Meet the insecure Indian: His favourite adjective is true – True Indian, True Picture, True Patriot

The Insecure Indian takes everything personally. He thinks anyone who criticises him is criticising his country. He is offended by t-shirts, beer cans, even doormats. He is an expert on Gandhi and Ambedkar. True is his favourite adjective – True Indian, True Picture, True Patriot.

In case you are wondering why I’m using the masculine, I know more men who fit this descriptor than women. Maybe it’s because they were brought up to believe they deserved so much more than their sisters – until they went out into the real world and got a shock. So for the purpose of this short rant, we’ll think of him as male.

He thinks cricket is a measure of our patriotism. He’s the kind of guy who leaves a stadium midway if he believes his team won’t win. He has a conspiracy theory for every loss his team faces – on the field and off it. He has no sporting spirit. He’s not even a real sports lover, he is just a cricket fan who doesn’t think twice about abusing his team if they don’t play well.

He thinks we shouldn’t play cricket with Pakistan though he watches every match that features the two rivals. Firecrackers blow his mind.

He is constantly comparing India to China, when the reality is that some of our indicators are even worse than Bangladesh. He needs fake news to assure him repeatedly that India is the biggest, baddest country in the world. Also the oldest, smartest, most evolved civilisation ever. He does not understand the meaning of the phrases “fact check” and “freedom of expression”.

He thinks he is rational, that those who disagree with him are emotional. He is a man of science, so much smarter than anyone who majored in History, please. Everything we learned in our history textbooks was lies, anyway. He’s taken it upon himself to fix that.

He classifies our heritage structures as he does everything else around him: Hindu or UnIndian.

He’s in a majority, in charge of almost every institution, all-powerful in modern India – but strangely scared of dissent. You should see how apoplectic he gets when young Indians say what they are thinking on a college campus. He hides his fear under a cloak of hate and aggression. He invokes the army to add legitimacy to anything he is saying. He thinks the rest of the world (America especially) is insecure, not him.

The Republic is his favourite TV news channel because it reinforces his persecution complex. He flourishes on social media and on maximum volume prime time news. He’s a bully who functions most effectively with his other bully friends, all of whom retweet or back him up when he starts screaming.

God help any woman who stands up to him: he will undermine her using every available patriarchal tool. He can’t understand why women no longer seem content lying passively under him as he asserts his right to occupy their bodies. He’s jealous that we can derive pleasure from sex.

He’s so insecure about women that he’s trying hard to convince fellow Indians that the desi cow, and not a real Indian woman, is his mother. Lesbians, foreign women, curly-haired women who wear jeans (and Jersey cows) are the only categories lower on the hierarchy than an Indian woman with “family values”.

The easiest way to spot an Insecure Indian is to look for someone who thinks “they” are ruining “his” country. That “they” will demand the same privileges he has received his whole life. That his country’s true character will finally come out of hiding now that people like him are in charge.