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.

Doing one’s bit for the country

(Published today in Business Standard)

I’m terribly confused. In a couple of weeks I have to go and vote in a new government for the city-state of Delhi. Not only did I JUST DO THIS a mere thirteen months ago, but it also made more sense at the time. Since then, the whole political cast has run around the stage switching places and personalities.

As I understand it, the vote-catching face of Narendra Modi, who turned secular left-liberals into sobbing alcoholics by sweeping the BJP to power all over the country, has been ditched and replaced by ex-cop Kiran Bedi, who used to be with India Against Corruption and said she would never join politics, but now thinks that Modi is Helen of Troy and she a little star buzzing around his sun, which makes her sound almost more bonkers than she sounds when she complains that people go on about small-small rapes when there’s so much corruption, which makes you wonder why she left India Against Corruption.

Arvind Kejriwal, who first said he wanted nothing to do with politics and then formed the Aam Aadmi party, massively won an election, and packed up his government in an almighty sulk after 49 days, has now said he is very sorry about that, and is running again under the Twitter hashtag #Mufflerman. The only constant thing about him is his cough.

The TV spokespeople are no better. Shazia Ilmi, who first joined the Aam Aadmi Party and had not one nice thing to say about either the Congress or the BJP, has now joined the BJP, where she says she is very happy, and now has not one nice thing to say about Arvind Kejriwal.

Meanwhile the Congress party’s Ajay Maken…zzzzzzzz…where was I?

Another way to understand Delhi’s political fortunes: First the AAP took a big bite out of the Congress. Amazement! Then the BJP was set to take a big bite out of everybody. Sob. Suddenly the AAP looked like it might come back from behind—cheers!—and take a big bite out of the BJP, but then the BJP craftily bit back—burrrrrrn—and then everyone began to bite the AAP—fight, fight!—which then really got into the mood and started backbiting itself—lol. Nobody can figure out what the Bhushans, père et fils, are up to. Everyone is ignoring the Congress, because you have to have teeth to play, but who knows how many canines that lot will grow between now and February?

Nobody in this nightmare has mentioned a single substantive issue I can remember.

I hope somebody will explain all this to poor Barack Obama while he sits captive at this year’s extra-long, extra-show-offy Republic Day Parade. It seems we will have more floats, which is only a tiny bit better than making the same old set of floats go slower. If we’re going to spend the equivalent of some riffraff country’s GDP on security, we might as well extract the maximum bang for our buck.

Speaking of bangs, I don't even know if I'll have time to be an upright citizen and vote, because apparently the growth in India's Muslim population has left us Hindus at a vanishing 80 per cent, so the Vishva Hindu Parishad wants me to be a horizontal citizen and lie with men. It just goes to show that you can eventually find common ground with the unlikeliest people. I look forward to winking at men with trishuls in bars and saying, "Hey baby, wanna take ten for the team?" I might be atheist, secular, childless and on the brink of menopause, but I do find working on having children to be lots of fun, especially if there's no risk of actually having children as a result.

Maybe they’ll give me that new national honour, the Padma Shri Shri Baba Maharaj Award, for effort.

Six gods walk into a bar

(Published in Business Standard on January 10, 2015)


Q: Where do Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, and Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva go to try to forget about their stupidest followers?

A: Buddha-Bar.

The above is an increasingly endangered form of speech known as “a joke”, which is based on pricking some kind of balloon with an element of subversion. I made it up, so it’s kind of lame, but still. The sad epilogue to this joke is that the only thing the gods are going to achieve is a horrible hangover, because no amount of ambrosia can obliterate the tragic embarrassment of having followers who kill other people in the name of imaginary friends.

Jokes are based on varying degrees of offence, and in order to find them funny, you have to be aware of what is being sent up, and agree that it’s worthy of ridicule. This is often premised on the ability to laugh at oneself. But you don’t have to find jokes or satire funny for them to be perfectly valid ways of expressing opinion.

I’m explaining all this at tedious length because people keep complaining about ‘unnecessarily provocative’ humour, which suggests that they either don’t know or have forgotten that humour is based on irreverence, offence, and provocation.

I don’t think my joke is particularly offensive, but someone, somewhere might, because the number of people who roam the world with a cork up their arse is really just mind-boggling. But that’s okay. One of the great misconceptions about free speech is that the needlessly provocative jerks practicing it think they shouldn’t be criticised. This is, to use a technical term, balls. Those needlessly provocative jerks know that the right to criticise and offend is the basis of free speech, humorous or not, and cuts both ways. Any spoken or written criticism and rebuttal is fine. Peaceful protest is fine. If you really, really have a problem, you can take each other to court, or attempt to expand—or contract, depending on your views—the laws that regulate free speech in your country.

At no point does physical violence enter the picture.

Satire is only one form of provocative free speech. There’s also straight up provocative, artistically provocative, and crudely provocative. This is where people typically ask the question: Why be unnecessarily provocative? What’s the need?

Here is why provocation, and peaceful tolerance of it, is not just needless, but necessary: anything that lies outside a society’s comfort zone—rudeness, irreverence, provocation, heresy, blasphemy, all considered needless and dangerous—is a point of potential social and intellectual innovation and progress. Not all of it bears out that potential—some of it really is stupid, we decide, and move quickly on; but to borrow a scientific analogy, medical breakthroughs come out of a lot of wasteful experimental duds. We don’t scrap the whole endeavour because some of it sucked.

It was once considered ‘needlessly provocative’ to say that the earth moves around the sun, or that human evolved from apes. It was once considered needlessly provocative for women to demand the vote. It was once needlessly provocative to reject caste, or to show a kiss on film. It is only by risking offence, by risking discomfort, hostility, and dismissal, that ideas evolve and generate other ideas.

Social consensus in India, supported by laws like 295A, encourages an attitude of infantile docility when it comes to religious sentiment, placing a premium on coddling personal belief even at the cost of other individual and human rights and social progress. We do ourselves a social and intellectual disservice with this attitude, because all we have accomplished is to say: comply, or accept violent reprisal.

The Charlie Hebdo journalists who were murdered this week poked at every social taboo they could think of. If that is needlessly provocative, then we desperately need some needless provocation in this country.