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.