If you’ve ever watched an episode of a reality show, then you would have probably figured out that they’re a sham. In general, they’re full of scripted confrontations that always end in a forced show of amiability, contain contrived arguments that go nowhere, and are burdened with an excess of artificial emotions.
Over the past few years, Indian reality shows have turned into contests of attrition in which we spend hours of our lives discovering which contestant has got the saddest life story. It’s not about who has the talent, because reality shows were never about that. It’s about who leads the most wretched life imaginable. Are you the son of an impotent leprosy patient and the blind nurse who took care of him? Please get to the front of the line. Really happy to give millions of rupees to this lady who hails from a village so disconnected from civilisation that they use carrier pigeons to send racist Whatsapp messages. Please give a standing ovation to our next contestant, a brilliant man who funds an orphanage in his home town by doing death-defying circus tricks using just his wits, a piece of flimsy rope and a small aubergine.
But of course, that is what we do in this country. We take somewhat unreasonable concepts and make them more farcical.
This Prime Minister once suspended every citizen’s fundamental rights. You’ll never believe what happened next!
Every year, when June 25 rolls around, we have our national orgy decrying the imposition of the Emergency. #NeverAgain, we tell ourselves, taking an oath to protect the motherland from such anti-democratic forces for as long as we live. If it was us, we think to ourselves, we’d have peacefully unseated Cruella de Ville and her prematurely balding son in two days just by the sheer force of our resistance. I, for one, really believe all those people who even in this day and age sagely nod in agreement with whatever bullshit their favourite politician spews would have stood up to a charismatic, authoritarian leader who belonged to a political dynasty.
Some of the main lessons of the Emergency were: don’t vote for political dynasties, strong leaders aren’t really the solution to all our problems, fundamental rights are more important than trains running on time, appointing party hacks to head government institutions erodes their effectiveness and most importantly, governments will always use the excuse of nationalism to stifle dissent.
Yet, we didn’t learn anything from this cautionary tale. Instead of sending them to the dustbin of history, the country voted the architects of the emergency back into power three years after the end of the “darkest period of Indian democracy”. Instead of growing an abhorrence for dynastic rule, we expanded our support for dynasty and now most of our political parties are family cults masquerading as legislative entities. Instead of developing an allergy for “strong leaders,” we keep trying to find the one true benevolent dictator who will solve all our problems.
The next Emergency is not going to happen in one day. The government is not going to fire up their Twitter machine and send you a polite message about curtailing your freedom. Hey fam, really blessed to announce that we need to suspend your constitutional rights for a little bit so that we can get some of our infrastructure on fleek. Mmmkay?#GovernmentIsBae #NotAnotherEmergency
For whom the eggs troll
We’re going to lose our limited freedoms piece by piece because our citizens fell in love with yet another self-proclaimed saviour. Each successive government comes along and curtails a bit of our rights and we end up convincing ourselves that it’s a good thing. In fact, we wouldn’t even recognise an Emergency-like situation nowadays until we are so deep into the quagmire because we’ll be too busy amplifying the government’s agitprop through social media. Folks who are willing to throat punch anyone who dares to even mildly criticise the current government pretend to be the arbiters of non-conformity.
Modern-day armchair vigilantes have convinced themselves that they would have stood up to the lean, mean, neutering regime. The same people who soil their pants if anyone utters the phrase “national interest” in front of them three times in a row would like you to believe that they wouldn’t have been swayed by the then government’s disinformation campaign. People who celebrate when the current government bullies private individuals or institutions using the power of the state act like they totally wouldn’t have been snitches, reporting perceived dissenters to the police.
People in this country are as susceptible to propaganda as they were decades ago. For example, take the Yoga Day celebrations. What was supposedly conceptualised as a day for “raising awareness about the wonders of yoga” turned into a day of strict voluntary participation. You were either with the brave patriots who were finally taking yoga back from the charlatans who had stolen it or you were anti-national scum who needed to drown themselves into one of our country’s large, filthy water bodies.
Once the “holiday” was notified though, the Indian Sycophancy Syndrome kicked in and everybody was trying to prove how much they love yoga, and took the whole celebration into absurd levels of ridiculousness.
Rusty party hacks who hadn’t lifted a finger for more than half a century suddenly started giving speeches extolling the virtues of the downward dog. A minister in Madhya Pradesh announced that prisoners who practice yoga would get a month off their prison term. According to the 160-page report compiled by the government on the media coverage of this blessed event, most teevee channels actually aired more promotional spots than they were asked to. A beleaguered cab company offered to provide free rides to the nearest Yoga Day event for those who wanted to participate in the revelry. Even passengers on domestic flights were encouraged to do some breathing exercises. Because the best time to test the processing power of your lungs is when you are sitting in a pressurised metal chamber where people are packed in like a can of sardines.
Moves like Jagger
Our polity is so bankrupt, so insulated from logic, that “other parties did it too” is considered a legitimate political argument. Appointing political hacks to lead government-backed institutions to keep control over them has been a trick used by every government. Yet the current dispensation has turned choosing the wrong person for a job they aren’t qualified for into an art form. They chose a guy who has no knowledge of cinema to run an institute dedicated to teaching it, selected a censor board whose chief thinks that “Bombay” is a cuss word, and appointed a historian-in-chief who thinks that the evils of the caste system were dreamed up by the Mughals.
Even if we admit that patently false argument that the liberal mafia has been turning these institutions left wing for decades, the defenders of the current government aren’t saying that they’re going to replace the so-called liberal propagandists with competent people. Nope. They’re not interested in appointing people who show independence of thought and aren’t given the chairmanships of prestigious institutions just as a reward for their fealty to the dark lord. They’re admitting that they don’t care for these institutions, as long as their ideology spreads its tentacles over the discourse in the country. So much for “India first”.
In our country, we’ve always been looking for some kind of white knight to come and save us from the clusterfuck. But here’s the truth: no one’s coming. The problems we face in this country are vast and quite frankly insurmountable, but there is no one person, no one law, and no one political party that will be able to fix those problems.
If you keep looking at everything through the prism of your tribe you’re always going to end up with a distorted version of reality. And then you will want to fix problems that really don’t exist, instead of fixing the ones that really do.
Power is an intoxicating aphrodisiac that can tempt even the most noble. And yet in our country we give uninhibited power to the most megalomaniac among us. We imagine that people who like hearing the sound of their own voice all day long are somehow going to fix our problems. And then we are shocked – shocked! – when they fail to do so.
If you don’t have any scepticism against the people in power and don’t hold their feet to the fire, the only person you’re fooling is yourself. Like that parrot in the children’s fable, you can close your eyes and pretend that the predator can’t see you. That, somehow, due to some anomaly of nature, he wants to be your friend. But if you open your eyes for a second, remove the distortion, then you can clearly see the eagle is headed your way with its claws out.
Or you could continue to ask people whose opinion you don’t agree with to self-deport to Pakistan.
That’ll work too.
Over the past few years, Indian reality shows have turned into contests of attrition in which we spend hours of our lives discovering which contestant has got the saddest life story. It’s not about who has the talent, because reality shows were never about that. It’s about who leads the most wretched life imaginable. Are you the son of an impotent leprosy patient and the blind nurse who took care of him? Please get to the front of the line. Really happy to give millions of rupees to this lady who hails from a village so disconnected from civilisation that they use carrier pigeons to send racist Whatsapp messages. Please give a standing ovation to our next contestant, a brilliant man who funds an orphanage in his home town by doing death-defying circus tricks using just his wits, a piece of flimsy rope and a small aubergine.
But of course, that is what we do in this country. We take somewhat unreasonable concepts and make them more farcical.
This Prime Minister once suspended every citizen’s fundamental rights. You’ll never believe what happened next!
Every year, when June 25 rolls around, we have our national orgy decrying the imposition of the Emergency. #NeverAgain, we tell ourselves, taking an oath to protect the motherland from such anti-democratic forces for as long as we live. If it was us, we think to ourselves, we’d have peacefully unseated Cruella de Ville and her prematurely balding son in two days just by the sheer force of our resistance. I, for one, really believe all those people who even in this day and age sagely nod in agreement with whatever bullshit their favourite politician spews would have stood up to a charismatic, authoritarian leader who belonged to a political dynasty.
Some of the main lessons of the Emergency were: don’t vote for political dynasties, strong leaders aren’t really the solution to all our problems, fundamental rights are more important than trains running on time, appointing party hacks to head government institutions erodes their effectiveness and most importantly, governments will always use the excuse of nationalism to stifle dissent.
Yet, we didn’t learn anything from this cautionary tale. Instead of sending them to the dustbin of history, the country voted the architects of the emergency back into power three years after the end of the “darkest period of Indian democracy”. Instead of growing an abhorrence for dynastic rule, we expanded our support for dynasty and now most of our political parties are family cults masquerading as legislative entities. Instead of developing an allergy for “strong leaders,” we keep trying to find the one true benevolent dictator who will solve all our problems.
The next Emergency is not going to happen in one day. The government is not going to fire up their Twitter machine and send you a polite message about curtailing your freedom. Hey fam, really blessed to announce that we need to suspend your constitutional rights for a little bit so that we can get some of our infrastructure on fleek. Mmmkay?#GovernmentIsBae #NotAnotherEmergency
For whom the eggs troll
We’re going to lose our limited freedoms piece by piece because our citizens fell in love with yet another self-proclaimed saviour. Each successive government comes along and curtails a bit of our rights and we end up convincing ourselves that it’s a good thing. In fact, we wouldn’t even recognise an Emergency-like situation nowadays until we are so deep into the quagmire because we’ll be too busy amplifying the government’s agitprop through social media. Folks who are willing to throat punch anyone who dares to even mildly criticise the current government pretend to be the arbiters of non-conformity.
Modern-day armchair vigilantes have convinced themselves that they would have stood up to the lean, mean, neutering regime. The same people who soil their pants if anyone utters the phrase “national interest” in front of them three times in a row would like you to believe that they wouldn’t have been swayed by the then government’s disinformation campaign. People who celebrate when the current government bullies private individuals or institutions using the power of the state act like they totally wouldn’t have been snitches, reporting perceived dissenters to the police.
People in this country are as susceptible to propaganda as they were decades ago. For example, take the Yoga Day celebrations. What was supposedly conceptualised as a day for “raising awareness about the wonders of yoga” turned into a day of strict voluntary participation. You were either with the brave patriots who were finally taking yoga back from the charlatans who had stolen it or you were anti-national scum who needed to drown themselves into one of our country’s large, filthy water bodies.
Once the “holiday” was notified though, the Indian Sycophancy Syndrome kicked in and everybody was trying to prove how much they love yoga, and took the whole celebration into absurd levels of ridiculousness.
Rusty party hacks who hadn’t lifted a finger for more than half a century suddenly started giving speeches extolling the virtues of the downward dog. A minister in Madhya Pradesh announced that prisoners who practice yoga would get a month off their prison term. According to the 160-page report compiled by the government on the media coverage of this blessed event, most teevee channels actually aired more promotional spots than they were asked to. A beleaguered cab company offered to provide free rides to the nearest Yoga Day event for those who wanted to participate in the revelry. Even passengers on domestic flights were encouraged to do some breathing exercises. Because the best time to test the processing power of your lungs is when you are sitting in a pressurised metal chamber where people are packed in like a can of sardines.
Moves like Jagger
Our polity is so bankrupt, so insulated from logic, that “other parties did it too” is considered a legitimate political argument. Appointing political hacks to lead government-backed institutions to keep control over them has been a trick used by every government. Yet the current dispensation has turned choosing the wrong person for a job they aren’t qualified for into an art form. They chose a guy who has no knowledge of cinema to run an institute dedicated to teaching it, selected a censor board whose chief thinks that “Bombay” is a cuss word, and appointed a historian-in-chief who thinks that the evils of the caste system were dreamed up by the Mughals.
Even if we admit that patently false argument that the liberal mafia has been turning these institutions left wing for decades, the defenders of the current government aren’t saying that they’re going to replace the so-called liberal propagandists with competent people. Nope. They’re not interested in appointing people who show independence of thought and aren’t given the chairmanships of prestigious institutions just as a reward for their fealty to the dark lord. They’re admitting that they don’t care for these institutions, as long as their ideology spreads its tentacles over the discourse in the country. So much for “India first”.
* * *
In our country, we’ve always been looking for some kind of white knight to come and save us from the clusterfuck. But here’s the truth: no one’s coming. The problems we face in this country are vast and quite frankly insurmountable, but there is no one person, no one law, and no one political party that will be able to fix those problems.
If you keep looking at everything through the prism of your tribe you’re always going to end up with a distorted version of reality. And then you will want to fix problems that really don’t exist, instead of fixing the ones that really do.
Power is an intoxicating aphrodisiac that can tempt even the most noble. And yet in our country we give uninhibited power to the most megalomaniac among us. We imagine that people who like hearing the sound of their own voice all day long are somehow going to fix our problems. And then we are shocked – shocked! – when they fail to do so.
If you don’t have any scepticism against the people in power and don’t hold their feet to the fire, the only person you’re fooling is yourself. Like that parrot in the children’s fable, you can close your eyes and pretend that the predator can’t see you. That, somehow, due to some anomaly of nature, he wants to be your friend. But if you open your eyes for a second, remove the distortion, then you can clearly see the eagle is headed your way with its claws out.
Or you could continue to ask people whose opinion you don’t agree with to self-deport to Pakistan.
That’ll work too.
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