Whatever floats your flaming boat

(Published in Business Standard today)


As 2014 turned into 2015, a Pakistani fishing boat suddenly went up in flames off the coast of Gujarat and sank, and the Government of India put it about that the Pakistani crew had set themselves on fire, either because they were terrorists, or because they were very unhappy. Who can be sure? I mean, people are always going up in flames in Gujarat, and nobody ever has a clue who did it. Maybe it’s spontaneous combustion.

Then the DIG Coast Guard was shown on video fondly reminiscing about ordering people to blow up the boat. The government said that the DIG had misspoken, and went looking for him with a steely glint in its eye. The DIG immediately denied saying it, refusing to let audiovisual evidence derail his narrative arc. The upshot is that nobody knows how exactly a Pakistani boat burst into flames and sank after we chased it for an hour and surrounded it.

In some countries, that would count as a fairly newsworthy bit of intrigue.

In this country, however, it is only as newsworthy as a situation involving another bunch of jokers, which also blew up, but differently.

People have been up all night yelling at each other and writing anguished op-eds about All-India Bakchod (AIB), the comedy collective that you hadn’t heard of until a couple of weeks ago and now cannot get away from. AIB recently held a roast of two Bollywood actors that featured swear words and sex jokes, as roasts do, and as soon as it was put online, invited a rash of complaints and First Information Reports.

One of the FIRs points out that AIB used swear words and made references to sex in an audience that included women. These women, in their simple, innocent way, brought their ears with them to the show. How could they have been prepared, by the word ‘roast’, for ribald humour? In mixed company! Do these AIB people think they’re too good for women’s safety? Ladies are so pea-brained--though of course a highly respected national asset--that they don’t understand how unsafe they are in the presence of swear words. They bought tickets to the show, and laughed their highly respected posteriors off. Never mind, we’re all here at the police station to clean up this mess.

As for the famously in-the-closet Bollywood personality who MC’d the show--pardon my French--his mother was in the audience. She had to sit there, in public, and listen to jokes about her son’s allegedly gay sex life—and he even mentioned what position he likes! First off, Indian mothers, having had their fun, are no longer aware that anyone in the country is having sex. When they daydream about their sons, as Indian mothers are supposed to, they see them only torso up. If the son has children, then his torso is forced to float upon a cloud composed entirely of euphemisms. Mothers, never, never, ever, associate children with sex.

Thank god there are people out there who care for our morality far, far more than we do ourselves. Without them, we’d just be some regular, grown-up nation with a sense of humour, or at least one that can live and let live.

The AIB episode should reassure us that we will steadfastly continue to address the long and scary list of India’s problems--from infant mortality to casteism to gender violence to corruption--by trying to prosecute people who make jokes we don’t find funny, and by trying to protect people who aren’t offended. Way to go, fellow patriots!

Meanwhile, I hope someone is working on a roast of the Coast Guard and the Defence Ministry.

How an electorate is like a safety kayaker

(Published in Business Standard on February 7, 2015)


About 200 years or so ago, I went on a five-day rafting expedition on the Alaknanda River, in a ducky. A ducky is an inflatable kayak, kind of like a two-person mini-raft. It is chiefly designed to pitch you without warning into shrieking torrents of glacial melt, and make you cry by the campfire every night, praying that you’ll pass away in your sleep so that you don’t have to do it all again the next day.

Anyway, one of the things they do on a rafting expedition is to carefully explain safety kayaking. Safety kayakers, in their one-man hard-shell kayaks, are fast, daring, insanely skilled river jockeys. These people surf and play in the maw of vicious rapids just for fun. Their job is to roll their eyes as they snatch you from the jaws of death after you fall into the river like the fat old loser you are.

Here’s how the safety kayaker briefing goes:

“Hi! I’m [insert cool Top Gun-type name]. When you fall into the river like a fat old loser, I will race to your side but then stop just out of your reach, and evaluate whether you are able to follow my directions. If I don’t think you can, I’ll wait until I think you can. I will direct you to calmly reach for this metal ring on my kayak and hold it, so that I can tow you to safety while rolling my eyes. If you panic and go for either me, or my kayak, in a manner that I determine endangers my own safety, I will whack you in the nose with my paddle and back off until you settle the hell down. I’m serious, I will hurt you. Don’t panic or thrash about or lunge, and we’ll be fine.”

I paraphrase, but that’s roughly it.

I duly fell into the Alaknanda and panicked and thrashed about and lunged at the safety kayaker who had materialised in two seconds. Sure enough, he bobbed around just out of my reach, observing me beadily and repeating “Calm down.” At first I was very angry that here I was, drowning—so young, so full of dreams—and there he was, obsessing about my tone rather than what I was saying. It was only after I’d mastered my emotions (i.e. realised that I had a life jacket on and wasn’t being dragged into the green depths) that the dude let me cling to his kayak while he rolled his eyes.

What does this have to do with elections in Delhi?

Well, in the last few weeks, as the pace and pitch of the campaign for Delhi has risen, the BJP has suddenly woken to find itself wet, cold and in trouble. Its last-minute chief ministerial candidate is not even from its own ranks. Its thugs have attacked churches; its police has cracked down on protesters; it has taken to smear campaigns; the PM called the media ‘bazaaru’ (sluttish); a critical news channel was allegedly mysteriously blocked in parts of Delhi. Complacency shattered, the roaring lion of the 2014 general elections is behaving exactly like a panicking rafter.

Electorates, like safety kayakers, are implacably committed to their own interests first. They will take a good hard look at the people freaking out in the water, and decide whether they’re likely to cooperate or to drag them down. They don’t like desperate, dangerous dirty tricks. There are other, less panicky swimmers in the fray, like the Aam Aadmi Party, and, it is rumoured, the Indian National Congress. So, as Delhi goes to the polls today, it will be interesting to see whether the BJP has earned itself a rescue, or a humiliating whack in the nose.

Either way, the electorate will be rolling its eyes.