cancan as wide as the queen’s in Bridgerton.

But the lesson the Shahed offers is not merely financial—about paisa-vasool ratios. It is also moral. Because every time the tiny heroic drone from a besieged and bleeding 5,000-year-old civilisation hits an American interceptor, it demonstrates that it is possible to stand up to stupid, greedy, selfish hypocrites with their bloated finger on the nuclear button. It suggests that maybe ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realpolitik’ are just another name for cowardice and buck-passing. It inspires the world to stop with the grovelling, the appeasing, the nervous giggling, the fence-sitting and the stress-hugging.

Of course, we must not romanticise Iran—the Ayatollah was clearly no saint and clamped down on protestors brutally—but the fact of the matter is that in these surreal times, Iran is the first sovereign state which is actually behaving like one.

During the Raisina Dialogue talks in Delhi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister—Saeed Khatibzadeh—made a striking remark. Iran and India, he said, invented and refined the game of chess. “We are chess players, you and I,” he twinkled at his interviewer, then added with a shrug, “And those guys… they play football.”

The contempt in his voice said it all. An expensive spectacle, a massive stadium, dumb, brute force, screaming crowds, 22 excessively padded-up players and high animal spirits. Versus two people across a small chequered board in a sunny spot engaging in a battle of wits—cool, strategic, sans drama or posturing, entirely focused on the long game. Which of them do you think will emerge victorious?

From architecture, landscaping, motifs and art, to language, cuisine and good governance, we have learned so much from our pre-partition neighbours. Perhaps, it is time to learn a lesson in integrity as well.

editor@theweek.in

schizo-nation-with-anuja-chauhan-ai-dreams-and-blocked-pipes

Sat Feb 28 14:40:25 IST 2026

I can’t see the clogged toilet pipes of the world’s most expensive and advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, currently stationed in the eastern Mediterranean on a mission to punish Iran into abject surrender, as anything but symbolic.

Late last year, in a single four-day stretch, the ship suffered over 2,000 plumbing breakdowns. Engineering teams worked 19-hour shifts. The pipes, it turns out, are too narrow for a crew of over 4,500, leading to frequent clogs. Clearing them requires acid flushes costing $400,000 each—and these can only be performed when the vessel is docked. Additionally, the crew, typically deployed for six months, had been at sea for eight months already—serving in European waters and the Carribean off Venezuela—and was finally headed home when it was ordered to Iran, and it is suspected that T-shirts and mop heads are being stuffed up the toilet pipes deliberately as a form of protest by demoralised sailors.

Basically it is a sh**-show.

Meanwhile, the world floats on in grand denial of such prosaic, plumbing-related issues. As foundation-model AIs cachet up their acts, the internet steadily loses its collective mind. Punch, a baby macaque (with a little help from Seedance 2), takes on a dozen adult monkeys, slipping and kicking to the beat of ‘Kung Fu Fighting’. Jackie Chan hurls Godzilla off a suspension bridge. Three-month-old babies recite classic film monologues. Street dogs give interviews in immaculate Bhojpuri.

It didn’t take long for the ‘most powerful man on earth’ to join the fun. Using the new tools, he inserted himself into a historic Olympic ice hockey final, scored the winning goal, physically beat up members of the Canadian team and was embraced by Team USA.

This could be pardonable if, after getting his jollies, he had disposed his private dream into his laptop’s trash can. But, instead, in a moment of supreme cringe, he posted it to Truth Social, thus making a win after two whole decades of arduous training, grit and persistence entirely about his pudgy, orange self. (No wonder he is such good friends with our prime minister—a man so eager to celebrate our sporting victories that he has lent his name to our largest stadium, and congratulates athletes large-heartedly with ads in which his image is larger than theirs.)

The point is this: AI has made it seductively easy to go fully delusional. We can use them to bring our wildest, sickest, darkest dreams to life, then spend the rest of our days salivating over them on loop, entirely disconnected from reality.

But reality exists.

Reality is Thermocol drones and Chinese dogs at AI summits. Reality is young women from the northeast being grotesquely abused in Malviya Nagar. Reality is 5,500 faecal coliform bacteria per 100ml of Ganga water—60 times the desired limit. Reality is powerful men’s names surfacing in the Epstein files.

Coming back to the woes of the Gerald Ford: it is the floating, E.coli-infested arena where Trump’s tough talk and mighty posturing hits ground reality with a resounding squelch. A $13.3 billion battleship, brought to its knees by faulty plumbing.

Deepak Chopra, apparently, told Epstein, “God is a construct, cute girls are real.” I am no wellness guru but here’s my take. Delusion is a construct. Poop is real.

editor@theweek.in

when-world-treats-you-like-a-child-by-anuja-chauhan

Sat Feb 14 11:40:41 IST 2026

These past few days have just been about waiting. Waiting for information to be revealed: the full and uncensored Epstein Files; the complete details of the trade understanding reached by India and the US; the full contents of retired Army chief M.M. Naravane’s memoir, Four Stars of Destiny.

The reasons being trotted out as to why we cannot have access to this information confirm that the infantilisation of the general public is now complete. We can’t handle it. We will get hysterical. We won’t be able to grasp the full context. We will overreact. We will blab. And, it is all for our good.

Various concerned mummies around the world are telling us to stop being such whiny babies. [White House press secretary] Karoline Leavitt and her boss told people to “just stop with the fake outrage and move on”. Our own ministers of home and defence scolded the leader of opposition so vehemently for sharing an excerpt published in a news magazine that one would be forgiven for thinking he had smuggled a smutty publication into a fifth-standard classroom.

The buck-passing between the ministry of external affairs and the ministry of commerce and industry when asked about the US trade deal is reminiscent of parents chucking the ball back and forth when their young children ask how babies are made—“I don’t know, ask your mamma!” “Not my department, ask your papa!”

Finally, we had no choice but to do what children do when faced with such a situation—play with our stuffed toys or watch television. And how fantastic that this week there was a Bad Bunny available on television to chase all our blues away. In a 14-minute Super Bowl halftime performance, set in a sun-drenched Puerto Rican sugarcane field, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio restored factory settings on so many truths the Donald Trump administration has been steadily chiselling away at.

The fact that the US has co-opted ‘America’ for itself when the word belongs equally to 35 sovereign countries in North and South America combined. That, as Billie Eilish put it, “No one is legal on stolen land”, and that the Latino races have a far stronger genetic claim to the continent than white settlers who arrived by boat across the Atlantic. The fact that the US famously went nearly 250 years without a federal official language, till Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 declaring English was it. The fact that the National Football League is not a jingoist puppet to be jerked around by white supremacists but an independent trade association collectively owned and financed by its 32 teams, with ambitions well beyond the US borders. And that the Turning Point types were reduced to a tiny, peevish minority who couldn’t drum up more than six million viewers for the lame ‘All-American Halftime Show’ they hosted, headlined by the Vivek Agnihotri of the US—Kid Rock, the man who has written lyrics like “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage, some say it is statutory, I say it is mandatory.”

Bad Bunny, singing exclusively in Spanish in his white jibaro, to an audience of over 135 million people, helped a lost, once-mighty nation re-acquaint itself with its diversity loving, immigrant-embracing soul. That is the power of real art and real artistes.

Meanwhile, here in India, some of our leading artistes attended the 100-year celebration event of the RSS and sang the praises of its chief Mohan Bhagwat and his idol, the constantly clemency-seeking V.D. Savarkar.

Ah, well. We copy so many concepts, plots, trends and fashions from the US. Perhaps, one day we will borrow some democratic spine as well.

editor@theweek.in

who-is-accountable-for-yuvraj-mehta-death-in-noida-killer-pit

Sat Jan 31 14:59:14 IST 2026

The death of Noida-based software engineer Yuvraj Mehta, on January 24, is a horrific tragedy that deserves our complete outrage and sustained attention. Just 27, with his entire life ahead of him, Yuvraj sank slowly to his death in a cold, sewage-filled pit—right in front of his helpless widower father—while the departments we pay taxes to allegedly stood by and watched.

It is a scene that could have opened any Rs600 crore blockbuster film today—with the stage fully set for a macho, hyper-patriotic ‘agent’ from some unnamed ‘department’ swooping in to pull off a magnificent rescue, all in dramatic slow motion. But this was Yogi Adityanath’s Noida. This was a freezing, foggy night. This was real life. So that didn’t happen.

The only person brave enough to don a lifejacket and jump into the water (the departments allegedly refused, citing that the water was too cold, and possibly spiked with iron construction rods) was a 26-year-old delivery agent, Moninder Singh. He spent 30 minutes in the icy water, trying to get to the fading Yuvraj, but was unsuccessful.

The press, who seem to have been milling around there in plenty, took his statement, but the very next day Moninder changed it, saying the police had done everything possible to help Yuvraj. And then there emerged a final statement, in which Moninder said the police had forced him to record the second statement, with the ominous threat, probably delivered in that caressing rustic accent we all know so well—‘that the affair would fade from the public eye in two or three days, but you live in this area’.

The questions arising from this ghastly incident are many. First, why did rescuers get there so late? Why didn’t they have longer ropes, taller ladders, bigger cranes, a radar that can see through fog? The policemen allegedly said they didn’t know how to swim; what kind of training are they even receiving?

Second, the site was known for being hazardous. A similar incident had occurred 10 days earlier, when a truck had fallen into the same sewage-water filled pit. The driver had been rescued by locals in the nick of time. Yet, no reflectors or warning signs were put up, and no barricades erected.

Third, why was there a yawning open pit? The construction company that dug it to build a mall abandoned the project two years ago. Why was it never compelled to fill it up? Why has no criminal liability been fixed?

Finally—and most disturbingly—why is Yuvraj’s father, Raj Mehta, a retired State Bank of India manager, being publicly shamed for seeking a meeting with the chief minister? Some have mocked him, twisting his plea for reassurance and closure into a cheap narrative about wanting a selfie with the chief minister.

It is deeply shameful Raj Mehta is not being awarded the dignity and respect his immense loss entitles him to. The simple fact is that culpability lies with the chief minister. This entirely manmade tragedy—occurring while we were busy prepping for a jingoistic, self-congratulatory display of might at the Republic Day parade—was caused by a series of cascading and criminal negligences, all of which happened on Yogi’s watch. He owes the bereaved father answers.

editor@theweek.in

why-are-young-people-joining-hindutva-the-answer-isnt-just-religion

Sat Jan 17 14:38:26 IST 2026

I read of the death of Prashant Tamang with immense sadness. A police constable, who sang in the Kolkata police orchestra, Tamang managed to audition for the third season of Indian Idol only because his superior, Zulfiquar Hasan, special additional commissioner of police, sanctioned leave. He went on to win the nationwide competition.

My husband, Niret Alva, was executive producer of Indian Idol at the time, and we were all genuinely excited about how reality television was democratising access across India—giving ordinary people with extraordinary talent a chance to “go to Mumbai” and build better lives for themselves. In the early 2000s, Niret produced a slew of reality shows—Indian Idol, Roadies, Fame Gurukul—that helped shine the spotlight on young people who would later become superstars, from Ayushmann Khurrana to Arijit Chakraborty.

Over the years our enthusiasm faded. Talent hunts began to focus less on talent and more on drama, politics, manipulation and faked fights. But in those early seasons, there was something pure and beautiful about reality TV: the reverence for music, the tough love of the judges, the intensity of the contestants’ effort, the camaraderie of the production crew.

Once, when Niret and I were on a Pepsi ad shoot in Venice with Shah Rukh Khan and Farah Khan (who judged Indian Idol 1 and 2) they described a familiar dynamic. “The best part of a location shoot,” they said, “is late at night, when everybody—regardless of designation—gathers in someone’s room, drinks, chats and turn-by-turn tells a joke, or recites a poem, enacts a dialogue or sings. Everyone applauds, or boos, good-naturedly. It is like family.”

When Bollywood insiders get teary-eyed and say Bollywood is their family, they aren’t bullshitting, they really mean it. There’s tremendous affection there. It’s toxic of course—but which family isn’t a little bit toxic?

And that’s what all of us are seeking, isn’t it—a feeling of belonging, a sense of having found one’s place in the world, and the people who are one’s tribe? One’s found family, if you will. Clubs like the Delhi Gymkhana or the Golf Club, old school and college networks like Doon and Stephen’s, MNC management cadres (think Unilever, Nestle, etc.) are the elite’s found family. A place where they feel safe and accepted, hanging out with people who they feel will come through in case of a crisis.

But what of the not-so-elite? In a time of economic and political uncertainty, with unemployment rampant and pornography available on tap—literally—where can they get their sense of belonging today? Trade unions? Too weak. The Ambedkarite movements? Not accessible to all. The Indian Army? Too dangerous. Bollywood or cricket fandom? Too online.

The bald fact is that the one institution consistently rewarding young people with a sense of dignified, stable community is hindutva. Join their cadres and you are immediately morally elevated. You belong to a superior civilisation. You are a part of a narrative that has historical importance; you become visible in national discourse, you are a part of a privileged, powerful network, with feet on the ground and with a clearly defined line demarcating insiders and outsiders.

I suspect this is why non-elite youth are thronging the shakhas—not because they love Lord Ram or Mother India, but because hindutva today is functioning like a mass, democratised Gymkhana Club—offering non-elite Hindus symbolic membership, dignity, and civilisational standing in a society where elite institutions and status networks remain structurally inaccessible.

The need of the hour is to provide talented ambitious youngsters a healthier, more wholesome alternative.

editor@theweek.in

love-hate-or-fixation-why-india-cant-get-enough-of-pakistan

Sat Jan 03 15:06:33 IST 2026

Gadar, Veer-Zaara, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Raazi, Uri, Gadar 2, Dhurandhar—the list of successful Hindi films featuring Pakistan is long and varied. Romance, comedy, drama and war: stories from almost every genre, unfolding in cinematic stand-ins for ‘Karachis’, ’NWFPs’ and ‘Lahores’ routinely play out on Indian screens to packed houses.

We have made ads involving Pakistan—Fevicol’s Wagah Border spot and Google Search’s Reunion spring instantly to mind. We reel with glee when we beat them at cricket, erupt in outrage when they out-throw us in a javelin contest, and our more desperate news channels now invite Pakistani experts for panel “discussions”.

In recent times, these films have grown more hyper-masculine, more aggressively patriotic, and more firmly rooted in dusty slums and pinds full of butcher shops and strutting roosters and kohl-eyed spies who themselves strut like roosters. Audiences shout and cheer with full fervour when they watch them, and tolerate no word of criticism (however mild) once they emerge from the cinema halls—whether from a professional actor like Hrithik Roshan or a measured critic like Anupama Chopra.

Loving these films has become the new Aadhaar card. If you don’t love them, your nationality, your Hindu-ness and your patriotism are all suspect. It is as simple as that.

Or, is it?

To me, it seems that the lovers of this sort of cinema seem to have a deeply complex, highly toxic love-hate situationship with our neighbouring country. It seems like their most secret fantasy is to cosplay as a Pakistani warlord. Or just be a Pakistani warlord. Otherwise, why all this love for Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait character?

Why are his reels and dance moves going as viral as Vecna’s from Stranger Things? Why the rumours that he is demanding Rs21 crore for his next project after reportedly being paid only Rs2.5 crore for this one?

Meanwhile, fashion and lifestyle watchers are noting something curious. Never has Pakistani culture and couture exerted such a strong influence on Indian aesthetics. Indian bridal fashion is increasingly incorporating elements like intricate Gara/Zardozi embroidery, softer, silvery pastel palettes, relaxed silhouettes, flowy garara and sharara styles, shorter kurtas, pencil pants, tulip salwar and wider pauchas (hemlines). Traditional yellow temple jewellery is giving way to diamonds and silvery platinum. The heavy, all-over mehendi favoured by UP and Punjabi aunties has been replaced by a more delicate, distinctly Arabic henna vibe.

Some home-and-garden stores are selling collections called Samarkand, Isfahan and Charbagh. And all this is happening while our earphones loop the latest hit from Dhurandhar. So yes, the line between hate, obsession and full-on-stalking seems to be blurring wildly.

As we ready ourselves for yet another Pakistan-set war film—Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis, which seems to promise a saner, more introspective narrative—let us remember that the antithesis of love is not loathing, but apathy. We need to arrive, both mentally and in our national narrative, at a place where we do not have to rave, rant and exist in a state of mild arousal about Pakistan at all times. It should not have the power to stir us so deeply.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote, “Aur bhi ghum hain zamaane mein, mohabbat ke siwa (There are other sorrows in the world besides love).” I would add: “Aur bhi mulk hain zamaane mein, Pakistan ke siwa (There are other countries, too, in this world, not just Pakistan).”

I am not a Pakistan lover. But I am not a Pakistan hater either. The opposite of love is indifference. That’s the goal. That’s what represents true healing. Can we please be mature enough to achieve it?

editor@theweek.in

from-mnrega-to-vb-g-ram-g-the-politics-of-policy-naming

Sat Dec 20 11:26:03 IST 2025

I am not an expert on rural employment policy. So, I cannot offer an analysis of whether the new Viksit Bharat—Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) is better or worse than the old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

But I have (mis)spent a large chunk of my life in advertising and marketing, so here is my take on the name the government has chosen to bestow on its latest grand scheme.

Scheme names today are not chosen casually, as they once were in more innocent—or, perhaps, just less canny—times. Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, for instance, does not lend itself easily to a coded, catchy abbreviation that can be quickly grasped by rural youth across India. It is a clunky mouthful. Considerable effort went into contorting it into the easily uttered ‘MNREGA’, and even then the nickname carried no coded meaning.

The Viksit Bharat—Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), on the other hand, arrives fully market-ready, complete with an artfully engineered nickname—VB-G RAM G.

Offended by my use of ‘artfully’? Then, look more closely at ‘Ajeevika’. What is it even doing there? It isn’t even the correct word. The term commonly used in state-level policies is ‘Jeevika’, meaning livelihood, which is itself superfluous because ‘Rozgar’ has already done that job. Ajeevika, in fact, refers to an ancient philosophical school that argues human effort cannot change fate and promotes a life of asceticism.

(The word ajeevika means livelihood in Sanskrit—Editor.)

To be fair to those who named the policy, I doubt they are followers of this ancient—and sadly twisted—philosophy! I do, however, think that they are guilty of sneaking an ‘A’ into the policy name just so they can bung in a ‘mission’ after it, and thus shoe-horn the name of their preferred god into what should be an entirely secular, public-funded programme. The addition of a G, before and after RAM, makes the entire nickname cringingly servile—Ji, Ram Ji.

Is this how the government is instructing rural youth to accept the scheme? With folded hands and reverentially bowed head and an attitude of “thy will be done”?

And, why only rural youth? Ji Ram Ji, increasingly, seems to be the attitude urged upon all of us. Influential film critics and major film stars are flayed on social media for daring to voice even mild disagreement with the politics or intentions of films like the latest right-wing offering, Dhurandhar.

If Hrithik Roshan—a man previously loved for being the only ‘Roshan’ (bright) among a phalanx of Khans—cannot be spared for tacking on one line of criticism to his otherwise fulsome review (“I may disagree with the politics of it, and argue about the responsibilities, we, filmmakers, should bear as citizens of the world”), what indulgence can the rest of us hope for?

Summarily dismissing critics of propaganda (who question the naming of massive, public-funded policies, or the content of mass cinema) as paranoid, evil or jobless is hazardous to democracy. It shuts down debate, renders logic irrelevant, closes its eyes and shuts its ears to all lessons that history has to offer and rams (that’s me being artful now) the version the powers-that-be prefer down the throat of the public, no matter whether they have its consent or not.

Ji, Ram Ji.

editor@theweek.in

from-cosmetic-surgery-to-election-wins-the-age-of-subtle-spikes

Sat Nov 22 17:42:03 IST 2025

Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline’ is an advertising tagline I have always admired. Wordplay aside, it beautifully captures the promise that Maybelline’s beautifying effect is so seamless that beholders are left wondering if your beauty is all-natural and genetically bestowed, or skilfully enhanced by human artifice.

It’s a bit like cricket outcomes in the 1990s. Dazzled and delirious after an unexpected India victory, we could never be sure if we had actually won the match, or, if Pakistan or South Africa had thrown it. Basically: maybe it is a miracle, maybe it is match fixing.

In the 2020s, more than ever, we live in a tainted world where nothing is quite what it seems. AI-tweaked videos proliferate online. Successful actors, like Janhvi Kapoor and Rajkummar Rao, now admit, matter-of-factly and without shame, to having had a “little bit of work done”. Everywhere we look, things are subtly spiked, digitally enhanced, or genetically modified like the corn and soya bean the US is keen on selling in India.

Itna toh chalta hai [this is acceptable] seems to be the general verdict. We are all breezily ‘no judgment’ and ‘hey, if it floats your boat’.

And, then there are the films. Independent filmmakers, across India, have issued a statement condemning a “systemic pattern” in which small and mid-budget films are being pushed to the margins: limited screenings, weekday-only morning shows, sudden cancellations, lack of transparency around programming decisions and imbalanced prioritisation of big-budget releases.

Meanwhile, OTT platforms increasingly demand theatrical success as a prerequisite for acquisition. This is shrinking the nation’s cultural space—choking fresh, independent voices and giving the audience a choice of only a few bloated ‘leave your brain at home’ entertainers or toxic propaganda pieces. Basically, maybe it’s a good film, maybe it’s marketing.

Or, consider elections. We see the BJP triumph repeatedly and wonder—maybe it is the people’s mandate, maybe it is meddling. See the beauty of the Maybelline line: it captures the grey area in which we now live. Nobody really knows. It could be one thing, the other, or a combination of both.

Rao, for instance, is a skilled actor—full of gravitas, charm, comic timing, puppy-dog eyes and now a cosmetically enhanced chin. So you can’t go around saying he is untalented and witless and ‘only a hit because chin’—that makes him look proactive and smart, and you look like a loser.

Similarly, the BJP is winning not just because it’s probably diddling the books but also because it is extremely strong organisationally. It has (until recently) tended to reward ability and hard work, it has made a large section of Hindus feel proud of their civilisational heritage and pantheon of gods.

What does the Congress have to counter that? It can’t be ‘the party that got you your independence’ cos what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? It can’t be jobs alone because that’s low on Maslow’s pyramid of needs. It can’t be ‘democracy is in danger’ because that just sounds like the Congress is in danger.

The Congress, urgently, needs to deliver a higher-order dream. An imagination-firing dream that will make corporates open up their coffers and give voters goosebumps when they press the hand symbol. It could be a new definition of independence, perhaps. Or, an inclusive new definition of Indianness, drawing from our roots as pluralists, philosophers, scientists and farmers—gently contemptuous of the shrill, childish binaries that hindutva advocates.

But it needs to be higher order than just ‘food’ and ‘jobs’ or ‘miss-miss, the BJP won by cheating’.

Figure out your ‘born with it’ quotient, basically, instead of complaining about the other party’s Maybelline.

why-the-girls-in-blue-are-a-breath-of-fresh-air-in-advertising

Sat Nov 08 12:55:06 IST 2025

In the late 1990s, I wrote a script for Pepsi titled ‘Main Bhi Sachin’. It was set at Lord’s, during the World Cup and featured a young, thirsty Shah Rukh Khan, on the hunt for a chilled Pepsi. He spots crates of them being carted into the Indian team’s locker room, tries to sneak in, but is shooed away by a very British guard pointing at a ‘players only’ sign.

So, Khan dons a curly wig and a Sachin Tendulkar jersey and sneaks back in. By today’s sensitised standards, it was probably appallingly racist that the British guard fell for this ‘disguise’ and let him enter, but let’s not go there, shall we.

Anyway, Khan-as-Sachin wanders around the locker room, creating havoc. Just when he is finally punching open a chilled Pepsi can and getting ready to sip it, a heavy hand lands on his shoulder. Behind him is skipper Mohammad Azharuddin, saying matter-of-factly, “Pad up, Sachin. You are on.” It all sounded adorable on paper, and I giggled plenty while writing it. But getting Azhar to deliver that one line naturally was… well, tough.

We did over 20 takes. Khan was flawless—his expression switching smoothly from happy anticipation to blind panic every single time. While Azhar, bless him, proved that while the Lord had gifted him cricketing genius, he had withheld the lesser talents. We finally got a usable take and staggered back to Mumbai, broken but relieved, to make of it what we could.

Azhar isn’t alone. Sourav Ganguly had the classic deer-in-the-headlights look in many of his early commercials. Sachin had exactly two expressions, a frown and an extra-wide smile. Rahul Dravid had a lovely Bangalorean drawl but was painfully self-conscious. I never got to work with Virender Sehwag, or Kapil Dev, but I have heard some horror stories.

Things got better for us advertising hacks with the arrival of M.S. Dhoni. He was relaxed in front of the camera—which doesn’t sound like much, but in our world, that is a huge plus. And, then, came the Instagram era, with celebrity agents, stylists, managers and Virat Kohli. Today’s cricketers—not just the ones married to film stars—know more about angles, poses and holding eye contact than the shooting crew ever did. Perhaps they know too much.

Which is why the ‘girls in blue’ are such a breath of fresh air. Unstudied, unfiltered, easy in their skin—utterly infectious in their authenticity. They share their emotions and thought processes with the camera so naturally. May be men are just more taciturn, or feel the need to be “cool”, but these young women have no such issues.

To even play a sport at this level in India demands progressive and supportive parents—and liberation from the ‘beauty laws’ that say a girl should not play lest she tan, rupture her hymen, or become too outspoken after discovering her own strength. Of course, we have had our Sainas and our Babitas—and they have been awesome—but now we have a busload of them, all drawing strength from each other. From the emotion in Jemimah’s huge eyes as she poured her heart out after the semis, to the proud little toss of Deepti’s head as she smiles for the cameras; from Amanjot’s father, a carpenter, crafting her first bat, to the fearless aplomb with which Shafali handled her air-drop into the thick of the fighting—the camaraderie among these sisters-in-sweat shows us what real heroes should look and be like.

Patriarchy’s loss is advertising’s gain.

editor@theweek.in

india-cultural-politics-hindutva-holidays-francesca-orsini-hindi-urdu-divide

Sat Oct 25 11:14:20 IST 2025

The assiduousness with which right-wingers fan the embers of religious differences in our country would put street-side bhutta-wallas to shame. Like, they literally never give it a rest—not even during the holiday season. In fact, especially during the holiday season.

I woke up the morning after Diwali to find 1) Francesca Orsini, a renowned scholar of Hindi, has been stopped from entering the country despite a valid visa. 2)

An ‘organic groundswell’ has arisen across the nation, asking for Diwali to be declared a week-long celebration and public holiday.

Orsini’s work, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, examines the constructed separation of Hindi and Urdu.

Her research demonstrates that during the colonial period, the British linguists, ever faithful to their policy of divide and rule, deliberately pried apart two closely mingled languages, associating Hindi with Hindus, and Urdu with Muslims. She further points out that in Awadh’s historically multilingual literary culture, Persian, Awadhi and Braj flourished alongside Hindi and Urdu in cheerful coexistence. This directly contradicts the hindutva brigade’s narrative of a monolithic, pure, Hindi-speaking Hindu identity.

Orsini is the fourth international scholar to be denied entry despite a valid visa. Such malevolence for scholars is, perhaps, understandable in a country where our leaders scurry out of recording studios (the latest being Prashant Kishor) when questioned about their degrees.

Now, let’s unpack the ‘groundswell’ calling for a week-long, government-mandated Diwali break, which could be created by doing away with ‘less desired’ public holidays such as Gandhi Jayanti, Labour Day, Easter (which falls on a Sunday, but why bother with logic?), Ambedkar Jayanti, Muharram or Bakrid.

The first logic on offer for this move is that “people will be able to go home and be with their families”. But, doing away with secular holidays disrespects the spirit of our democracy, the father of our Constitution and the father of our nation—all in one go. The reality is that across our gloriously multicultural land, people celebrate Pongal, Onam, Bihu, Durga Puja, Ratha Yatra, Ganesh Chaturthi, Gurpurab, the Eids, Christmas, Nowruz, etc; with full on fervour. Most workplaces deal with this by offering optional days-off, and people opt for offs on the days that are significant to their particular faith, which is a good system because there’s always somebody from another faith to man the desks, and ensure work continues.

Schools, on the other hand, traditionally give about seven-to-ten days off in October, not because they are obsessed with Ravana-felling as such, but because Dussehra provides a neat mid-point between summer and winter.

The second logic on offer is an eternal right-wing favourite for temples, statues and the abrogation of Article 370—that this ‘will boost the tourism industry’. To back this claim we are being told that Diwali hotel bookings are at a record high this year. I suspect this has less to do with fervour around Lord Ram’s homecoming, and more to the fact that Diwali fell early this year—before high-season rates kicked in.

Which brings me to my final point—Diwali moves around a lot. If we let it dictate our annual week-long break, it won’t be long before the tail starts wagging the dog. Soon, the hindutva herd will demand that we abandon the “evil, Sonia-Gandhi-and-Italy-tainted” Gregorian calendar and switch to the Samvat. After that, our work schedules, flight timings and even the IPL fixtures will be ‘subject to the appearance of the moon’.

editor@theweek.in

diwalis-true-spark-lies-in-igniting-change

Sat Oct 11 11:12:03 IST 2025

So Dusshera has come and gone, and we’re now gearing up for the annual ODI (On Diwali, Inevitably) clash between the pataka party and the anti-pollution brigade. RWAs and schools are printing circulars begging people to keep it clean, while environmentalists and animal lovers strategise hectically to protect the air, the trees and all creatures great and small, even as right-wingers get busy cooking up their annual toxic rasedaar aaloo-tamatar stew of religious fervour, performative patriotism, brutal bullying and vulgar displays of wealth.

When we were children, we made a rangoli at the front door on Diwali, wore new clothes, sucked white batasha (moulded sugar) animal figurines, performed an OJJ (Om Jai Jagdish Hare) arti at home, burnt a modest cache of fireworks and played teen patti late into the night using dry fruits as currency. It was a simple yet perfect celebration, and the only thing I would want to add from the post-1990 universe into that classic mix would be Ed Sheeran’s mid-2025 desi-collab banger, with lyrics and a beat that is perfect for Diwali:

“You’re glowing/You colour and fracture the light/You can’t help but shine/And I know that/You carry the world on your back/But look at you tonight/The lights, your face, your eyes/Exploding like fireworks in the skyyyy.... Sapphire!”

During those childhood fireworks displays, the excitement stemmed mainly from the swift beating of our heart as we waited for the fuse to spark. Lighting patakas was a risky business, requiring courage (especially since the quality of crackers was rather erratic those days). The igniting provided as much excitement as the light and sound that followed. There were always some swashbucklers (fathers, brothers, the occasional feisty aunt or didi) who did the actual lighting while the rest of the party stood around watching breathlessly, hands clasped.

It was every child’s dream to be one of those badass heroes one day. Stepping forward while the rest hung behind in fright, bending down casually to ignite a delightful explosion of light. Coolest move ever.

Apart from joyously celebrating India in all its moods and colours, Sheeran’s lyrics also suggest that fireworks don’t have to be literal, they can also be symbolic/metaphorical. Of course, beautiful women have been hailed as patakas, phuljardis and lardi bombs by generations of Bollywood writers and roadside molesters, but let’s get our head out of our knickers, shall we, because I’m talking about truth bombs. The thought-provoking, conscience-stirring, brilliantly illuminating kind which the finest quality of stand-up comedians, whistleblowers and vigilant opposition MP specialise in launching into the smoggy sky of our public discourse.

Now, these are a form of Diwali celebration I can totally get behind. Whether it is a middle-school class teacher quietly but firmly debunking fake historical narratives in her classroom, a new resident challenging the colony RWA for having segregated elevators for domestic workers and residents, journalists daring to print the words Genocide in Gaza without employing inverted commas, the lack of consistency and logic in our external affairs policy with neighbouring nations and super-powers, a statement on the blatant partisanship of our Election Commison, or even a CJI politely suggesting to petitioners that they pray, meditate and ask Lord Vishnu to intercede and fix the matter of his beheaded statue in Khajuraho himself.

These truth bombs deliver highly on adrenalin and the accelerated heart-beat factor, they are fume-free, particulate-matter free (also literally free) and fully guaranteed to draw oohs and aahs on family and colony WhatsApp groups, national news channels and in the real world.

Why not gift ourselves cleaner air and a cleaner conscience by switching to these patakas this festive season.

editor@theweek.in

modi-and-me-a-shared-birthday-journey

Sat Sep 27 11:10:24 IST 2025

When I was a child I used to envy people who shared their birthdays with famous people. My best friend was always flexing about being born on October 11, which is, of course, Amitabh Bachchan’s birthday. Then there was my aunt who taught English, and so was very chuffed to be sharing birthday with William Shakespeare. My mum, whose life’s motto was ‘I want to Break Free’, was born on the September 5, the same date as Freddy Mercury.

I sulked mildly about not having a famous birthday fellow (or ‘hum-buddae’, as in humsafar or humraaz) for the longest time, till I realised, around the mid-2010s, that I had won the lottery as far as ‘hum-buddaes’ were concerned, because my birthday is on September 17, now being celebrated all over India as Vishwakarma Puja, as well as Narendra Modi’s happy birthday.

It has become a fortnight-long celebration, stretching all the way from September 17 to Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday on October 2, neatly underlining the parity in their stature. All sort of policies and drives are unveiled—health camps for women, children and the elderly, blood donation drives, and sports festivals.

This year was Modi’s 75th, and my 55th, but he seemed so much younger than me—bounding around energetically, brushing aside any rumours of party precedents of retirement@75. Everybody, near and far, high and low, congratulated him on his landmark anniversary, but I was particularly impressed by two individuals who followed up their wishes with two very different sorts of birthday presents.

Donald Trump called at midnight, which, as we all know, is a privileged slot reserved for only the closest of buddies. Later, he tweeted that they’d had a ‘wonderful chat’ and hailed Modi as ‘my friend’. But two days later, he followed up his friendly call with a birthday present that immediately put one in mind of Javed Jaffrey’s immortal quip: “With friends like mine, who needs enemas?”

Slice it any way you like, call it a brain gain, a ghar vapsi, a mixed blessing or cite China’s ‘Sea Turtle’ phenomenon where techies returned from the US to enrich the homeland, the 100K fee on H1-B visas is a slap in the face of Indian diplomacy and everybody in the Indian diaspora who voted for our birthday boy’s bestie, Donald.

Shah Rukh Khan, too, wished Modi on September 17. Sporting a beanie cap, total sincerity and a naughty grin, he hailed the PM’s journey from rags to Raisina, his energy, his passion, and commitment to the nation. And the very next day, his company Red Chillies released a blockbuster series on Netflix, directed by his son Aryan, who spent almost a month in jail under the Modi regime in 2021, on drug possession and peddling charges which were finally dismissed because of lack of evidence.

Some people are hailing Aryan’s slick, self-trolling, funny-dark show about the world he grew up in a ‘flex’ against the birthday boy. This may seem a bit of a reach, but what else do you call a tremendously successful production that shuts up all the rightwing naysayers who indulged in the vilest of character assassination and called its creator a traitor and a nalla (no-good) nashedi nepokid a few years ago?

For my birthday this year, I scored a stunning bouquet of pink oriental lilies and giant sunflowers, a very bougie coffee machine with a big stack of coffee capsules, a lovely dinner party hosted by my sister, and five thousand rupees in cash from my housekeeper.

Overall, I feel I have done better than my ‘hum-buddae’.

editor@theweek.in

arundhati-roy-mother-mary-comes-to-me-analysis-god-of-small-things-inspiration

Sat Sep 13 15:16:10 IST 2025

There are many reasons why Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is essential reading. For people of my generation, who read The God of Small Things in our 20s—and walked around in a daze afterwards, “like somebody had shot heroin up our arms”, to quote Arundhati’s literary agent David Godwin—this book feels like a vital companion piece. It is a vivid “making-of” chronicle, a kind of behind-the-scenes narrative that in some ways surpasses the original novel.

Unlike journalists and lesser writers who conceal their sources, Arundhati shares generously. We meet the inspirations for Velutha, for Chacko, for Baby Kochamma, the hideous sticky Orangedrink Lemondrink man, for doomed, dimpled Ammu and her beautiful, heartbroken children. We walk along the river, visit the pickle factory, ride in the tail-finned, sky-blue Plymouth and we get to see our Ammu live a long, massively successful life instead of perishing alone, ‘swollen with cortisone’ at 31.

She never gets with the real-life Velutha, though. Which isn’t as tragic as it seems really, because as a much older woman myself now, I find I am less interested in Velutha’s chocolatey abs and untouchable tongue (though they will always be swoonworthy) and more interested in what he symbolises. And boy, does Mary Roy (our Ammu) get down and dirty with what he symbolises!

At a private gathering, when asked what her mother’s greatest legacy to her was, Arundhati replied ‘an overactive middle finger’. In The God of Small Things, the affair with carpenter Velutha is Ammu’s/Mrs Roy’s overactive middle finger in action.

And in real life, the bums of the Syrian christian community have felt the power of her flipped middle finger, not just once, but twice. Her alcoholic, abusive husband—whom she left early, not because of the drinking or the beatings but because he was ‘a nothing man’—has felt it too. So has academia, when her tiny school bloomed into the iconic premier institution, Pallikoodam. All this, in the conservative world of 1986 and earlier.

And this finger flipping happened on home turf. Luke 4:24 in the Bible says, “A prophet is never recognised in his own land.” This, in modern parlance, translates to ‘you can conquer the world, but you can never win against the uncles in your family WhatsApp group’. Yet, Mrs Roy did exactly that when she went to the Supreme Court and secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. Then, she went a step further, steadily buying up land around her school ‘like a mafia don’, right in the faces of the community that disapproved of her marriage to an outsider, her divorce, her vagabond children and her rowing with her brother and mother. It was a clear case of what toxic Pakistan-haters today would call “ghar mein ghus ke maarna”.

If Mrs Roy is the prophet who achieved recognition in her own land, Arundhati is the prophet who took the gig global. Refusing to be reduced to just her corkscrew curls, ‘beautiful neck’ and ‘domestic fiction’, she constantly, fearlessly spoke wonderfully eloquent truth to power.

The combined story of mother and daughter in Mother Mary Comes to Me is heady stuff. In a world of trend-chasing cinema obsessed with opening-weekend numbers, corporate-funded literary festivals kowtowing to the government-of-the-day, subservient media, IT raids, beauty-aids, toxic males, trad wives and the obsession with perfect, photogenically lived lives, the Roy women stand apart. Chaotic, unapologetic, uncompromising, they remain a beacon for mothers and daughters who are willing to pay the price for equality, excellence in their fields, and no b***shit—from either state or spouse.

editor@theweek.in

christine-fair-trump-profanity-political-discourse-derogatory-term

Sat Aug 30 13:05:33 IST 2025

Dr Christine Fair, a prominent American political scientist and Georgetown University professor specialising in South Asian security and counter-terrorism, recently called President Donald Trump a ch***ya—several times—during an interview with Pakistani-origin British journalist Moeed Pirzada, a man who himself is no stranger to the word on air.

It is not the first time Trump has been bestowed with this title. Last year, X users were calling him a “certified ch***ya” several times (which, in the Indian context would translate pretty much to ‘ek number ka ch***ya’ or ch***ya #1 ) but as far as I know, it is the first time somebody (especially somebody so erudite) has actually mouthed the word—non-ironically as the Gen Z say—on camera.

When South Asian users tried decoding the word for global audiences last year, many described it as translating to ‘c**ty idiot’, which isn’t too far off the mark. In modern colloquial Hindi, ch***ya does mean foolish, stupid, or incompetent, but with a stronger, more offensive connotation due to its vulgar roots (it derives from a rude word for female genitalia).

Could ch***ya be on the verge of going mainstream? It wouldn’t be the first profanity with foreign roots to make the leap to respectability—and even to the Oxford English Dictionary. One is tempted to imagine language to be a sort of London Season in Regency England, with OED playing the part of the patronesses of Almack’s, and ch***ya as an audacious upstart, hoping to make the cut, emboldened by the success of equally vulgar predecessors like putz, schmuck, pendejo and others (putz and schmuck both derive from Yiddish and originally meant penis, but have now been prettified to mean moron or sucker. Pendejo is Spanish and literally translates to pubic hair, but is now also used as a synonym for stupid).

And it’s not like other desi words haven’t made the cut. There’s chaddi for one—a homely word for underwear—which was popularised through the phrase ‘kiss my chaddis’ in the show Goodness Gracious Me, to the point where ‘keep it in your chaddis’ and chaddi-buddies’ are common parlance today. There’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a superhit musical and film, based on a book by Ian Fleming; a title inspired by a bawdy British army ditty, where soldiers had to get a ‘chitty’ or permission slip to leave their base and visit brothels to ‘bang’ the ladies there.

So ch***ya can dare to hope. Delhiites (and Punjabis on both sides of the border, probably) would claim it to be an extremely useful and practically wholesome word—and hey, all cusswords sound cute/softer/exotic in the mouths of people who are not native speakers. But there’s no getting away from the fact that if used in professional, academic, or public settings, it is never short of crass and disrespectful.

But then crass and disrespectful are words more and more people are associating with Trump, who himself recently used ‘f**k’ while talking to the press about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The usage was rendered even more offensive because it was an English word in the mouth of a native English speaker, so there was zero scope for either exoticity or cuteness.

There’s a reason why the casual use of mother-tongue expletives is frowned upon in formal, high-stakes settings. It creates an informal, wham-bam-care-a-damn shoot-from-the-hip slackness where anything goes, like say planning to bomb countries on an unsecured Signal chat, randomly hiking tariffs, and issuing executive orders with the rat-a-tat-tat-tat-ness of machine gunfire.

Pausing long enough to use good languages helps us keep our fingers off triggers. Countries and people in crucial jobs everywhere need to resist the temptation to swear.

editor@theweek.in

election-commission-pr-disaster-voter-fraud-allegations

Sat Aug 16 11:29:37 IST 2025

Our Election Commission had been put in the dock by our united opposition (300 plus MPs marching to the EC’s door) and I am mystified by how badly it is handling the crisis. Like, why so defensive and skittish?

Rewinding to roughly a month ago, I am sure the couple now known for all eternity as the Coldplay concert cheaters has wondered a million times since the kiss camera picked them out on that fateful night how their lives would have played out if they had managed to keep their heads in that moment. Instead of ducking and turning, what if they had stayed relaxed, even smiled and waved at the camera while casually shifting into a more platonic, socially irreproachable hug? Would Chris Martin still have been prompted to make that damning ‘having an affair’ remark? Would every jobless person on the internet have immediately made it his/her holy mission to image search and identify them on the spot? Would he still have a job and would she still have blessed anonymity? Probably yes.

It is easier said than done, of course, but the phrase Keep Calm and Carry On (originally a motivational poster produced by the UK government in 1939 in preparation for WWII) has not become a massive meme for nothing. It is advice worth its weight in gold—to stay unblinking and unrattled and in-the-moment during a sudden, massive crisis.

Any professional in the image/crisis management industry would tell the EC that the smartest thing to have done, after Rahul Gandhi held that massive press con on August 7 (what fantastic optics, by the way! A lone man facing a sea of journalists in a crumpled T-shirt. Rahul’s grizzled styling is becoming fully Zelensky lite while our PM is too reluctant to face even a one-on-one interview with the Indian press dressed in a bespoke bandhgala), is to thank him for bringing the issue to their notice and to appoint an investigative committee to deal with the ‘allegations’. After all, the Congress has made similar accusations in the past, most notably regarding EVMs which fizzled out ignominiously. Depriving the issue of oxygen of public attention would have caused it to peter out, especially with all the sound and the fury of the Trumpian drama playing out constantly in the background—50 per cent tariffs, and who-stopped-the-war and what not.

Instead, the EC has behaved like a complete puppet of the government, neglected to put up even a token display of neutrality and insultingly dismissed our legally elected leader of opposition like he is a witless upstart. So now they are dealing with a self-created PR disaster, where Akhilesh Yadav gets to cut a dashing figure, leaping nimbly over police barricades in his eye-catching lal-topi. Rahul Gandhi, with the virtuous glow of a man who has done his homework well, gets to court arrest outside the EC. The INDIA bloc gets to gleefully chant slogans outside the monsoon session of Parliament. And, the YouTuber brigade—Dhruv Rathee, the Deshbhakt, Ajit Anjum—get to put out episodes pretty much agreeing with everything the Congress is alleging, with a special focus on how sus the SIR of the Bihar voters list is, and how the PDF of the draft list has now been replaced by scanned photographs on the state’s EC website, making checking a daunting, backbreaking task.

It would seem that the Congress, for once, has hit pay dirt. #Votechori is not a political issue, it is the bedrock of our democracy, and has the potential to rouse regular folk to anger and (even worse) vigilance.

Gyanesh Kumar and Co certainly haven’t kept their calm. It remains to be seen if they can carry on.

editor@theweek.in

smriti-irani-kyunki-reboot-tulsi-virani-comeback

Sat Aug 02 14:52:20 IST 2025

It is telling that the very first line of the much-hyped Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi reboot trailer has Smriti/Tulsi musing: “Apne woh nahi hote jo tasveeron mein saath khade hote hain, apne woh hote hain jo takleefo mein saath khade hote hain [Your dearest ones are not people who stand beside you in photographs, rather those who stand beside you in difficulties].” The copywriter in me can’t help but applaud. What a sly diss, so sweetly delivered, that, too, on soap opera primetime, probably the only slot when Smriti’s erstwhile political ‘dearest ones’ are likely to be watching, given their penchant for all things melodramatic and over the top.

So will today’s audience take to the reboot once the little rush of nostalgia has faded? Comparisons are already being made with Anupamaa—the Kyunki of this generation, if you will—which began a little like English Vinglish fan fiction but came into its own magnificently, with its bildungsroman tale of a middle-class doormat housewife rising from betrayal and divorce to self-respect, remarriage and resurgence. Interestingly, Rupali Ganguly, the star of Anupamaa, became a BJP member in 2024, and posts regularly about political issues, rather like early-era Smriti used to. The BJP clearly has their plan B in place.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen if Smriti’s plan B will work. I’m not a fan either of her acting or of her politics (as minister, she failed to protect either students or women) but her sheer gumption and tenacity are impressive—nobody who loves an underdog could have failed to cheer when she so brutally took down Rahul Gandhi in 2019. But clearly hubris got the better of her in 2024, and the Congress dexterously got underdog lovers like me to switch our sympathies to ‘humble Congress worker’ Kishori Lal Sharma.

The makers of the new Kyunki will probably try and tap into this fire and gumption, but it has been a long time and, though the Kyunki jingle is an absolute banger, I’m not sure it is enough to get the job done. Re-releases, ‘spirit’ sequels and re-hashes are becoming a little too common nowadays—the latest ‘offering’ is rumoured to be 2013’s problematic Raanjhanaa, with a new AI-generated ending in which Dhanush’s creepy stalker protagonist doesn’t die, but survives. Ewww.

At the end of the day, there is no getting away from the fact that any firebrand, no-nonsense middle-aged Indian woman in a sari is channelling the OG—Indira Gandhi. And, if you have been watching the parliamentary debate on Operation Sindoor, the person channelling her best right now (even though it was her brother who got Modi to drink water) is Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

Hmmm, lemme think, who does the BJP have in its ranks to counter that energy?

There was a lot of chatter on the news analysis panels about Shashi Tharoor being sorely missed at the debate and how the Congress should have been secure enough to let him speak. By that token, Smriti was sorely missed at the debate, and maybe the BJP should have ‘stood by her in her difficulties’ and let her speak as a loyal stalwart and an MP in the Rajya Sabha?

But Smriti/ Tulsi is back in Shantiniketan, looking wounded that Mihir has forgotten their anniversary. (In a spoiler to absolutely nobody, he hasn’t.)

If you’ve watched any teleserials about Gujarati matriarchs, you will know they come brimming with punchy, hard-hitting kitchen metaphors. I’ll use one to sum up the current situation—you can reheat stale food as much as you like, it will still lack both nutrition and taste.

editor@theweek.in

is-narendra-modi-exempt-from-bjps-75-year-retirement-rule

Fri Jul 18 17:42:36 IST 2025

Fauja Singh, the 114-year-old marathoner, was a biological wonder—he sprinted into eternity felled not by age, but by a tragic road accident in Jalandhar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, never a slouch in the PR department, swiftly fired off a tweet, calling Fauja a “unique persona and an exceptional athlete with incredible determination who inspired India’s youth on the very important topic of fitness”.

The nation paused, shed a tear, and scrolled on. But wait—rewind. Zoom out. Modi turns 75 this September, and the RSS has been dropping not-so-subtle hints about senior leaders stepping aside at that age. Is there a connection? Could Modi be flexing his own vitality, in a subtle nudge to the world—I’m still fit, still hot, nobody puts Modi in a corner?

The BJP’s unwritten rule—retire at 75—has been a guillotine for stalwarts like L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. Both were swiftly shuffled off to the ‘Margdarshak Mandal’ once they hit the milestone. Recently, Mohan Bhagwat, while speaking at a book launch for RSS ideologue Moropant Pingle, recounted an anecdote where Pingle, upon receiving a ceremonial shawl at 75, quipped that it was code for “you are old, step aside”. The opposition and Twitterati immediately got excited, speculating if this was merely a moment of introspection (Bhagwat is also set to turn 75 in September) or a coded jab at Modi. “One arrow, two targets,” crowed Jairam Ramesh, with a smirk you could see from space.

Amit Shah immediately scrambled to clarify: “No retirement clause in our constitution!” Of course, Modi’s tweet for Fauja could be genuinely heartfelt or simply a tapping into the world’s current TikTok/Instagram fuelled obsession with fitness. Well-heeled, boomers and xers are chugging protein shakes, counting Fitbit steps, and spinning on pelotons—not just to be healthy, but to give mortality the middle finger.

From Bryan Johnson’s mission to erase his biological age to Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed status of ‘Ozempic Santa’, from Trump’s talk about a third term, to Nicole Kidman’s miracle pregnancy, to Tom Cruise’s ‘Mission Impossible’ to be fit forever, and locally, our trio of ‘bare’ly-hanging-in-there Khans, Rahul Gandhi’s one-palm push-ups, Neena Gupta’s glow-up and the grizzled beauty of soon-to-be-60 Milind Soman (who, btw, attended an RSS shakha as a child) we are constantly being told that #ageisjustanumber. Not that this shared, sweat-soaked dream is a bad thing—it may make us all fitter—cigarette-packet-like health warnings on samosas, jalebis and Modi’s very own pakoras are to be welcomed—even though the regime that implements them has not been very kind to our female athletes or athletes in general.

Nobody seems to retire gracefully in India—from cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar hanging on till his 100th century, to Sonia Gandhi helming the Congress from 1998 to 2022, to D.Y. Chandrachud clinging on to his official residence in Lutyens’ Delhi six months after retirement, everybody seems reluctant to yield their spot in the limelight. Meanwhile, younger, hungrier generations have to grumble, rumble and plot rebellion.

The BJP-RSS has always been an exception to this rule. One of the most praiseworthy things about the combine is their bench strength—the shrewd encouragement of rising stars within the system, especially when the sheen of the older order seems to be fading. It is in this context that Modi’s tweet needs to be studied. Will our 56-inch-chested biological wonder be able to prevail as long as Fauja? Only September will tell.

editor@theweek.in

we-spend-our-lives-denying-death

Sat Jun 21 11:43:03 IST 2025

A friend just posted an Instagram story—an aerial shot of Mumbai—with the caption: “Landed! Surely ‘landed’ is the most beautiful word in the world?#Thankful.”

We’re all struggling to make sense of the horrific tragedy that was Air India flight 171. The scale of it, the suddenness, the sheer randomness—both for those on board and the ones simply eating a meal on the ground. What a sobering reminder to all of us hurrying around, self-importantly, on the surface of the planet, meeting our goals and targets and deadlines—that death can come anytime and anywhere. Literally, out of the blue.

Stampedes at religious gatherings like the Mahakumbh and joyous celebrations like the RCB win—as well as the many train and bus accidents, collapsing flyovers and crumbling bridges all around us—underline a similar message.

Life is cheap in a country of 1.4 billion people, we fume, stoking our righteous anger in a bid to keep the fear of mortality at bay. The guilty must be identified and swiftly made to pay. And, of course, this is correct and should be done asap. But, also, maybe, take the opportunity this tragedy provides to reflect a little on the only thing we know for sure in this world. That we are all going to have to leave it.

Many religions, certainly Buddhism and Hinduism, recommend meditating on death—the inevitability of it—and the calmness and perspective that comes with accepting this inevitability as a means to lead a fuller and happier life. Reminding ourselves daily of the impermanence of life helps us sift through everything that’s going on and recognise what truly matters—and what is mere distraction.

And, yet, we spend our lives denying death. It starts from infancy. Young parents spin long, made-up tales of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, ‘one true love’ and some God or the other to their impressionable children but never speak to them of death. I am not sure why they do this—personally, I’ve always loved the way Disney’s The Lion King explained it so simply and so beautifully—“The sun rolling high, through the sapphire sky, keeps great and small on the endless round of the ‘circle of life’.” Or even the scene where Mufasa tells Simba, so matter-of-factly—“We eat the antelope, but when we die we become the grass and the antelope eats the grass.”

I remember my five-year-old son watching the film, and when this scene played out, remarking, very seriously, in his sweet five-year-old voice, “Fair enough!”

It goes without saying that early and untimely death is anything but fair—there were 11 children and two infants on flight 171—their lives have been snatched from them, their loved ones on the ground left utterly broken and grief-stricken. And in a world that practically worships youth and immortality—if the followers of Bryan Johnson and the Kardashians are anything to go by.

And, still, there is a silver-lining. It was quick, being the predominant one. Life was snuffed out quickly, there was no lingering and no protracted suffering. Pain, even if horrific, could not have lasted longer than 32 seconds—surely this is something to hold on to?

To me, Air India’s doomed flight 171 will serve as a sobering reminder of my privilege. I get to live another day while so many others did not. It’s amazing how much this recalibrates my priorities. Get out of my way—I have sunsets to watch, animals to cuddle, flowers to smell, people to call, and things to do.

editor@theweek.in

jaipur-when-pink-turned-sour-rajasthan-governor-haribhau-bagade

Fri Jun 06 17:29:03 IST 2025

Sometimes, living in Bengaluru makes me pathetically homesick for the north, so I readily agreed to lead a writer’s workshop in Jaipur. Rajasthan is home turf for me—I have cousins in almost every city, and the Rajput spice box (hing, garlic, saunf, red chillies, mustard oil) is the taste of my childhood and my nani’s cooking. My mother-in-law served as governor of the state for several years, so I have had the chance to spend grown-up time there, too—and was lucky enough to cheer the Rajasthan Royals to victory in the inaugural IPL.

I spent a very happy week wandering around the pink city (not as salmon pink as it used to be—more of a tandoori marinade orange, but maybe the general ‘saffronisation’ and ‘sindoorisation’ in the air impacted the shade card issued to the Jaipur Development Authority painters this year?). But, the food, the shopping, and the hospitality more than compensated—precious stones, blue pottery, the softest of block-printed cotton, amiable shopkeepers, skilled craftsmen, fantastic new clubs and pubs, and a new eight-lane highway as broad as an undammed Indus.

The only sour note was reading in the local papers that Rajasthan Governor Haribhau Bagade took it upon himself to declare—at a public meeting in Udaipur—that the marriage between Mughal Emperor Akbar and a Rajput princess, Jodha Bai, is a “fabrication” and “one of many historical inaccuracies introduced due to the early influence of British historians”. He further claimed that “there was a king named Bharmal, and he got the daughter of a maid married to Akbar”.

The governor’s source—which he cited with great conviction—was simply that “there is no mention of Jodha in the Akbarnama”. He failed to provide any source to support the second half of his claim: that a maid was passed off as a princess and married to the emperor.

Now I am not even going to get into the many historical evidences that point at a mutually respectful relationship between the two martial races, the fact that Rajput generals fought in the Mughal armies and vice versa, or even that a Rajput empress quite definitely went on to become the mother of a Mughal emperor.

I am not even going to deep dive into the obvious contradiction. Like, please make up your mind—if the British policy of divide and rule (which lead to the creation of India and Pakistan) was to fan the flames of hatred between Hindus and Muslims, then why on earth would they invent a romantic story in which they happily intermarried? Shouldn’t they have been inventing stories in which they offed each other?

I am just going to focus on the casually casteist, entirely tone-deaf entitlement inherent to the suggestion that a Rajput princess was too ’high born’ to accept a Mughal proposal—so her family bid a “lowly” serving maid to do the dirty, dangerous job instead.

Surely, as a community famed for its courage, Rajputs would be offended by the implication that a Rajput princesses hid behind her maid—someone she was meant to protect—rather than face the emperor herself. I know I am!

The governor went on to encourage a false equivalency between Maharana Pratap and Akbar—this even though the latter’s empire extended from Bengal in the east to Afghanistan in the west, from the Himalayas in the north to the Godavari river in the south, and the former ruled Mewar, which is just about half of modern day Rajasthan.

Bhavani kassam, so embarrassing. Not for Rajputs, though. For him.

editor@theweek.in

women-should-not-be-non-playable-characters

Sat May 24 11:04:13 IST 2025

My children started using the term ‘NPC’ a few years ago. It originates from video games, and stands for ‘non-playable-character’, which means that when the game offers you a choice of characters whose identity you can assume in order to play the game, NPCs are not on the list. This is because NPCs are typically side-characters, somebody with a few stock lines and actions. They are there to keep the plot moving, but definitely not key or consequential in any way.

“God, he’s such an NPC,” my son will say when someone strikes him as colourless, or mindless, or has nothing to say for himself. So, why do I get the feeling that many of today’s right-wingers seem to view women the same way—who hold up half the sky, as Mao Zedong said—as NPCs?

As in, you are in the game; you have a few lines and tasks, but you have no room to innovate, manoeuvre or grow into a bigger role. Take our female wrestlers, for example. They are allowed to wrestle and win medals, but heaven forbid they speak up against sexual harassment. Our female MPs, who are allowed to be badass, but if they put up a post asking the prime minister why the US president is claiming credit for the ceasefire with Pakistan, they get a call from J.P. Nadda and promptly delete their posts.

Our war widows—they are allowed to mourn and rant freely on all the television networks, but God forbid they appeal for peace or clarify that they don’t advocate hate! We have a woman as our president and head of state, but unlike say, a Michelle Obama, who owned her identity as a descendent of slaves, Droupadi Murmu has never really addressed any problematic issues like the death of Stan Swamy or the targeting of tribal Christians by right-wing groups. Most recently, we had two lady spokespersons briefing the press on Operation Sindoor—both capable women, but they, too, seemed to be reading from a set, formal script. Compare their demeanour to that of Air Marshal A.K. Bharti, who spoke with so much leadership and swag: “Our job is to hit the target, not count the body bags.”

Why did neither Wing Commander Vyomika Singh or Colonel Sofiya Qureshi feel relaxed and empowered enough to make such swashbuckling statements? Maybe because one of them had to fight a court battle to even earn her permanent commission not so many years ago? In such an environment, it is no wonder that Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad, while praising the choice of the two women officers, commented: “The optics of two women soldiers presenting their findings is important, but optics must translate to reality on the ground. Otherwise it is just hypocrisy.”

It’s also no wonder that this entirely unexceptionable post has got him arrested. What makes the arrest especially ironic is that the offended party is none other than the Haryana State Commission for Women. It is so galling to see the body—which was nowhere on the scene when two Kuki-Zo women were paraded naked in Manipur, or even when Vyomika was fighting her battle for permanent commission in 2019—obediently pushing majoritarian agendas by cracking down on minorities through ‘issues’ like triple talaq and ‘love jihad’ and now this latest ‘violation of women’s modesty’, like a good little girl.

Women are not, and should never be, mere NPCs. That was the point Ali was making. And that’s what got him arrested. Who is really the misogynist here?

editor@theweek.in

operation-sindoor-is-effective-branding

Sat May 10 16:01:15 IST 2025

Operation Sindoor is effective branding. It pays homage to the lives and the grieving wives of the 26 blameless civilian men we lost, thus reminding the world, every time the operation is mentioned, that our action was purely retributive, and it also puns neatly on Sindhu, our shared river and our shared heritage, and the treaty we have currently put in abeyance.

The government’s press release is careful to stress that no Pakistani military facilities were targeted—only identified terrorist infrastructure, and that, too, in a “focused” manner. World leaders have reacted with concern, but have not condemned India’s actions outright. The general sentiment seems to be that Pakistan had it coming. And now that noses have been bloodied on both sides, it would be advisable to back down. Time to de-escalate and exercise restraint.

To me, this criticism seem a little perfunctory. The US president, in particular, has all but shrugged it off, saying: “India and Pakistan have been at war for centuries, if you think about it.” (What even?).

The fact of the matter is that over the past few years, countries going to war with each other has been happily normalised. Russia grabbed Crimea, then attacked the Ukrainian mainland. Israel has been allowed to brutally pulverise the Palestinians, and is now planning to seize Gaza. North Korea has sent troops to Russia. Yemen’s Houthis are firing rockets at a steady pace and are facing retaliation that seems massively disproportionate, and Israeli counterattack just levelled entire buildings in Sana’a and destroyed six planes.

Meanwhile, the US president and his MAGAts have abandoned any pretence of couthness, and are now speaking loosely and casually about taking over other entire countries, and carving up the world as they see fit, that too on poorly secured Signal chats. This kind of moral slackness and open disregard of national borders and sentiments create an atmosphere of ‘anything goes’ that can spread very quickly, even as NATO and the UN bleat ineffectually in the background. In this heady, blood-lusty climate, where the US can thirst lecherously for Greenland and Canada, and Israel can make ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ plans for Gaza then, why (reason both India and Pakistan) can’t we snatch all of Kashmir, and make it our own?

Um, we cannot and we should not, because, at this rate, the whole world will very soon be at each others throats.

Pakistan, however, has vowed to respond. I doubt common Pakistanis are happy with this decision. The Karachi Stock Exchange-100 index plunged 6,500 points after Indian retaliation, wiping out almost six per cent of its value. Since the April 23 Pahalgam attack, it has shed almost 10,000 points (Indian equity markets showed resilience).

If cutting trade and diplomatic ties, refusing to release river waters, mock drills, air raid sirens and power cuts help us vent our rage and heal the wounds caused to both our jaan (life) and our shaan (pride), then let us carry them out, and meticulously.

Having a common enemy can unite a nation, and the way people have rallied around Indian Muslims, in general, and Kashmiris, in particular, is heartening. But let us stop there. Finally, ‘doing one’s bit’ does not mean viciously trolling anybody who appeals for peace, like the tragically widowed naval bride Himanshi Narwal. This is the lowest form of jingoism and sickeningly misogynistic—and it is on the Union home minister and the Prime Minister to ‘do their bit’ and punish such trolls swiftly and severely. Such attacks weaken our national fabric and our shaan more than anything carried out by Pakistan.

editor@theweek.in

what-is-a-working-funeral-the-papal-one-for-example

Sat Apr 26 11:13:50 IST 2025

Donald Trump tweeted, “Melania and I will be going to the funeral of Pope Francis, in Rome. We look forward to being there!” This didn’t go down well with the nit-picky folks on X, because who “looks forward” to going to a funeral? It isn’t exactly a wedding, or a music festival or some sort of Roman holiday. Surely something in the general zone of ‘we will be attending to pay our last respects’ would have been more suitable?

But may be it’s the best one can expect from a man who says world leaders are calling to “kiss my ass”, describes a free nation as his ‘51st state’ and calls the head of his own federal reserve “a major loser”. Talking classy isn’t his strong suit, clearly.

On the other hand, perhaps Trump’s onto something. If you’ve seen the hilarious BBC series Yes, Prime Minister, you may remember an episode where James Hacker, the British PM, explains the concept of a ‘working funeral’ to his wife. She sees him bent over reams of documents, asks if he’s reading a draft of the sermon, to which he replies testily: ‘Lord no, this isn’t about the sermon! This is about politics. This funeral has come at exactly the right moment. We’ve got all sorts of things to discuss—NATO, the Warsaw pact, the Middle East of course.’ (Umm, sounds familiar?)

Mrs Hacker goes on to ask: “So this funeral would be a sort of summit conference?”

Hacker: “Yes! It’s a heaven-sent opportunity!”

Mrs Hacker (eye-rolling): “Literally!”

Totally missing the sarcasm, Hacker continues to explain: “Much better than a summit, because there are no expectations. People don’t expect their leaders to come back from a funeral with test-ban agreements or farm-quota reductions, so one can actually have some meaningful discussions. A summit, on the other hand, is just a public relations circus.”

Everybody, it seems, is going to be at Papa Francesco’s funeral. Apart from Trump, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky were amongst the first to confirm their attendance to the ceremony to be held on Saturday in Vatican City. Britain is sending a high-ranking royal. Condolences and confirmations continue to pour in from leaders and nations around the world.

It’s encouraging that ‘Trump whisperer’ Giorgia Meloni will be on home turf and strategically placed to provide a much-needed soothing touch to the various heads-of-state brushing bristling shoulders in the pews.

I am really starting to feel very hopeful about this funeral.

In the BBC series Hacker explains: “It is good if there’s lots of singing and organ music because one can talk softly through it. And, during the sermon, one can catch up on jet lag.” He concludes his little homily on working funerals by saying of the deceased: “He’s done much more for the world by dying than he ever did in the whole of his life.”

Of course this is not true of Pope Francis—a man of compassion, forgiveness and simplicity, who did so much good, and whose final message, read aloud by his archbishop on Easter, mentioned the people of Gaza in particular—appealing for a ceasefire, an exchange of hostages and a thawing of hostilities. It went on to painstakingly pray for every single war-torn nation in the world, focussing specially on the vulnerable, the marginalised and the migrants.

The Beatles, appealing for unity and common ground, once sang ‘come together, right now, over me’. The Pope’s body, laid out in the nave of St Peter’s Basilica, seems to be making the very same appeal.

Indeed, his death, at this juncture, provides an opportunity to the world’s hardliners to face-save, climb down and take up kinder, more conciliatory positions all round.

Let’s hope they make the most of it.

editor@theweek.in

the-great-american-betrayal

Sat Apr 12 10:35:17 IST 2025

I have become horridly fascinated by the Donald Trump circus. It should be ticketed entertainment, except it can’t be, because it isn’t entertainment really—too many lives and livelihoods on the line. But I am staying up late and checking the morning headlines in the US compulsively, the way I used to stay up to watch StarPlus drop the latest episodes of Anupamaa, back in the good old days when Anupamaa used to be good.

I guess my fascination is to do with the fact that the US is supposedly the gold standard. This is what we are all striving to be. This is democracy in all its glory—the golden land where just about anybody, no matter their faith, gender or ethnicity, has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A country with a free, fair press, empowered institutions providing checks and balances, unbiased courts, college students and comedians who routinely take a dump on the government, and entertainers who win Oscars even after fearlessly exercising their freedom of speech. A country where black men and women of half south-Indian origin rise to fill the highest posts in the land.

Of course, it has its flaws—wokeness, loneliness, mental and physical health issues, a tendency to poke its nose in the business of other countries—but even then, when our democracy is grown up it’ll be like the US, we’ve all thought, starry-eyed, at some point or the other.

But now the words of Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz’s bitingly satiric ‘Tum Bilkul Hum Jaise Nikle’ (written in 1996 in response to the rising communal violence in India) are sounding in our ears as we stare open-mouthed at our TVs, trying to process America’s meltdown and its crazy backward stumbling towards a hallucinated ‘great’ past.

Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle,

Ab tak kahan chuppe thhe bhai,

Wahi moorakhta, wahi ghamanpan,

Jisme humne sadi bitaee.

(Hey, you turned out to be exactly like us—where were you hiding all this time, buddy?

The same foolishness, the same arrogance, In which we squandered centuries.)

Later in the poem she says:

Ulte paon chalte jao,

baram-baar yahi dohrao,

Kaise veer-mahan tha Bharat,

Kitna aalishaan tha Bharat!

(Keep walking backwards into the past, keep repeating the same, single slogan

O, how brave and great was India!

O how glorious was India.)

When I first read the poem, I had been amused by it, but it is only now, when I see the US obscenely desecrating its own hallowed ideals, that I realise the poem came from a place of deep pain and betrayal.

Yes, we have betrayed every idealist in Pakistan with our narrow, hate-filled anti-Muslim rhetoric, and, yes, the US has betrayed every idealistic Indian with its stupid white supremacist rantings. We can all do so much better. How did we end up hating our own citizenry and rubber-stamping stupid, self-harming policies like demonetisation and reciprocal tariffs?

The MAGA lot seems obsessed with land grab—Canada, Greenland, Gaza, but what they’re failing to grasp is that they are surrendering priceless moral high ground with every narrow, extortionist statement that comes out of their piggy little mouths. Oh, and their ‘golden’ visas? Not going to work. Why should rich people come to America? America was built by poor people who came to America because they wanted to become rich. It’s called the American dream. It’s a global dream and any hungry young achiever in the world is entitled to dream it. America had better start ‘america-ing’ again. Or, it will lose the only thing that made it great.

editor@theweek.in

kunal-kamra-is-feared-not-for-his-jokes-but-for-his-truth-bombs

Sat Mar 29 11:12:39 IST 2025

Let’s be very clear. The outrage over Kunal Kamra’s ‘Naya Bharat’ act (barely a day old and already past four million views) isn’t because he might have called Eknath Shinde a traitor. The outrage is because, over the course of a 45-minute monologue—delivered in his trademark wry, matter-of-fact, exasperated style—followed by a 15-minute song routine, featuring sharply reworked lyrics, he dropped truth bombs with devastating effectiveness and a precision American warplanes currently air-striking Yemen could only envy.

He began by reminding us all that this is a weakened BJP, with only 239-240 seats—dependent on coalition partners—so he can make jokes that would have been unthinkable when it had a brute 350-seat majority. He referenced the Ambani wedding saying, first they gave us free data, then said look at my beta (son). He took direct swipes at the richest of Indians, called out the lack of logic of a community with an 80 per cent majority claiming to be ‘endangered’, slyly suggested we Google how many Gujaratis join India’s armed forces annually (the number is shockingly low, especially for a state that claims to be staunchly patriotic—a mere two per cent, or 28,000 from a population of more than 60 million).

Then he called up a keyboard accompanist, and launched into a series of parody songs, climaxing with a no-holds-barred banger dedicated to our prime minister, titled ‘Tanashah’ (dictator), sung to the tune of the Shah Rukh Khan’s classic Baadshah.

This is the real reason why Kunal is being persecuted, because he went there—to all the places we have been trained in these eleven years into believing are holy or untouchable.

He did not merely flirt or make nudge-nudge-wink-wink allusions, he struck with zero subtlety or fu**s to give, he named and shamed, called out hypocrisy and BS, and he did all this in plain, nonchalant, care-a-damn Hindi, which makes him so much more dangerous than English-speaking Vir Das, or Germany-based Dhruv Rathee, or robotic AI Grok.

On top of that, he seems to have done the biblical thing—like the king in the parable in Luke 14:31, he first sat down—before going into battle—counted the cost and seems prepared to pay it. This is what makes him so dangerous—the fact that instead of caving in like say, a Ranveer Allahbadia, aka BeerBiceps, he is brandishing a copy of the Constitution, asserting his right to roast India’s rich and powerful, and seems positively eager to fight it out in court.

Clearly, he’s trying to make India braver. He’s saying, look, you are allowed to do this, laugh, be irreverent, ask questions, demand answers, know your rights. He’s like the first chill guy on the dance floor at a rigidly formal party, manically doing Govinda style jhatkas and Katrina Kaif thumkas in an effort to get the rest of the crowd to stop being so scared, and just simply do the happy dance of democracy.

See, comedy and speaking truth to power has a long and respected history in India—take Tenali Rama, or Raja Birbal, or even Jawaharlal Nehru urging famous cartoonist Shankar “not to spare me”, or even, most recently, Modi stating on Lex Fridman’s podcast that “criticism is the Soul of democracy”. The tradition of the roastee being the chief guest at the roast is a healthy one—it keeps leaders grounded, creates space for catharsis, venting and fresh perspectives, and reassures the public that their leaders are secure enough to handle criticism.

Go watch Kunal’s ‘Naya Bharat’ if you haven’t already. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but I totally defend his right to say it.

editor@theweek.in

forget-maga-and-miga-go-for-mdga

Sat Mar 15 11:04:13 IST 2025

Must say that all the reports of ‘Agent Krasnov’ make fascinating reading—like one of those old school, thick-as-a-brick bestsellers that Irving Wallace and Robert Ludlum used to write. A younger, thinner, almost-handsome Donald Trump, newly wed to his beautiful Czech wife, being wined and dined by the inscrutable men of the KGB! It is certainly an irresistible theory—perhaps because it feels so karmic—payback time to the US for all the times the CIA has carried out ‘regime change’ around the world—to find that whatever goes around has come around, and that they are now lumped with a head of state carefully picked, groomed and backed by the Russians.

You can almost hear the best screenwriters in Hollywood spitting on their hands as they sit before their laptops to hammer out the blockbuster film—‘Our Man in DC’, perhaps, or, ‘Agent Trump’, or inspired by a recent article in The Observer, ‘Putin’s Bitch’. Anyway, even if Trump isn’t a stooge but just a white-supremacist fanboy with a massive Putin crush, there was no need for him and J.D. Vance to launch a ‘peace through rudeness’ offensive.

The level of ugliness, gaslighting and vulgar bullying in the Oval Office was straight out of a domestic violence case—entirely counter-productive! Because, really, till this public dressing-down of the man in the black shirt by the bullies in suits in the Oval Office, a lot of people in our part of the world were sympathetic to the Russian point of view. We felt that the US had no business man-spreading itself through NATO all the way till Russia’s front door like the proverbial pushy camel in the tent.

So even when Russia (fearing that Ukraine was going to be given NATO membership) broke the promise they along with the US and the UK had made in the Budapest Memorandum (to never invade Ukraine because it had given up its nuclear arsenal), and went ahead and invaded Ukraine anyway, the move, somehow, felt justified. Like it was just Russia being put in a situation where they had to emphasise that nyet means nyet. Because, realistically, if you are a little guy it is on you to keep the big boys in your neighbourhood charmed and happy and on your team. That is what diplomacy is all about. Being calm, shrewd, polite and getting along with everybody—or at least everybody important in your neighbourhood—is what career diplomats do.

But Ukraine, for whatever reason, decided instead to keep the distant Americans happy—even though they have, to quote Zelensky, “a nice big ocean in between” which makes it very hard for them to come save him quickly.

So anyway, here we were, not very concerned about the Ukrainians, till Trump took a rude public dump on him, and now he’s global underdog #1 and cute images of him are being printed on T-shirts all over Sarojini Nagar, Delhi, Hill Road, Mumbai, and Commercial Street, Bengaluru. What to even say to the young people buying these T-shirts? That, perhaps, Zelensky isn’t such an underdog, after all? That, perhaps, the lesson to be learnt from his humiliation is that, given how unhinged and unpredictable the globe is getting, we can’t allow ‘external affairs’ to mean just hugging people and accepting awards and doing MAGA-MIGA.

It is imperative that our government does what Europe is busy doing—putting its neighbourhood first. Also, ensure that our ties with Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, China, the Middle East and Russia—are well-tended, respectful and mutually beneficial.

editor@theweek.in

men-too-have-glass-ceilings

Sat Mar 01 10:47:57 IST 2025

The more I read about rape, suicide, family troubles, unemployment, toxic masculinity, excessive religiosity and hysterical jingoism, the more I feel we have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

We have been funding NGOs, holding summits, creating policy and demonstrating and what-not―all focusing on improving the status of women. But maybe what we really need to do is to focus on our men.

I don’t need to quote statistics to convince you that alcoholism rates are significantly higher for men than women in India. Same goes for drug addiction. Same goes for addiction to pornography. We have normalised this behaviour so much that nobody even raises an eyebrow about it, with literally every working woman sharing the exact same story with her colleagues during the lunch break―that her maid’s husband is a drunkard who hits her and steals her money and that she has either left him or is planning to. It’s a trope that has been milked for comedy for decades (from Keshto Mukherjee back in the day, to Danish Sait’s wildly popular ‘Bevarsi Kudka’ sketches on Instagram) with nobody pausing to ask why exactly these men are choosing oblivion in a manner that hurts their families so hard both emotionally and financially, that it is akin to self-harm.

Most damningly, while twice the number of Indian women (compared to men) report being depressed, the suicide rates for men are roughly triple those of women. So women are depressed, but men are the ones dying by suicide, with as many as 31 per cent of them citing ‘family problems’ as the trigger.

Now patriarchy is a system canny old warlords perfected to maintain their stranglehold on power by turning young men into killing (or be killed) machines in the service of the warlord’s armies, and women into baby-making machines to replace said men who got killed. The fallen men (and their mothers) were valorised for their ‘loyalty’ to ‘God’ and ‘land’ and paid handsomely. Thus, the patriarchy values men only for loyalty (to their masters) and brute physical strength, and women only for obedience (to men), health and fertility. It deems all other qualities―intelligence, wit, kindness and creativity―as entirely useless.

Indian women, powered by ancient female lore and our pantheon of goddesses, and more recently by government initiatives, women’s own gumption, and the lack of shame around unburdening to friends or seeking psychological help, are taking assured steps towards financial self-reliance.

But Indian men, increasingly under pressure from a sluggish economy and job scarcity, are not taking similar steps towards either domestic self-reliance or seeking help by sharing with friends/psychologists, as society still judges this behaviour as weak, loser-ish and effeminate.

What they are doing instead is watching films where heroes cry, yell at their fathers and push women around, or joining religious groups, or vicariously applauding the macho antics of the Trumps and the Musks, or worst, worshipping at the alter of the unholy trinity of drugs, porn and rape.

As a society, we need to let men know that in a healthy world, healed of unnaturally imposed rigid roleplay, women and children would love to see them shatter the glass ceilings on the home front, and excel as nurturers, masala dosa-makers, pram-pushers, baby-rockers, salsa dancers, nursery-school teachers, floor-sweepers and occasional weepers.

Hopefully, the planet’s first generation to be raised by so many working mothers―the notoriously ‘unemployable’ Gen Z, with its obsession with work-life balance, gender neutrality, and total disregard for Boomer-era structures and hierarchies―is going to be the one to show us all the way.

editor@theweek.in

stop-applauding-the-sporadic-victories-of-kings

Sat Feb 15 10:50:27 IST 2025

We invented chess, which was pretty cool of us. The original game ‘chaturanga’—that is four divisions (infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry)—was a war strategy game. When the game travelled to the Middle East, they mangled the Sanskrit and it ended up being called ‘shatranj’ instead. The pawn (infantry) and the knight (cavalry) are still very much in evidence on the modern chess board but the Persians mispronounced rath (chariot) as rukh, which got translated in Europe to rocca which means ‘fortress’ in Italian. And so we have the rook, which looks like a castle. The elephant shared a similar fate, as the stylised design of the piece resembled a bishop’s mitre, so the Europeans (who clearly had no issues mixing church and state) started calling it the bishop.

The Middle Easterners also came up with ‘shah-mat’ to indicate that the king’s defeat was imminent, which led to westerners mangling the term to ‘checkmate’. Still, it is very much an Indian game, and we are damn good at it—just look at our grandmasters and everything.

It’s interesting that in the game India invented, victory is defined by the killing of the opposing king. Compare that to a game called Chinese checkers, where victory means ensuring that each and every piece crosses over to the other side, with none left behind. Chinese checkers is basically sabka saath, sabka vikas on a star-shaped cardboard (By the way, Chinese checkers was not invented in China. It originated from the German ‘Hamla’, which in turn originated from the English ‘Hoppitty’ and was actually rebranded Chinese checkers by an American marketing team.)

I hear that—fuelled by the success of our lad Gukesh (quarter final loss to Caruana notwithstanding) and the charms of Anna Taylor-Joy in The Queen’s Gambit—chess clubs are mushrooming all over our country and online. Which is great. But what I would really welcome is making Chinese checkers mandatory in our primary schools—even if it is just in moral science class. Because for how long will we derive our national pride from the victories of one, or two, or three extraordinary ‘kings’?

So what if Satya Nadella or Priyanka Chopra or Rishi Sunak have briefly made it big? Who cares how much money the latest Telugu film made overseas, or how ‘tight’ Modi reportedly is with Trump, or many crores our phalanx of crazy rich Indians threw at first world celebrities to come dance at our weddings? The bitter truth is that ordinary Indians have been returned handcuffed and leg-shackled on military planes from the US, simply because they saw absolutely no future for themselves in India.

That the Mahakumbh, billed as the greatest festival of faith on earth, has seen fires, pollution, pawing, sexual harassment, traffic snarls and the death of an undisclosed number of ordinary Indians in stampedes caused mainly by organisational mess-ups. That unemployment is at an all-time high and the stock market at an-all time low. That our prime minister is appeasing a man who has just put the brakes on a law that forbids US companies from bribing foreign officials in order to win business from them—a move that will undoubtedly make the richest Indians even richer. We need to stop applauding the sporadic victories of ‘kings’. And understand that we only win when all of us win.

editor@theweek.in

jeet-adania-and-diva-jaimin-shah-the-wedding-goes-slim

Thu Feb 06 15:03:10 IST 2025

So Jeet Adani is to have a ‘traditional and simple’ wedding sans celebrities or media glare. His father told the press that the auspicious date was finalised during a visit by the Adani family to the Mahakumbh in Prayagraj, where the muhurat was decided in the presence of vedic scholars.

This statement puts to rest the rumours circulating wildly that celebrities ranging from King Charles and Pope Francis to Serena Williams, Daniel Craig, Taylor Swift and Elon Musk would arrive like a phalanx of fairy godmothers to bless the newlyweds and their happy families.

As an Aadhaar card-carrying member of the gawking populace, I am not particularly disappointed. Anyway, celeb surfeit is kinda trending. What with the Ram temple inauguration last year, then all the pre-wedding and wedding celebrations for Anant and Radhika, followed by the Donald Trump swearing-in, and the multiple Coldplay concerts, it had become exhausting to keep track of what everybody wore, what they said, what gifts were exchanged, and how much everything cost.

One doesn’t need to have a marketing degree to grasp why the Adanis, planning a wedding at the heels of the Ambani extravaganza last year, figured that a massive blow-out wedding would only deliver diminishing returns. Far wiser to go small and simple and virtuous and occupy the high moral ground, that too at minimal cost—something that has eternal appeal to the Gujarati heart.

Another much-touted reason to go small and simple is fear of the evil eye. That’s such a privilege flex, isn’t it? I think it may be the biggest one ever! Like I am doing so well in life that my biggest fear is that somebody will hex me. So, I go around putting thoo-thoo-thoo and the Turkish evil eye emoji at the end of all my social media posts and donating money all around. In this country with its million markers of caste and class and wealth and success, it may very well be the definitive measure of having crossed over from being a have-not to a have—the day you transition from putting the evil eye, to fearing the evil eye!

Another celebrity who opted for the small and simple wedding option recently is high-throwing Haryanvi hunk Neeraj Chopra. With his usual unceremonious less-talk-more-action swag, he snucked off to a super luxury resort in Himachal Pradesh with his nearest and dearest ones, and got married by a pandit who didn’t recognise him in order to ensure the secret didn’t spill out. The buzzwords for such events are usually #intimate #private #cosy #simple. The guests list hovers at around 300, and the no-holds-barred bloodshed in celeb circles to secure a place on that exclusive list of 300 is far gorier than the violence and carnage showcased in the film 300. (This is great entertainment for us gawkers, too—much more fun than who-wore-what actually!)

By the way, if you are hoping that these weddings may cause cheaper weddings to become the norm, you are going to end up disappointed. Because hosting a 300 people wedding is yet another privilege reserved for the fabulously wealthy or insanely famous. The rest of us would immediately be hit with accusations of cheaping out. So unless we develop a very thick skin, we will continue to have to spend (an average of) Rs20 lakh for a wedding. To put that figure in context—our average per capita income is Rs1.4 lakh. So, basically, as a nation, we have normalised spending 15 years worth of our earnings on a three- to four-day event. No wonder Gen Z doesn’t want to get married only. It isn’t fear of commitment. It is fear of expenditure.

editor@theweek.in

corporate-culture-gets-rough

Fri Jan 17 15:16:54 IST 2025

It’s been a very macho fortnight. A whole bunch of gents have recently said or done some very manly things, starting with Mark Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO, who has been doing a lot of mixed martial arts and hunting, and visiting with Donald Trump in November ’24, is now calling for a more ‘masculine’ company culture and leadership style.

To be fair, he did get famous by creating Facemash (a site that sourced photographs of female Harvard undergraduates without permission from the university’s online directories, then presented users with pairs of women and asked them to rank who was hotter. The homepage stated, “Were we admitted for our looks? No. Will we be judged by them? Yes.”) So he’s just reverting to type, really.

Anyway, Meta is loosening restrictions on discussions of contentious social issues, such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It has scrapped its fact-checking programme aimed at curbing misinformation, placing the onus on users to police falsehoods. And it will insert more political content into people’s feeds, after previously de-emphasising that very material. So, things are starting to smell pretty Musky at Facebook.

In another development, the chairman of Larsen & Toubro has been seen browbeating employees in an internal video. He was telling them to work a 90-hour week, including Sundays, because “how long can you stare at your wife?” This is problematic on multiple levels.

First, the chairman has said this in spite of having a sizeable human resource team (led by a woman, who is, as we speak, posting on LinkedIn to clean up the mess which he is too macho to clean up himself) to educate him on the importance of a work-life balance in building a culture of healthy, sustainable (not short-term, use-and-throw) excellence.

Second, the chairman directly links employees’ patriotism to their working hours, citing China as the ultimate ‘Sharmaji ka beta’ we should all be aspiring to be; or else be considered anti-nationals.

Third, Glassdoor and Reddit users have been quick to point out the staggering difference between L&T’s measly starting salaries of Rs5 lakh per annum, compared to the chairman’s own Rs51 crore per annum. Many have pointed out they would be quite happy to work on Sundays if they could have what the chairman is having.

Fourth, the man has been caught saying ‘wife’, and not ‘spouse’, which demonstrates that women at his company are invisible to him.

Finally, his remarks also seem to be a macho-upping-of-the-ante reaction to the statement made recently by Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy, where he asked young people to work a 70-hour week because “we are poor and need to make India number one”.

Basically, it’s a classic (and very-male) competitive game of mine’s bigger than yours. The sort that Zuckerberg is getting nostalgic for. In fact, prior to his ‘masculine’ statement, he just shut down Meta’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) operations worldwide. (Apple is under pressure to scrap its DEI programme as well, but is resisting.)

Call me alarmist, but it seems to me that corporate culture worldwide is mutating into a more and more rough and tough, ‘masculine’ affair—employees are expected to work brutally long hours, and put up with aggressively sexist and racist cooler talk while doing so—both things that women, given our status as child-bearers and primary care-givers, as well as the physically weaker, less-aggressive sex—are ill-equipped to do. Seen against the backdrop of the Pelicot case in France (the fact that so many men could prefer an inert ragdoll as a ‘partner’), and the rise of self-objectifying, domestic goddess tradwife trends on Meta, it seems like a wave designed to systematically push women (and minorities) completely out of the workplace.

editor@theweek.in

manmohan-singhs-strength-lays-in-his-intellect

Sat Jan 04 17:13:33 IST 2025

On my 12th birthday, my parents decided I was old enough for pocket money. Two crisp five-rupee notes were deemed sufficient for a month’s expenses—and they were. I clearly remember treating my friends to colas and burgers in the school canteen with just one of them, eliciting admiring cries of ‘whoa, big spender!’ from all present.

Perhaps, because we had no television, mobile phones, or video games back then, I spent a lot of time smoothening down and gloating over my pista green and pale-orange fivers. I dug the denseness of their texture. I found the curly whorliness of ‘five rupees’ written in all the Indian languages mysterious and romantic; the picture of a man tilling a tractor against a rising sun reminded me of my grandfather’s village in Haryana; the solemnity of ‘I promise to pay the bearer the sum of five rupees’ written in English and Hindi gave me actual goosebumps, and I loved the fact that making all this sound tremendously official and trustworthy was a neatly scrawled signature in dark ink—‘Manmohan Singh’.

Everybody describes Singh as ‘mild-mannered’, ‘self-effacing’ and ‘meek’, but how does one chart a journey from the small towns of Punjab, where he was educated in Urdu and Gurmukhi, to Cambridge and Oxford, the Delhi School of Economics and the University Grants Commission, serving as governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and ultimately ending his career as prime minister of India, without either strength or determination? The answer is that you can’t. Singh’s strength and his determination lay in his intellect. But, in an era where we applaud ‘diamonds-in-the-rough’, disdain Nobel laureates and Cannes winners, and worship ‘street-smarts’, the merits of actual smarts naturally pass us by.

I am not romanticising Singh. The man who appointed him to his first political post as finance minister—prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao—deserves equal credit for picking the right man for the right job, and giving him free rein. Rao displayed a chill and a lack of insecurity that is rare to find nowadays, or indeed at any time. And some would say, he paid the price for it.

I guess what I am really mourning, while reflecting on Singh, is the passing of a time when our leaders genuinely respected and empowered our intellectuals to take on a larger role in public policy—from aerospace scientists like A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, to brilliant strategists like Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, to uncompromising bureaucrats like T.N. Seshan.

To make the point more stark, Singh and Raghuram Rajan were both governors of the RBI, but the contrast in the manner they were treated by the regime in power could not be greater! I am not saying that there is something inherently superior about people who are more qualified than you, but, similarly, there is nothing inherently superior about being unqualified and ill-informed. Why not take counsel from somebody who has devoted decades to become an expert in a particular field, instead of (to cite an infamous case) appoint a B-grade TV actor to head India’s premier film and television institute?

Strangely enough, those who disdain actual intellectuals (like Romila Thapar, say) and claim to revere underdogs with ‘real-life learning’ are the first to speak up against caste-based reservations that benefit the genuinely deprived! Union Home Minister Amit Shah calling Dr B.R. Ambedkar—a scholar alumnus of Columbia University and the London School of Economics, founding father of our Constitution, and lifelong champion of dalit rights—a ‘fashion’ is a classic example of this sort of cultivated contempt.

Intellect is not fashion. It is a rock-solid merit. One that our nation urgently needs to value.

editor@theweek.in

rekha-ji-time-to-rock

Sat Dec 21 11:14:19 IST 2024

Older women enjoying a second season of visibility, success and relevance has been one of the nicest trends of the past decade or so. It started with Sridevi’s English Vinglish—a film about a middle-aged woman’s quest to prove she is more than just a wife and mother. The film did phenomenally well and inspired a slew of tremendously popular serials—all about beautiful, under-appreciated homemakers on similar quests of self-discovery.

We have seen Neena Gupta return to centerstage with Badhaai Ho, Panchayat and Masaba Masaba—all meaty, multi-faced roles. We have seen Ratna Pathak Shah kick it out of the park with Lipstick Under My Burqa. We have seen Zeenat Aman, casually and classily, acquire a whole new generation of fangirls and boys simply on the basis of her Instagram posts. We have seen Sharmila Tagore’s Gulmohar, and we have seen Shalini Passi hold the whole country in thrall. It is a great time to be an older woman in India.

Even off-screen, we have never been more visible. There’s Nita Ambani doing as good a job of being a business baron as she is of being a wife and mother, there’s Priyanka Gandhi Vadra finally getting sworn into Parliament, there’s Falguni Nayar becoming a billionaire as she enters her 60s—the list is long, impressive and hugely inspiring.

Which is why Rekha’s recent appearance on The Great Indian Kapil Show struck such a discordant note.

I sat down to watch, ready to enjoy a trip down memory lane with the genius who had killed it in Khoon Bhari Maang, Khubsoorat and Umrao Jaan, a single woman, the daughter of a single woman, who started working very young and lives alone in Mumbai on her own terms.

I was interested to know Rekha’s views on cinema, politics and gender equations of today. Instead, all I got was a lot of guff about “drinking the water with which my mother’s feet have been washed”, and tonnes of totally unsolicited sharing and sighing over her crush, which would’ve been more appropriate to a class nine sleepover.

Like, c’mon Rekhaji, you were asked a question about how you managed to dance the garba so well in Suhaag, inspite of being south Indian. You could have mentioned the choreographer or the director, you could have shared your thoughts on the music composers or the singers (or the fact that Mohammad Rafi, a practising Muslim, always sang aartis so beautifully), you could have praised the vibrant Gujarati community and how they are taking over the world, you could have made the point that Indians are just Indians, north or south be damned, but instead, you chose to gush about the infectiousness of the charisma of your co-star. Why?

Thinking as an advertising professional, I appreciate that this could be an attempt at being ‘different’, of zagging while the others zig—a sort of unabashed, post-feminist, wallowing self-flagellation which sets her apart from the other ‘older’ women because she has the guts to address the elephant in the room, and isn’t dodging the ‘real’ questions by talking about her craft or her industry, but, instead, is wearing her heart on her sleeve in a manner that makes everybody else in the room uncomfortable (poor Kapil certainly didn’t know how to keep his face straight, for sure)—but I feel that at the end of the day it is reductive. Because this is 2024, and the real questions aren’t about cute boys.

Nobody cares that your heart feels stuffed to bursting with an unrequited bhandaar [storehouse] of pyaar [love] for your man-crush. All we care about is your bhandaar of talent currently going untapped because you refuse to move on. Don’t eat crumbs, Rekhaji. Eat and leave no crumbs.

editor@theweek.in

pitfalls-of-extreme-feminism

Sat Nov 23 10:29:44 IST 2024

To be honest, I got to hear of South Korea’s extreme feminism movement—4B—only recently. It is a radical form of feminism, formed in the crucible of toxic patriarchy with all the attendant violence and misogyny, punishing beauty standards and yawning pay gaps, which advocates the four Bis (Bi means no, in Korean), which are biyeonae (no dating with men), bisekseu (no sex with men), bichulsan (no children with men), and bihon (no marriage with men).

Born in the late 2010s on the internet, 4B spread and spawned a similar movement in China, called the 6B4T, which expands the four nos to include a boycott on all sexist products and also a boycott on ‘married donkeys’, or married women, who do not follow these principles.

It also rejects strict beauty standards, anime culture, the culture of fangirling on film, sport, music or other idols, and even religion.

4B is having a hot moment globally because a section of female Americans, disheartened and disgusted with the election results and the accompanying toxic flexing online, have announced that they have decided to have nothing whatsoever to do with men (or the women who are donkeyish enough to marry and co-parent with them). To me, none of this is something that Bridget Jones and her circle of singleton buds would not have come up with on one of their drunken, late-night rant about entire male species in general and ‘smug-marrieds’ in particular.

It is something my (single) daughter and her (married-to-a-drunkard, living-and-raising-a-child-with-her-mummy) cleaning lady would have come up with on a drunken Mumbai night in their balcony, as well.

But they would all have probably woken up the next morning, forgotten all their earnest besties-before-testes vows, and gone right back to being ‘mad about some boy’ or the other. That is just our hormones and the undeniable joy of physical attraction.

I am guessing the American women who are calling for 4B are having a similar vent-and-rant fest. And I can totally understand the frustration of women lumped with an out-and-proud misogynist like Donald Trump as their commander-in-chief, but at the end of the day, we live in a world half-full of men, and three-fourths full of men and women who are in relationships.

Boycotting them all can never be a viable, long-term solution. But in the short-term, oh yes. Women banding together to create pressure groups that help us get better compensation in the workplace, better films, healthier popular culture, and less responsibilities at home, yes. Single women supporting other single women instead of considering them ‘competition’ for the teeny-tiny pool of decent men out there, oh yes. Single, independent women calling out married ones who are putting up with disrespect and violence against themselves or their children, certainly. Women refusing to have sex or date entitled men with obnoxious political views, yes, yes, yes. What’s off the table, if we want the good of all womankind, is giving up on men altogether, which is what 4B advocates. Because giving up on men means giving up on our chance to negotiate more respect for women inside marriages, as well as model these new, more-respectful relationships to a new generation.

We are not incels, ladies—sad haters who gather online to whine about how no woman will sleep with them, and emerge into the real world sometimes to randomly shoot a few women dead. So whatever else we do, please let us not create a schism between women who are in relationships and women who are not. This will only weaken all womankind.

editor@theweek.in

hear-out-my-bleat-from-the-street

Sat Nov 09 11:33:40 IST 2024

What with all the apps delivering straight to one’s doorstep, the supermarkets, the food halls and even the occasional (super-expensive) pop-up thela (cart) offering the woke from field-to-fork option, the good old veggie-market/mandi has fallen off my regular beat. But I love the energy and the atmosphere of a hardcore street market, and I have many fond memories of being my mother’s packmule, trotting back loaded down with fresh yummy veggies (spread evenly into two plastic baskets to balance the weight) while she strutted ahead, bright-eyed and flushed with the joy of a good bargain.

So, this Diwali, I, along with an NRI pal, visited the weekly market that is held fairly close to our home outside Bengaluru to soak up some of those old-school vibes. It was more crowded than we remembered, and more exotic (lots of dragon fruit and rambutan happening), and, of course, nobody was giving away chillies and coriander bunches for free. But what really made us do a double-take was the cries of the street vendors.

At first glance it was the same familiar scene, men standing next to their carts calling out prices and describing the virtues of their goods as shoppers walked by. Sometimes they hail the passing throng to get a laugh, calling ‘hey, college-going akka’ to flatter you, or ‘tomatoes as red as your cheeks, amma’ or ‘oye, stylish guy on the phone’, and so on. The old ‘hassi toh phassi’ (if I can make the person laugh, I have hooked him/her) really applies at vegetable markets, indeed at all street markets. But, then, we realised that the street market had discovered artificial intelligence (AI).

Sure, there were energetic cries coming thick and fast from the knot of carts heaped high with apples, but nobody was actually mouthing them. Instead, there was a speaker attached to every cart, blaring a recorded chant at passing crowds while the vendors themselves lounged about on folding chairs, avoiding eye contact, and pulling on cigars. My friend chose to look at this development optimistically, marvelling at Indian innovation and how it made complete sense for the vendor to not strain his voice needlessly at the market. Besides, this levels out the playing field for those who are not so extroverted, she said, after all, it is not the street vendors’ job to put on a colourful performance and flirt with every passing aunty in need of an ego boost!

What to even say? Maybe I’m just an aunty in need of an ego boost, but I didn’t like the averted gazes of the vendors and the robotic, impersonal ‘street cries’. I felt they had robbed us both—vendor and buyer—of a moment of human connection, where we would meet, chat, sass a bit back and forth, come to an agreement that suited us both, and close by wishing our families a happy Diwali. “Arrey, maybe he can’t be arsed yelling all day and chatting with you,” my friend said, “He would rather sell his stock quick, go back home and hang with his fam.”It is alienation,” I stuck to my guns, “We are being forced into silos. A wedge is being driven between him and me, thanks to this stupid, recorded aapal-aapal-aapal.” My friend replied tartly, “You should have thought of that before you succumbed to the convenience of shopping app deliveries and left the market men high and dry. Now, don’t cry me a river about the pleasures of slow-living and the sorrow of sundered connections!”

Which is also a good point. So I dropped the subject, switched on my electric candles, banged out my stencil rangoli, played my aarti off YouTube, and ate my store-bought mithai. Happy Diwali.

editor@theweek.in

nerdiness-has-always-been-cool-in-india

Sat Oct 26 10:58:33 IST 2024

I have been an ‘expert’ on Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) for four years now, but I still get super-nervous every time we shoot. The stakes for the bright-eyed, super-smart contestants are so high that their tension becomes contagious—even people like me who have no skin in the game and stand to win not even one rupee, let alone one crore, get all hyped up and thumpy-hearted.

I could always decline the invite and spare myself the stress, but I have a soft spot for quizzing and quizzers. I first came across the word quizzical in some much-thumbed romance novel in my girls’ boarding school library when I was 14. The hero would ‘raise his eyebrows quizzically’ at the heroine or he would ‘shoot her a quizzical glance’. The quizzical glance usually preceded a passionate kiss, which left her ‘quivering’. I decided I liked the word and, as that was the year the inter-college quiz contest Quiz Time started beaming out on Doordarshan National, I developed (along with thousands of other teenage girls too snobbish to admit to finding either Anil Kapoor or Sylvester Stallone attractive) a massive crush on its intelligent, suavely styled host Siddhartha Basu. This swiftly led to more crushes—now on the boys who were contestants on his show!

Right about this time, the American film Revenge of the Nerds released and gave us Generation Xers a word to describe the introverted, mostly male, medical, engineering or history major types who love quizzing. (The film, in its turn, was inspired by a lifestyle magazine article titled ‘Revenge of the Nerds’, which described computer programmers gaining respect in Silicon Valley. And the word ‘nerd’ itself was pulled out of the ether by Dr. Seuss in his book, If I Ran The Zoo.)

The thing is that unlike in the US, nerdiness has always been cool in India—because it is linked to aspirations and upward mobility. Its noble goal is breaking free of poverty. This is why Kota Factory and 12th Fail are loved as much, if not more, than Dangal and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. Because intelligence can get us out of our gutters, we respect it by day, even though we swing to moronic item numbers by night.

It is the reason why KBC has done 16 seasons. Besides, it is not just about the money. It is also about knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Becoming smarter. More informed. And, finally, it is also about the sweet thrill of getting an answer right. The dopamine hit that delivers can’t be gotten out of a bottle, or at the end of a vape stick. Because KBC is a clean hit. Without the cut-throaty nastiness of a Roadies or the voyeurism of a Bigg Boss (both of which have done over 20 seasons).

Watching it together is a family ritual. It is cliff-hanger entertainment sure, but it’s also super-sanskaari. In our polluted, troubled world, it is encouraging that KBC continues to run, and run successfully. Another encouraging trend is that children across India, jaded by video games, dating apps and nightclubs, now seem to be hunting for clean, offline ways in which to meet and interact. Karaoke, cooking, travel, pickleball, chess, frisbee—and quizzing. Trivia nights are proliferating in nightclubs across Bengaluru, giving our bright young nerds (who would never stand a chance on, say, a crowded dance floor) a spotlight to shine and socialise under. For older people, quizzing is a sort of cerebral spring-cleaning. It prompts your brain to go rummaging in boxes it hasn’t opened in a long time, and helps long disused neural pathways to light up again. To mangle Olivia Newton-John’s immortal lyrics—‘Let’s get quizzical’.

editor@theweek.in

toilet-papers-are-a-bum-deal

Fri Oct 11 16:17:16 IST 2024

So I have picked up my jhola and been in fakir mode last two weeks—travelling for a family wedding, and then a beach holiday through Australia and southeast Asia. And what I have learned is this—bum guns are taking over the world. In India we call them health faucets or jet sprays, or bum washers. The Muslim world calls them shattafas, the Aussies seem to prefer bum gun. I remember from a previous holiday that in New York, the Waldorf Astoria refers to them, very poshly, as a bidet shower (not to be confused with bridal shower, which I did, briefly.)

The internet couldn’t give me a clear answer as to who was the enterprising soul who first bought bum washers to India. Surely, he or she is deserving of a Padma award for services that ensured our nation was never left behind. Bum washers showed up randomly in the early 1990s in all the plumbing stores, and, ban on proselytising or not, our Hindu nation was immediately converted. They were much more efficient than the drippy, cumbersome mugga/chembu system we had been using till then—one felt rather like a desi cowboy handling the gleaming steel body, pressing the springy little hair-trigger and revelling in the focussed, forceful spray that left you feeling all tingly and minty-fresh and humming your favourite toothpaste advertisement jingle (yes, I am aware that bums don’t have gums, let alone teeth, but I am also aware that as a regular bum gun user, you know exactly the sensation I mean.)

I would like to point out that there is data to show, quite conclusively, that it is only after bum guns became ubiquitous in Indian loos that we had our bildungsroman on the world stage, and gave the world a host of global CEOs, beauty queens, Nobel Prize winners and politicians. And now, the rest of the world is slowly waking up and asking to have what we’re having.

The global north, which used to make do with soft corn husks, leaves, hay and rags of cloth pre-softened in salt water before the invention of toilet paper, is now poised to take another big leap. One that will be soft on the bottom line (repeated wiping gives you soreness and rashes) as well as good for the environment—after all, manufacturing a single roll of toilet paper requires up to 140 litres of water and almost 700 grams of wood—not to mention the water you use to flush the wadded up tissue afterwards. Add to it the risk of clogged pipes leading to sewage overflow, and the resultant environmental damage and public health issues. Of course, bidets have been common among the upper classes in Catholic countries like Italy and France, because their scripture lays emphasis on anal rinsing—but bidets are unwieldy and complicated—one has to sit astride them and they take up too much space.

Lately, Japanese toilets have gotten a lot of good press, too, but they’re expensive to buy and even more expensive to install. But the good old bum washer is cheap as chips and easily installed. They had a major moment during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, where YouTubers educated the world in general, and Covid-era Aussie toilet paper roll stockpilers in particular, on the benefits of rinsing over wiping. So, it is no wonder that a year later, Australian brands like Tushy’s and Tudaloo are now telling toilet paper purists to shattafa up. It is clearly another big cultural win for the ancient civilisations of Asia. The rest of the world should totally thank us from the heart of their bottom.

editor@theweek.in

why-even-think-of-using-mc-bc-slurs

Sat Sep 28 11:09:24 IST 2024

A video of Paralympic gold medallist Navdeep Singh abusing after throwing his javelin in Paris went viral. It was mostly pretty garbled because he was fist-pumping and stomping around in circles while doing it, but the familiar syllables (especially if you are a Delhiite) of ma-ki-ch*** (mother’s vagina) rang out as clear as bell—kind of an awkward thing to have to explain to your child whom you have been making watch the Paralympics to inspire him/her with the wondrous never-say-die attitude of para-athletes and the power of the human spirit to triumph against all odds.

Of course, aggression, if correctly harnessed, is a great tool in the sporting arena and Navdeep was facing a tough contest at the time from Sadegh Beit Sayah of Iran, who actually scored further than Navdeep, but got disqualified for waving around a political/religious flag after his record-breaking throw. Sportsfolk of all sorts—tennis players, cricketers, footballers—often hype themselves up by trash-talking during such intense moments. John McEnroe and Virat Kohli are classic examples.

Still, ma-ki-ch*** was definitely a little excessive. It could even be argued that it merited a red card, of the sort that got Sadegh disqualified, except that the Parisians probably couldn’t grasp what was being said. In an interview he gave later, Navdeep justified his language by saying (with a sheepish, boyish smile) that he’d picked up such language while living and training in Delhi. Which, bizarrely enough, even sounds understandable, as our capital now seems to revel in its rape-ville tag and the regularity with which it features in songs that flex on its toxic masculinity with refrains like ‘Dilli se hoon behen c*** (I’m from Delhi, sister f*****.)

Of course, like all people with challenges, the four-feet-six-inches-tall Navdeep wishes first and foremost to establish himself as a regular person with all the regular flaws and frustrations, not some mushy, goodie-goodie object of pity. His use of foul language has gone a long way towards achieving that goal. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has come forward to reprimand him (but with a fatherly twinkle in his eye.) And Gen Z now think he’s a total badass. Win win. Far be it for me to take a high moral tone about foul language.

Being a Delhiite born and bred, I am well aware of the cathartic thrill of mouthing taboo words, and the exquisite release from frustration and pressure it provides. But I can’t deny its inherent misogyny. (The obsession with mothers and sisters and female body parts is deeply problematic, to say the least.) Also, like all powerful weapons, the source of its power lies in how sparingly it is used. Navdeep’s outburst had power because he mouthed the aggression of a largely voiceless group of underdogs. But if he uses it too often, or in low-stakes situations, it will start to show decreasing returns to scale and become gimmicky—kind of like in commercial cinema or OTT shows, where heroines and grandmothers who drink and swear have gone from novelty to norm to numbingly cliche. Language is a gift granted in such lavishness only to human beings upon this planet. The more words we use, the more expressive we become, the richer our interactions grow, the more our civilisation flourishes.

So the choice is ours, really. We could thunder ‘Know your place, weakling’ or ‘Grovel before the champ, loser’ or ‘Remember this arm, this is the arm of a champion’ or even ‘Never mess with an Indian who has drunk his mother’s milk’. Or settle for something as vanilla as ma-ki-ch***

editor@theweek.in

how-stree-2-has-given-us-hope

Sat Sep 14 11:36:20 IST 2024

The unprecedented success of Stree 2 is the best news we have had in the recent times. The fact that a film boasting no massive stars, and with an unabashedly feminist agenda, has comprehensively out-performed Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s toxic masculine star-studded Animal at the box office is (to me, at least) kind of the cinematic equivalent of Awadhesh Prasad winning Ayodhya—it redeems my faith in the inherent decency of Indians. Stree 2 has also overtaken Sunny Deol’s Gadar-2 and Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan, and is now closing in on dislodging Jawan (another SRK starrer, with domestic collections of Rs583 crore) from the top spot of biggest films ever. All this, with no jingoism, no Pakistanis, no hyper-masculine heroes, no marital rape, and no toxic, animalistic lick-my-shoe type dialogues.

Some might say that the lessons one can learn from this stupendous performance is that marvellous things are possible if we just stick to the basics—quality writing, solid direction and acting, tight editing and well-done visual and sound effects. Seems simple enough on paper, but there are a million obstacles waiting to derail the most dogged and idealistic of filmmakers—egos, politics, logistics, trend-chasing, too-many-cooks, creative hubris and/or timidity, financial hubris and/or timidity, and the general fog-of-war that descends on the best of talents when they’re too close to a project to see the larger picture.

So, kudos to the makers of Stree 2 for keeping a level head (haha, because the villain in the film is headless) during the production process and getting this herculean task right. But more than that, kudos to them for picking a plot (Stree, 2018) about a beautiful prostitute who just wanted to marry her lover and settle down to a quiet life but was murdered by a moral police led by a patriarchal village headman (and former client) who couldn’t stomach the thought of a woman daring to demand agency, choices and social mobility. The prostitute promptly turned into a ghost and cut off the headman’s head for his pains.

In Stree 2, the prostitute’s ghost is now the protectress for all things progressive in her little village. All is well till she leaves for a while and the headman’s ghost (headless, hence dubbed Sarkata) returns to wreck havoc. He presents as a gibbering disembodied head (very reminiscent of Pinky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde from Pacman) and drags away all smoking, drinking, texting, small-small-clothes sporting, working women by his long hair (not theirs, a refreshing twist on the old trope) and confines them in a land of boiling lava, where they’re bald, white-robed, dead eyed and sucked of all energy, till Stree and the rest of the madcap ensemble arrive to save them. (Which sounds grim but it is all actually super-funny in the hands of writer Niren Bhatt and directer Amar Kaushik. Kudos to both.) But most of all, kudos to the audience for voting overwhelmingly for this feminist-horror-comedy with their money and their precious leisure hours.

Dare we hope that the writers of Animal Park (sequel to Animal) could be getting into a room and discussing arcs where their toxic-man-child protagonist finally gets his comeuppance? Because it’s not just Stree 2, there’s also #Metoo, back in public discourse with a vengeance given the revelations coming out of the Malayalam film industry. There’s also Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia taking on Sarkatas of their own in rural Haryana. At a more frothy level, there’s even Ananya Panday’s new series, showcasing victim-shaming, sexual harassment and the rights of women in a show where the antagonists seem very inspired by Prajwal Revanna and Arnab Goswami. Over in the US, Kamala Harris’s numbers continue to improve. Of course, one swallow does not make a summer. But Stree-2 has given us hope. Here’s me manifesting more beheadings. Metaphorical ones, of course!

editor@theweek.in

rapist-vote-bank-actively-fosters-rape-culture

Sat Aug 31 10:57:08 IST 2024

I am sensing some ennui in the reportage around the horrific rape and murder at the R.G. Kar Medical College. Perhaps it is just me, but it seems that the media, while putting on their grimmest faces and asking—‘how many girls will have to die horrible deaths before we fix ourselves as a society?’—seem to be mouthing this often-repeated line a little mechanically. There is a sense of simply going through the paces, before moving on to something more ‘important’ and ‘substantial,’ like the prime minister’s visit to Ukraine, say, or the state of the stock market.

Politicians, while claiming to care, seem to be indulging either in tokenism or opportunism. Regular folks are disheartened as well. Because we have held candlelit marches for Jessica and we have protested for Nirbhaya. No One killed Jessica and Delhi Crime have been produced, released, watched and awarded. The Nirbhaya gang rape and murder ended Sheila Dikshit’s reign in Delhi and ushered in the newer, ‘cleaner’ government of the Aam Aadmi Party. We did our bit. Or did we?

Because even though public opinion was quick to condemn Tarun Tejpal, one year after Nirbhaya its support for abuse survivors definitely waned by the time #MeToo came to India. We waited eagerly to see if Bollywood’s #MeToo moment would throw up any big names, rumours about whom have circulated in the industry for decades, but when this did not happen, we were quickly tired of it. Priya Ramani, the courageous journalist who called out M.J. Akbar as a sexual predator, fought a lonely battle, mostly.

There was a sense that women were ‘making too much of an issue out of something quite small’. They were ‘being difficult’. They were ‘playing the woman card’. And what about men’s rights, huh? What about the future of young boys who innocently ‘misread’ the signs sent out by fickle-minded teases who wore small clothes, put perfume, and ventured out after dark, and then withdrew their consent at the last moment?

I was on a channel debate some time during the 2010s, where, upon being asked why these tragedies kept happening, I had said that it was because no politician wanted to alienate the ‘rapist vote bank’. This alarmist conspiracy theory was laughed off by both the anchor and my fellow-panellists.

But there is a ‘rapist vote bank’. You could also call it the patriarchy, and it cuts across all castes, faiths and socioeconomic categories. It is the reason why men with crimes against women get tickets, win elections and enter Parliament. It is why people like Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh and Prajwal Revanna and their families stay relevant.

The ‘rapist vote bank’ actively fosters rape culture—that is a society that normalises, condones and even admires hyper-masculine, the act of degrading and dehumanising women. This happens in a million big and small ways. If we call out any of these ‘small’ things, we’re labelled alarmist, problematic and hysterical. If we demand that something be done about the relentless, endless barrage of rapes, eyes are rolled, and we are called nags. In fact, the trope of the nagging woman is the one that is weaponised the most against us. But what is nagging except for persistence?

We need to persist now like never before. We need to persist, not mechanically, but with a vengeance and zero tolerance. We need to send out the message to all stakeholders that the feminist vote bank is larger and more influential than the ‘rapist vote bank’. Ignore it at your own peril.

editor@theweek.in

show-some-muscle-for-vinesh-phogat

Sat Aug 17 14:23:02 IST 2024

Um, are we timid again? There was a time, back in the day, when Indians were timid. You know, intimidated by white people, their accents, expensive clothes and shoes. But, then, slowly, we got over that colonial mindset. The non-aligned movement helped us carve out a space for ourselves on the world stage. We won the cricket World Cup. We hosted the Asian Games, we liberalised, we became Miss Worlds and Miss Universes, our artistes won Oscar nominations, our doctors, engineers, MBAs and economists took over the world—from Indra Nooyi to Priyanka Chopra to Kamala Harris. We strode with assurance across the world stage.

Today, our globetrotting prime minister is a ‘vishwa guru’, a leader amongst leaders, much awarded by foreign governments, more famous than Shah Rukh Khan. His re-election campaign celebrated his influence abroad, including the heroic tale of how he got the war stopped to get our children back from Ukraine. This is a man who stands up for his own. Which is why I was totally gobsmacked by his roll-over-and-die tweet on the whole Vinesh Phogat issue. I was expecting him to come out with guns blazing in Phogat’s defence—appealing to the powers-that-be about the unfairness of the verdict, like our cricketers do—eyes ablaze, arms raised, spinning in slow motion to demand ‘howzat’ with full self-assurance and passion.

But, instead, he just tweeted a bunch of tame platitudes. ‘Vinesh, you are a champion among champions! You are India’s pride and an inspiration for each and every Indian. Today’s setback hurts. I wish words could express the sense of despair that I am experiencing. At the same time, I know that you epitomise resilience. It has always been your nature to take challenges head on. Come back stronger! We are all rooting for you.’

Seriously? Words could not express his sense of despair? Do we need a prime minister who despairs? And, why the haste to put out the tweet? I mean, he was clearly in no hurry to congratulate Phogat for beating world number one Yui Susaki of Japan the previous day. But the moment she trips up, he’s immediately tweeting to commiserate. Imagine if he had instead taken the time to speak to a few experts, educated himself on all possible options and then tweeted something like—‘Vinesh, I am utterly gutted by the unfairness of what just happened. The best legal minds in the country are immediately at your disposal and will file your appeal as soon as possible. You’re a winner, and we’ve got your back. Hang in there and stay strong. Jai Hind.’ Surely that’s what a ‘vishwa guru’ would do? But no, all we got were statements in Parliament on government providing 070 lakh to Phogat in the build-up to the Olympics for training and competitions abroad. It was left to concerned NRIs and sympathetic fellow olympians to help Phogat file her appeal, with the Indian Olympic Association scrambling to make a late entry onto the team of lawyers.

Phogat has won anyway. Like Arijit Singh, who finished eight on the reality show Fame Gurukul, losing out to an audience poll favourite nobody even remembers today, like the band One Direction, who finished third on The X Factor, but achieved giddying heights of success subsequently. Phogat is already a winner, not in a contest but in real life. It would have just been nice if her country had had her back.

editor@theweek.in

masculine-trait-of-listening

Fri Aug 02 16:21:44 IST 2024

A welcome counterweight to the worrying trend of toxic masculinity in our films, popular culture and the mind of today’s youth seems to be emerging in the form of teachable masculinity. These films and books tend to feature fit, cocky, young simpletons, the apple of their mother’s eyes, entitled, high-self-esteemed, who’ve never questioned traditional gender roles simply because the status quo serves them so well. But when they come in contact with a young woman (obviously beautiful) who awakens them to the many ways in which society is unfair to women, they can’t unsee it, and have the chill, the empathy, and the lack of insecurity to change their man-child ways.

Feminist young women may jump in at this point and protest that it isn’t their job to re-train men into being better version of themselves, and that men should come pre-trained and sensitised into the dating market, just like girls traditionally do, but that ain’t happening anytime soon and we’re all works-in-progress, and should all be willing to both give and receive feedback. After all, even the eternally lustworthy and much venerated OG, Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, was open enough to listen carefully to Elizabeth Bennet when she took him down with a remarkably well-articulated rant after he condescendingly asked for her hand in marriage. What makes Mr Darcy every girl’s dream man is the fact that he was so teachable, that he listened so carefully while Lizzie excoriated him, that he took her feedback constructively, and that by the end of the book he had either entirely changed, or satisfactorily explained his vexing behaviour.

Karan Johar seems to have read this book often and thoroughly, because it is from the stable of Dharma Productions that we are receiving a steady stream of teachable, loveable man-children who grow into better men by the end of the movie. Most recently we’ve had large-hearted west Delhi Punjabi dudes—Akhil Chaddha and Rocky Randhawa—played by Vicky Kaushal and Ranveer Singh, respectively. Earlier, Varun Dhawan’s Badri from Badrinath ki Dulhania got hit with bad reviews and accusations of toxicity, but audiences loved how, once he saw the error of his ways, he was quick to apologise and had nothing but admiration for his hard-working, ambitious and intelligent wife. But my favourite large-hearted, simple-minded macho dude from the twenty-teens has been Salman Khan as Bajrangi Bhaijaan, a staunch patriot and devout Hanuman-bhakt, who is horrified to find himself in sole charge of a non-vegetarian Pakistani child, yet, after a short, stinging lecture on secularism and humanity by his fiery girlfriend, immediately sees the error of his ways. These characters are all antithesis of the Sandeep Reddy Vanga model, a man so hyper-masculine that he is always in control, always the best person in the room, always emotionally correct, already knows everything, and is therefore unteachable.

Unteachable people have no character arc—they end the film as they started it—without any comeuppance or introspection or admittance of wrongdoing. The closest Johar came to writing a character so unbending was the Raichand patriarch played by Amitabh Bachchan in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and even he had the bigness of heart to apologise to his son and win all our hearts at the end of the film.

Currently, we are all stunned by Simone Biles’s return to form, and inspired to be a little like her (and other Olympians) in their constant, gritty quest for self-improvement. Being a sullen know-it-all isn’t ‘strong’ or ‘sexy’. Teachability is sexy. Just look at Akhil Chaddha and Mr Darcy.

editor@theweek.in

samvidhan-hatya-diwas-should-be-observed-on-december-6

Sat Jul 20 12:31:05 IST 2024

So, the government wants us to venerate June 25 as Samvidhan Hatya Diwas or ‘Constitution Murder’ day. This is confusing because for most Indians June 25 is a glorious, golden date, because duh, it is the day Kapil’s Devils won us our very first cricket World Cup. But I guess ‘the day Indian cricket came of age on the global stage’ isn’t half as click-baity as ‘the day democracy died’, especially if the responsibility for said death can be lumped on the opposition.

Nobody doubts the PR savvy of our ruling party—they know that the efforts of YouTube educators, the opposition, and social activists have made ‘Samvidhan’ a sexy, trending word understood even in rural, illiterate India. All those nicely designed preamble T-shirts at protests, MPs taking their oaths while brandishing a paperback copy of the Constitution in their hands, and ‘Modi versus the Constitution of India’ emerging as the mic drop rejoinder to the oft-parroted question ‘But Modi versus who?’ have made them eager to wrest the word (if not the 1,45,000-word document behind the word) away from the opposition and co-opt it for themselves.

And, so, now we are to have a ‘Samvidhan Hathya’ day, harking back to the Emergency in 1975, a good eight years before the World Cup victory, with the Congress cast in the role of murderer-in-chief. This serves as an effective teaser campaign for the movie, Emergency, releasing in September, starring freshly minted BJP MP Kangana Ranaut, which in turn serves as an effective campaign for the elections due to be held in three states in the last quarter of 2024—Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand. Kangana is a gifted actress and I am sure she’ll do her best to make the hoary, almost 50-year-old cautionary tale of Indira Gandhi’s misdoings relevant to Gen Z. If anything, given their obsession with self-improvement, work-life balance, the inner workings of the mind, and all things new age-y and karmic, I think they would be much more interested in why she ended the Emergency when she could’ve you know, just continued being a hated but all-powerful despot. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that March 21, 1977, is not going to be correspondingly celebrated as Samvidhan Satya day or ‘the day the Samvidhan rose from the dead’ because introspection, climbing down, and admitting to a mistake are really not practices our rulers are interested in celebrating.

Coming back to June 25, I feel it should be kept sacred to cricket. After all, June 25, 1983, was our very own unforgettable, heady ‘Miracle at Lord’s’ and we’ve only won the ODI World Cup twice!

Meanwhile, the Samvidhan gets murdered in our country on a regular basis. I mean, there are so many dates they can pick and choose from if they really want to commemorate a Samvidhan Hatya Day. But then again, our current state of emergency is unofficial—we slid into it so slowly and insidiously that there’s no one, clear date on which the enslavement began. When exactly did the media begin to crawl, when did the persecution of the farmers begin, when precisely did our competitive exams get compromised, when did parliamentary candidates start winning elections without even having to stand for them, when did debates in Parliament become a thing of the past to be replaced by fiats and ordinances, and on which date did electoral bonds start hollowing out our democracy from within? Hmm, a tricky problem, this... But wait—oh good, I just thought of something! Let’s keep June 25 for Kapil paji, and commemorate December 6 as Samvidhan Hatya Diwas.

editor@theweek.in

admire-rahul-gandhis-fearless-pose

Sat Jul 06 10:25:42 IST 2024

#FerozKhanKaPota was trending on X; so, naturally, I thought Fardeen Khan’s son was making his Bollywood debut. Bit young to be launched was my initial thought, but then I figured he could be taking the Jaden Smith route. Anyway, I clicked on the hashtag, and much to my disappointment it turned out to be the same old right-wing ravings about the ‘Muslim origins’ and ‘stupidities’ of Rahul Gandhi. Disappointment, because I genuinely thought the BJP bots were smarter than this. Surely, they realise that the pappufication of Rahul—rather like wabi-sabi decor and Sabyasachi reds—is so last season? Like it or not, Rahul is no longer a lightweight, a dynast or a reluctant politician. He’s sharp, he’s smart, he’s doing his homework—his speeches are fiery, his rebuttals instant and stinging. He has self-appointed fairy godmothers on YouTube and the independent media and his championing of the idea of India, as envisioned by our founding fathers, has caught the imagination of the nation.

It doesn’t hurt that with his worked-out chest and silvery stubble he’s giving what Gen Z likes to call DILDO (Dad I’d Like to Do.) Best of all, with his doubled numbers and as the official leader of opposition, he is looking at ease in Parliament, looking in fact, as if to the manner born (which of course he is). Seated in the front row, besides the portly, homespun Awadhesh Prasad—whose very presence in the house is a slap in the face of the BJP’s brand of politics—he comes across as a total insider, relaxed, respectful and yet informal—a fourth generation parliamentarian, so much more at home in the new building than the men who commissioned it. These worthies on the other hand, look sullen, stiff and stuck-up—never a good look.

The Pappu tag worked ten years ago because it rang true, and ‘bhaiy ki sarkar’ (a government that rules through fear) is a label that will stick because of the same reason. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have ruled primarily through fear, a fear fostered by their brute majority and the stranglehold they had on the nation’s institutions. Which is why re-baptising the Congress’s symbol as a secular, non-violent abhayamudra or the fearless pose, and juxtapositioning it against the rule of fear is more than just a smart piece of speech-writing, it is product repositioning and brand relaunching at its best.

The standout line from Rahul’s speech (addressed directly to Modi) was a defiant, ringing ‘aap Hindu ho hi nahi’ [you are not Hindu]. Obviously he feels empowered enough to say this because (to quote Mahua Moitra) even Lord Ram himself has said, ‘Not in my name’ through the verdict in Ayodhya.

There is a growing sense that the BJP does not speak for all Hindus, that many are deeply uncomfortable with its politics of hate and prefer a gentler, deeply personal practice of Hinduism. This is the trending sentiment Rahul has latched on to, and this made up the meat of his speech. Modi interjected at this point (a rare event, he prefers to ignore Rahul utterly, like Manipur, women wrestlers and Aryan Khan and so much else) and accused Rahul of calling all Hindus violent. But Rahul fact-checked that on the spot. Such fun!

I was wondering what to watch now that India has won the World Cup, but now I’m thinking that these battles over the soul of Hinduism in our more balanced Parliament may actually fill my entertainment void. My children did come around to try and change the channel but I just raised my hand and showed them the abhayamudra. Who knows, maybe hate and hindutva are also on their way to becoming so last season?

editor@theweek.in

hounding-of-arundhati-roy-may-turn-out-to-be-a-self-goal

Sat Jun 22 12:32:43 IST 2024

The hounding of Arundhati Roy may well turn out to be one more of those own-goals our rulers are growing to be famous for. Perhaps, the thinking is that it will make them look ‘stronger’—like they haven’t lost their iron grip on the minds of this nation and are still very much in control of what we read, think, eat, worship or whom we love.

But cracking down on the OG rebel who taught us all that it is sometimes okay to ‘break the love laws, the laws that lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much’ is perhaps not a good idea. All it may end up doing is make Roy, 62, relevant to the free-thinkers amongst Gen Z who, though familiar with the competent, well-researched, but decidedly non-libidinous lectures of Haryanvi engineer Dhruv Rathee, remain innocently unexposed to powerful seditious prose like ‘the carpenter’s hands lifted her hips and an untouchable tongue touched the inner-most part of her. Drank long and deep from the bowl of her.’ (Yes, boys and girls, that is the kind of stuff Indian writing in English was dishing out back in the swinging 1990s.)

The God of Small Things blew my 27-year-old mind, even before it won the Booker Prize, and I’m sure it will do the same to all the curious young folks who may now go looking for it, the same way they went looking for the Congress manifesto about two months ago.

Surely this is not an outcome the ruling dispensation was hoping for. But what exactly is it about Roy that gets rightwing chaddis into such a febrile twist? Is it her genes—a mix of Bengali and Malayali, both of which are states that have decidedly rejected their politics? Is it because she is beautiful as well as brilliant, which women are just not supposed to be? Is it her battleship-grey curls, her huge eyes and her extreme thinness, which make her caricatures T-shirt friendly, in the manner of Jimi Hendrix and Albert Einstein? Is it the fact that she is effortlessly feted, internationally, something that is naturally triggering to people who have just returned from screening a propaganda film like Hamare Baarah at Cannes to tepid response, in a year where Payal Kapadia—former student at the Film and Television Institute of India who led an agitation against the appointment of a subpar rightwing backed chairperson—won a Grand Prix?

I think it’s a combination of several things. Her fearlessness, her empathy, and her calm—Roy never shouts. She just speaks out undeniable, inconvenient, damning truths in a sweet, soft voice (almost reminiscent of fellow grey-curly Yogendra Yadav) wherever and whenever she is interviewed, which is increasingly going to be everywhere and often.

“In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.”

editor@theweek.in

get-together-nancy-tyagi-and-kanhaiya-kumar

Sat May 25 11:13:29 IST 2024

I have been following Nancy Tyagi on Instagram for over a year. Her video showed up on my feed, and I was immediately fascinated by the thin brown girl with the erect stance, striding purposefully through the dust and grime of what looked like a fabric market in north Delhi, with a tote bag slung over one delicate shoulder. Sitting in Bengaluru, I was immediately taken back to the time when a younger me had braved the heat and dust of a similar market with minimum budget, maximum hope, a celebrity outfit in my heart and a hunter’s hungry glint in my eye.

Nancy conferred with a succession of pudgy shopkeepers, made her selection, hailed a cycle-rickshaw, and came home with bales of red velvet and satin inside her tote. Using an old-school hand-operated sewing machine very similar to my mother’s, and a brass tailor’s scissors, she stitched herself an outfit exactly like the one Amrita Rao wears in the classic ‘Gori Gori’dance number from Main Hoon Na (2004). As she modelled the outfit, pouting and pirouetting, I was utterly hooked. Last week, Nancy, her IG following now swollen to over 10 lakh, graced the red carpet at Cannes in two stunning self-made ensembles, a dramatic pouffy, pale pink gown and a diaphanous, glittering mauve sari and cowl.

Sonam Kapoor, a Cannes veteran and a fashionista in her own right, gushed over Nancy’s second outfit and tweeted to Nancy, “Make me something, Nancy Tyagi.” Sonam may have to get in line though, as Nancy is blowing up big right now. It is a Cinderella story of the best kind, with an impoverished young girl, a gorgeous gown and a fancy ball at the heart of the plot, except this young girl is her own fairy godmother and her own Prince Charming.

In today’s uncertain world, with rampant unemployment and crumbling institutions, being one’s own godmother, significant other, and support system is emerging as the surest (if not sole) way to success, especially if one is born without a silver spoon in their mouth—you know, in the sort of family that eats with their fingers, which is to say, most of us. This ‘Do It Yourself’route of success calls for an incredible amount of focus, determination, hard work, homework and stamina. And while I am fairly certain that Nancy is not actively looking for a Prince Charming, thank you very much, the interfering Indian auntie and indefatigable romantic in me cannot help recommending that she check out the IG page of a remarkably intelligent and charming young man who seems to be in possession of all these qualities, and who (just like her) has a million plus followers—one Kanhaiya Kumar, originally from Begusarai and JNU, and currently hoping to be a member of Parliament from North East Delhi.

Now I know THE WEEK’s pages are not Karan Johar’s couch of manifestation, but Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath’s recent rant notwithstanding (‘I’m not going to ruin 18-20 years of my life babysitting. What if the child says ‘scr** you’ at 18 and leaves anyway’) our country urgently needs clean, talented self-made people to get together ideologically at least, if not romantically.

Of course, romantically would be better (no couple in India is as popular as Virat-Anushka—stable, focussed, high achievers who inspire young people to be the best they can be.)

I feel I am starting to sound dangerously Hitleresque with this dream of creating a master-race of self-made super-achievers, so I will now desist. Have a great election, Kanhaiya. (And maybe order a spiffy bespoke kurta from Nancy to wear on counting day?)

editor@theweek.in

rupali-ganguly-should-take-advise-from-her-tv-character-anupamaa

Sat May 11 11:46:13 IST 2024

I have been a fan of the television drama series, Anupamaa, right from the very start. The number one Hindi TV serial in the country for almost four years now, it tells the story of simple Ahmedabad housewife, Anupamaa, who loved her husband, children, and in-laws, and found her happiness exclusively in theirs. Till the day she found out her husband has been cheating on her, and has nothing but contempt for her as she is uneducated, uncool, overweight, a pushover, with hands that “stink of masalas”. And so begins Anupamaa’s second innings, in which she re-discovers herself, with her own hopes and dreams, divorces the cheater who did not value either her love or her stellar qualities, starts her own business, retains the love of her children and in-laws, marries a handsome, supportive tycoon who adores her, and proceeds to have an awesome new life (marred, of course, with all sorts of minor vicissitudes to keep the TRPs coming.)

The fact that the show airs on prime time Star Plus makes it a far more effective tool to battle patriarchy than any number of Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaanis, Thappads or Laapataa Ladies. There’s a lot of Matarani and Jai Shri Krishna in Anupamaa, but don’t be fooled by the sanskaari trappings. The show is subversive from beginning to end, pretty much starting where Sridevi’s English-Vinglish left-off. Anupamaa is an excellent home-maker and cook, but also fiery and fearless. She never hesitates to tell off family, friends and society. She is sympathetic, progressive, intelligent, independent, outspoken and thinks for herself. Which is why I wonder how Rupali Ganguly, the actor who plays Anupamaa, and has a fan following which has been compared with that of Smriti Irani’s in the early 2000s, will fare in the BJP.

I suppose the entry in politics seemed like the next logical step to the actor—Irani’s example is there before her, as is Arun Govil’s. After all, no matter how popular a show is, it cannot run forever, and one must be pragmatic and plan ahead.

But what would Anu (from the show) whisper into the ear of Rupali (the actor)? She would be happy and reassured that Narendra Modi has declared ‘zero tolerance’ for people such as Prajwal Revanna, and added that ‘they should not be spared’. But surely she would want to know why a government that came to power in the wake of the nation’s anger at the rape of Nirbhaya has proved itself, time and again, to be absolutely callous to crimes against women, unless they belong to a tiny and specific sub-section of atrocities committed on Hindu women by Muslim men? Or why Modi remains silent on horrific crimes against women in Unnao, Hathras, Kathua, Manipur? Or why Bilkis Bano’s rapists were garlanded, and why Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh’s son was given a ticket, and why dastardly dynast Revanna was fielded, even after the BJP was warned by its member that the man was poison. I suppose Rupali will have to explain to Anu that even though this is the real world, in which Rupali is still just an actor, with a whole lot of new lines to learn and a new role to play in a long-running super-hit reality show hoping to be renewed for its third season.

Still, I am hoping that after playing Anu for so many years, Rupali has imbibed a little bit of the character’s strength and sensibility. And that she will carry some Anu-ness into this next phase of her life. And even if she doesn’t, she isn’t the only Anupamaa. We are all Anupamaa. And we all have a vote.

editor@theweek.in

is-bjp-trying-to-divide-and-win-with-mangalsutra-jibe

Sun Apr 28 13:47:24 IST 2024

I am blown by the amount of research the BJP’s speechwriters have put in. They have gone way back in time to dig out and wilfully misquote something Manmohan Singh said in 2006 at a meeting of the National Development Council (NDC), which is “Our collective priorities are clear. Agriculture, irrigation and water resources, health, education… along with programmes for the upliftment of SC/STs, other backward classes, minorities and women and children… We will have to devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably in the fruits of development. They must have the first claim on resources...”  

It is interesting to note that after making this ‘deeply worrying’ statement, Singh still managed to get re-elected in 2009—clearly proving that a majority of voters were chill with what he had said. My guess is that the majority of voters are still chill with what he said.

And our worry is more to do with our missing ‘fruits of development’. Like, hello, where is our big fat fruit platter? And why isn’t Prime Minister Narendra Modi explaining why it is missing, instead of making hateful statements about how many children our Muslims are producing—when he surely must know, with all the reports he has to read, that Muslims are producing roughly the same amount of children as everybody else, and that India achieved replacement level fertility rates two whole years ago. I even wrote about it here, and wondered why we weren’t celebrating this achievement more. (Duh, because the ruling party likes to use this hoary, defunct bogey bear to whip up insecurity and division.)

For those who demand specifics, fertility rates have declined drastically across all religious communities over the last two decades to land at 2.1. And the Muslim fertility rate, while still the highest in India, is only 2.36, and getting steadily lower every day. Also, it gets compensated (sadly) by the community’s neonatal mortality rate, which is also the highest in the country.  So either our prime minister is not doing his homework, which is unlikely because he wakes up so early and works so hard, reminding me often of the endearing prime minister Hugh Grant played in Love Actually who lifts the 10 Downing Street phone to say, “I’m very busy and important.” Or he’s knowingly inciting the voters of Rajasthan by implying Muslim hordes, dressed in furs and riding on horseback, will swoop in to snatch mangalsutras from the necks of Hindu mothers and wives if they vote for the Congress—which is just plain silly—because there are 80 per cent Hindus in India and only 14 per cent Muslims, and it is much too hot to wear fur in Rajasthan. And anyway, if they had to do that they would’ve done it during the “60 years of Congress misrule” for heaven’s sake.

Our Election Commission, by coyly declining to comment on this flagrant hate-mongering, has proven it has a severely debilitating case of erectile dysfunction. By speeches such as this, and telling acts like turning the Doordarshan logo saffron, and arresting Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal—the BJP has revealed that it is not as confident as it claims to be. Such insecurity, when the party is resurgent, flush with funds, and has all the state institutions in their firm control, is puzzling.  

Is the BJP, which always has its ear to the ground, actually worried that Ram phal is not considered a ‘fruit of development’ by most Indians? Is it because more people are saying hey, if we’re allowed to go back in time and pull out old speeches, where’s that plump 15 lakh ‘fruit’ Modi assured us was gonna drop into all our bank accounts? Maybe Muslims probably stole that, too. And used it to buy fur-coats and horses.

editor@theweek.in

lok-sabha-polls-are-the-biggest-reality-show-on-earth

Fri Apr 12 11:23:18 IST 2024

You have gotta love the election season. Setting aside contentious issues like electoral bonds, rumours of electronic voting machine rigging, bribery, intimidation and wilful disinformation, the fact is that India’s Lok Sabha elections are still the biggest reality show on earth. Of course, reality shows today are often accused of being a little um, performative and pre-decided, much more ‘show’ than ‘reality’ but that doesn’t stop them from being absorbing viewing.

As usual there’s so much to watch and learn from the BJP’s advertising, marketing and information cell. It’s wrong to call it a cell, or even a sell, because it’s so much larger and savvier than that. Their classiest move this time, to me at least, is the weaponising of the number 370. By setting it as their target for 2024, they achieve two things. One, they flex casually on the fact that for them the erstwhile magical number of 272 is a bayen hath ka khel, the equivalent of competing with one hand tied behind your back. This is something an indulgent adult often does with a child, which in effect allows them to infantilise the opposition, which is clearly the logical next step after they have successfully infantilised the electorate (Bharat Mata is our holy mother, we are her worshipful, dutiful children, and to question her, or her chosen son Modiji, is the worst kind of sin.) And, two, without even uttering a single word on the topic, they remind all of us of the abrogation of Article 370, of the fact that nobody has ‘special status’ in India today, and that the BJP juggernaut sweeps everything that comes before it, be it the Supreme Court, the intentions of our founding fathers or the wishes of the majority residents of a state.

The opposition’s smartest move this time, to me at least, is the acronym, or rather the backronym (when one already has a word in mind and works backwards from there, to come up with an expanded form for it) I.N.D.I.A. This branding is a stoke of pure genius—it makes the alliance seem more cohesive, less raggle-taggle, it’s memorable, and gives the alliance some much needed high ground—they stand for the idea of India, not just opportunistic election victory—the speeches can just write themselves. In fact, the branding clearly rattled the BJP publicity machine, as rumours of India officially changing its name to Bharat swept our news feeds just a little after I.N.D.I.A was announced. But the usual cracks showed up in the ‘alliance’ almost immediately, and the BJP probably (and wisely) concluded that there was no need to panic.

Still, the BJP is no slouch in the acronym game—there’s UPYOGI sarkar (Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath) and the last time I watched a new channel, a BJP spokesperson was busily pitching torturous backronyms like RAM LALLA (Rashtriya suraksha, Mahila, Labharti, Leadership and Ardhvyavastha), GIIITA (Growth, Information, Innovation, Infrastructure, Technology and Atmanirbhar Bharat) and PDA (Performance, Delivery and Aspiration) to an amused anchor.

The AAP used to be good at this—the name of the party is in itself evocative, and lends itself to endless, powerful wordplay, as does the symbol of the broom which would sweep India clean of all corruption. If the AAP publicity apparatus ups its game and plays it smart, they may be able to convert Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest into a sympathy wave that may pay a sweet dividend on the hustings. Who knows, Delhi could become BADLAPUR. (Beloved And Dashing Leader Arvind Powers Party’s Unbelievable Resurgence.)

editor@theweek.in

private-space-get-a-camera-less-phone

Sat Mar 30 11:18:06 IST 2024

So all the young folk and the queer folk in my life are very upset at the break of long-time lesbian lovers Anjali Chakra and Sufi Malik. For those who came in late (like me) Anjali is a Hindu from India, and Sufi is a Muslim from Pakistan. They live and work in the US and shot into the limelight in 2019 when their pictures (dressed in traditional desi attire and laughing under an umbrella in the rain) went viral on the internet. And recently, everybody swooned collectively when Sufi went down on one knee, dressed in a beautifully tailored white pantsuit, and proposed to Anjali at the ‘very tippy top’ of the Empire State Building. And why not? These are gorgeous young women (Sufi is all twinkly-eyes and slight, elfin charm, while Anjali is a large-eyed, long-tressed stunner) who broke barriers of gender, religion and politics, all in one shot. Naturally, they captured our imaginations and our hearts and seemed to be living the happy ending we all crave. So what went wrong with Anjali and Sufi?

Their carefully coordinated posts on social media spoke of infidelity (committed by Sufi, devastating Anjali), but of course it goes much deeper than that. I am guessing their relationship deliquesced under the white hot heat of the very same viral wave they rode on to popularity. And unlike Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik, another hugely popular Indian-Pakistani couple who broke up recently, their chief accomplishment is their relationship itself. They don’t play tennis, or cricket. One is an artist and the other works in the health care sector; they are pretty much just starting out. It is terribly sad, and these girls probably didn’t know what they were getting into. When your love story starts getting recorded and lapped up daily by consumers it slowly gets leached of all spontaneity, and becomes calculated, rehearsed, agonised over and acted out cynically with one eye on the watching audience. Basically, a love story devoid of all love.

Living your ordinary day-to-day life in the public eye is nightmarishly difficult. Ask Kate Middleton. When you allow (even your own) cameras into your daily life, your marriage proposals, your baby births, and your most trusted spaces, you leave yourself with no place to escape to. Life becomes the Bigg Boss House, and all you can do is to fight to not get vacated. In the BC (before there was a camera in every phone) era these were issues only celebrities faced. But now, each and every one of us is a mini-celebrity, constantly locked in a battle to look as pretty in real life as we look in our display pictures. Everything is a projection, everything is for an audience, nothing is real. We don’t have experiences anymore. We merely record the projection of an experience, showcasing what we think one is supposed to be feeling when one has an experience of that sort.

If you watch films from Karan Johar or Sooraj Barjatya, you’ll see Amitabh Bachchan or Alok Nath playing a powerful business tycoon who loves his joint family. Then, on the news, you’ll see an actual powerful business tycoon, dancing to the songs of those films at his family functions. The tycoon is trying to behave like the actor, who was trying to behave like the tycoon. In a gangster flick, an actor is trying to ape a gangster, who was anyway trying to ape an actor. In an army film, an actor is trying to copy a commando, who was trying to copy an actor.

It is like two mirrors placed in front of one another, reflecting virtual images all the way to infinity. Nothing is authentic. The answer? Protect your private spaces fiercely, and get yourself a camera-less phone.

editor@theweek.in