Fly, the beloved country

(Published on June 11, 2016 in Business Standard)


When I was sixteen, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception convinced me that mind-altering substances were the way forward. I would know the colour of sound. I would see music! I would touch the most exalted parts of my brain, and the grottiest, and never be bored.

I took my first drag of marijuana in college, bright-eyed with expectation. Nothing happened, so I took three more quick ones. Suddenly I was boiling from the inside, skidded out of the door into a Pennsylvania winter storm, fainted into a snowdrift, and had to be dragged inside. After four head-spinning hours, when the panic attack subsided, I concluded that drugs were horrible, and left them the hell alone.

Twenty-five years later, a kindly felon chaperoned me through the right way to smoke the stuff, and I finally discovered why people go on about it. There I was, lifting through the inconsequential material roof of my skull, trying to float out clear to the stars, moored to the planet only because I was holding on to my chair. So that’s why people do drugs: unreality is much nicer.

It’s so appealing, in fact, that despite our strong Indian traditions of drug use typified by ascetics, Holi revellers, and Shiva, we also continually strive to achieve unreality without substances. It has become cultural second nature, probably because our realities are so nasty.

Thus the strange case of The-State-That-Must-Not-Be-Named in the movie Udta Punjab, which is currently giving everyone hives for completely opposite reasons. It’s a movie about the raging, tragic drug problem in Punjab. That seems like an important, necessary movie, right? But under the marijuana-like influence of the Central Board of Film Certification’s chief nitwit, Pahlaj Nihalani, Udta Punjab is being turned into a movie about someone, somewhere, doing something, beside a signboard that maybe threatens the sovereignty of India. The CBFC has removed bad words like ‘election’ and ‘MP’, and turned Udta Punjab into a movie floating up through our skulls, unmoored to any kind of reality. Nihalani’s imbecilic political and cultural instincts set off his alarms 89 times in that film, for reasons of swearing, for wanton use of the name ‘Punjab’ for the place ‘Punjab’, and for generally being offensively spot on. On Planet Nihalani, reality is defamation. The most unusual howls of protest from Bollywood have shown that even people known for party drugs draw the line somewhere.

The Shyam Benegal-led committee, set up this year to review the certification process, recommended a new category of certification, for which Udta Punjab may qualify: A/C, or ‘adult with caution’. A/C-certified films will be screened not at theatres near residential areas, but in, for example, red light areas. Puzzling, wot? Do cautious adults not live in residential areas? Are adults who take their kids out to the movies incapable of picking suitable movies? Are cautious adults only allowed to go to red light areas to demonstrate their caution? It’s all very confusing—or, in real, non-marijuana terms, barking mad. Benegal reportedly said that the Punjab government might be upset by the suggestion, in Udta Punjab, that parts of the government collude with the drug mafia, when, in fact, “the government is doing a great deal to curb this menace.” This suggests that Benegal and Nihalani both confuse the function of film certification with the function of keeping the state happy.

The point is, people, you can’t just go around confusing art with reality! You have to confuse it with political spin. That’s what it takes to pass anything in this joint—in which case, I’ll pass on that joint.

Kids: Just say no.

The unbearable niceness of TV

(Published on May 28, 2016 in Business Standard)

On Indian TV, any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental


If you’ve spent any time immobilised, lately—say, for example, because you’ve twisted your ankle, and been medically sentenced to two to three weeks of watching television while pretending to read—you will have noticed that TV has really changed in this country over the last few years. Specifically, it has been put into a playpen, wearing a corset and a veil, and tasked with safeguarding the national moral fibre.

In other words, it’s ruining television viewing. Dialogue now sounds like this: “If you had the *** you would have stood up to your ***. Now Get off your *** and get to work, you lazy ***.” It’s as if Vedic biochemists have discovered that our tender ears will burn to a crisp if they are exposed to the napalm of a salty colloquialism. It makes you want to throw the book you’re pretending to read, at the screen.

Indian television is self-regulated, and since the Broadcast Content Complaint Council was set up in 2011, TV has followed the Indian Broadcasting Foundation’s version of the Ministry of Information’s self-regulation guidelines. A quick look at these guidelines suggests that the Ministry suggests that Indian television protect Indian viewers from any resemblance to life. And asked to bend, broadcasters seem to have decided to crawl in order to avoid becoming judicial bait.

Watching a really great adult show like Orange is the New Black is, therefore, an incredibly annoying experience—not only do they keep cutting out same-sex kisses, as if those might cause Indian pelvises to go up in flames worse than heterosexual kisses, but every third word of dialogue is missing. Why air a show about inmates in a women’s prison if you’re only going to try to make it sound like a grown-ups day care centre? Are we supposed to believe that jailed criminals do drugs, run smuggling rackets, whack each other with locks in socks, and bonk each other constantly, but would never, never utter the word ‘boob’?

But—after noting that one show inexplicably replaced the word ‘shit’ with ‘jerk’—forget sex, drugs, violence, and swearing for a moment. Television shows are subtitled, to clarify difficult accents and compensate for hearing challenges. The subtitles take purification so seriously that they have become entirely uncoupled from rationality, replacing the word ‘breast’ with ‘chest’, ‘sexuality’ with ‘femininity’, ‘lesbian’ with ‘queer’, ‘horny’ with ‘in passion’.

Who amongst us has never said: “My queer friend said that chestfeeding can feel feminine, but maybe she was just generally in passion”?

Words like ‘vagina’ and ‘nipple’ can simply disappear into asterisks, so dangerous are they to society. So can ‘cocaine’. So can…wait for it…‘beef’. Yessir, beef. Not in a movie about Partition, but on an episode of the much-loved sitcom Friends.

Indian television airs shows like Orange is the New Black and Game of Thrones because younger Indians have the cultural bandwidth to appreciate them—they’re smart, sexy, and edgy. But it only airs them, as The National pointed out, after cutting out smarts, the sex, and the edge.

India is hauling itself into the future of entertainment with typically anaemic adherence to the most puritanical standards, not the most progressive. It’s amazing that a country filled with adult viewers hasn’t made a serious racket about increasingly being treated like infants. Or perhaps most adults just go and get the whole show off the Internet, without the mutilation.

It’s enough to make you say, ‘I’ve had it with this jerk,’ and go back to your book for real.

So you think you can dance

(Published on May 14, 2016 in Business Standard)


I find myself at that point in life when people at parties are largely younger than me. Not just at parties, actually; people all over the place—serious people, like policemen and doctors and pilots and stuff. I’m not sure who thought it was a good idea to let these people out and give them uniforms and tell them to go run the world, but I feel they must be closely watched, even though I have no idea what to watch for. It has given me a whole new insight into why really old people wear a permanent look of rank suspicion.

About those parties, though, I really cannot work out where all the other older people (my age) went. I have a hunch that somewhere out there, older people are throwing parties filled with older people, to which I’m not invited, either because a) older people have higher standards and better judgement, or b) see a).

Either way, I seem to spend a lot of time with appallingly shiny-eyed, endlessly energetic young people, firm of bosom and bright of future, who have an amazing capacity to remember things, including from the week before. To watch them drink all night and bounce off to work the next day; to watch them shine at each other with natural flair; to hear them articulate three clever paragraphs in the time it takes me to place my tongue in the correct position to make an ‘L’ sound; well, I see it all as a test of acceptance sent to me by my Creator. In a questionable display of humour, my Creator giveth me these tests right around the time s/he taketh from me the ability to drink a lot.

You know the phrase ‘middle-aged exuberance’? That’s right, you don’t, because nobody says that, because it’s not a thing. It costs too much. I proved this to myself last weekend when, at the tail end of a party co-hosted by three young people, I decided to jump through an open doorway from the living room to the terrace.

There was no need to jump since the door was open. Post-facto, everyone wanted to know if I was drunk, but no—I was only full of the happy beans of dancing, and whimsy. This was the exuberance part. I jumped with both feet from a standing position, in sandals that were flat as a pancake, on an even surface. I fully intended to arrive in the same position, but somehow my left ankle turned as I landed, and I kept landing for ages, finally coming to rest on my butt, eye level with a table, seeing stars from the pain in my foot. This was the middle-aged part.

See why they don’t go together?

The young people around the table made big shiny eyes and ‘o’ shaped mouths. ‘Tell me this is an ashtray,’ I said, stubbing my cigarette out on the table and really hoping it wasn’t wooden, because this was also a housewarming. Once blood flow to my head was restored, I dragged myself down three flights of stairs, limped to my car a block away, drove myself home, limped up three flights of stairs, and went to sleep still cursing. Talk about ignominious.

So it was that I found myself in the doctor’s office the next morning, getting myself x-rayed and bandaged and told to stay off my feet for three weeks.

It’s easy to forget middle age when you hang with the grotesquely hale. But middle age will find a way to remind you. So, no doubt, will the young people.

I’m with stupid

(Published on April 30, 2016 in Business Standard)


It became clear, the other day, that age is stupidifying me even more than nature already has. I woke up and realised that the feminine hygiene product introduced into my lady bits the previous evening had now been there for fourteen hours. I tend to be on the psychotic side of careful about removing those things, because of the risk of toxic shock syndrome (TSS), so this was an emergency. Bolted to the bathroom. Scrabble for string, no string. Manual probe, can’t reach. Anxiety levels, Defcon 1.

I screeched into the emergency room. My panicked gabbling got me waved through reception, billing, and the nurses’ station, to the emergency intern, who made me wait ten life-threatening minutes for the gynaecologist. ‘If I die of TSS it’ll be your fault,’ I snarled.

In the doctor’s office I tore off my clothes and leapt upon the table. ‘Calm down, dear,’ said the doctor. She examined me. She frowned. ‘You put it in at 6pm, dear?’ she asked. (Gynaecs think that saying ‘dear’ a lot makes the speculum less speculumy.) ‘Yes, yes, it’s been 14.5 hours and I’m going to die of TSS, take it OUT!’ I shouted. ‘Nothing there, dear,’ she said. I made her look again, now worried that maybe my hoohoo had eaten it. She probed with wiggling fingers (though not in a good way). ‘See? There’s nothing, dear.’ Sweet relief, I was not going to die of TSS. I skipped home and inspected the trash, and there it was, neatly wrapped up. Boy, did I feel stupid.

But I’m not alone—it feels like the whole country is getting stupider every day.

For example, the Gujarat government wants PhD students to reach for the stars by picking their research topics from a list of research topics provided by the government, consisting of state and central government schemes and projects. Students will monitor and evaluate these, and voila, PhD. Cool, huh? The government outsources its work for free, keeps scholarship relevant, and ensures that students develop nationalist chops by getting their data and conclusions right if they want their degrees.

But who needs degrees in the republic of stupid? We have already shown, via a secret dossier at Jawaharlal Nehru University, that scholarship is measured only by moral virtue. Some patriotic teachers backed by the administration spied on empty bottles and used condoms and concluded, among other things, that the place is a huge sex racket, that students drink, and that the Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment is in fact promoting sex work.

Even the Prime Minister’s MA degree from Gujarat University has been wiped off his website. Was it retrospectively revoked because he didn’t survey the right project? Has it just been misplaced? Is it being withheld for national security reasons? Nobody’s getting back to the RTI activist who requested to see it.

But honestly, that’s just a storm in a very small teacup, because we’ve decided that education is overrated—except MBAs. The only thing the nation needs is MBAs and a hailstorm of other acronyms, godmen, ancient texts, and flagpoles that can be seen from Beijing and Kabul. Especially ancient texts. HRD minister Smriti Irani wants the Indian Institute of Technology to offer Sanskrit, so that students can research all the rich science available in Sanskrit texts. That seems like a reasonable allocation of resources if you think about it while drinking cow urine.

So really, let’s stop banging on about education, when what we really do well is stupidity—it’s better to set an achievable goal. At least in that world, I know I’ve made it.