The perpetual comedians in Indian politics

There is a real time comedy circus going on in our country. Starting from Beni Prasad to DigVijay Singh to Akhilesh Yadav to Mayawati to Mamta Bannerji to K Chandrasekhara Rao, we have an unending list of big and small leaders who open their mouth and make us laugh.

We were listening to the news when I started laughing. Specky looked at me and said, ‘Shh… this is important. Let me listen to the news.’ The after just a moment, she turned and asked, ‘But what was it that made you laugh?’

‘The news,’ I said, ‘today’s comedy menu has Nitesh Rane asking Gujaratis to leave Mumbai and the TRS chief shouting – Leave Telangana!- at the top of his voice. Don’t the two of them make you laugh?’

‘Well, that’s true. They have made statements that tell me they aren’t serious about development of the country.’

‘Oh! No, you’ve got it all wrong,’ I explained, ‘they are actually doing us all a favour.’

Then I went on to tell her that the falling rupee, the schizophrenic stock market, and the tumbling economy of the nation were making us all too serious and these politicians have finally decided to bring a bit of humour back in our dull and stressful lives.

‘Look at it this way,’ I said, ‘People slog the entire day to earn enough only to buy their daily bread and nothing more. All the dreams, the wishes, and the plans, cling to the quake-prone recesses of the mind… and then should the news come in to add the extra dimension of more targeted blasts to shatter the common man completely?’

‘No,’ Specky defended the common man, ‘The news has no right to add to our disturbance.’

So I told her that the news is nothing more than what the newsmakers want it to be. And our newsmakers were fully aware of the precarious situation of the minds of the people and so…

Well, at this point I recounted to her the story of the demon who was wreaking havoc on a city when the city council decided to send him one person every day to be eaten. The demon liked the idea and one person was queued up each day as the sacrificial meal for him. This went on until one thoughtful person thought of a brilliant idea…

‘But forget that brilliant idea,’ I said, ‘the point I’m trying to make is that the Indian politician is perceptive enough to know that all this stress is sooner or later going to bring the people together and convert the masses into some sort of a gargantuan demon for their kin. So they have decided to let one of them come up every once in a while to prevent the common man to transform into this demon.’ My theory of the common man turning into a demon did not impress Specky until I added, ‘The politicians are actually trying to instil some humour into our lives.’

‘Sick humour,’ she said, ‘Nitesh Rane is simply telling us all how irresponsible these people in powerful positions can be.’

For the uninitiated, let me share the tweet that did it all. ANI ?@ANI_news tweets: ‘If Gujaratis trust Narendra Modi & feel more development in Gujarat then they should return to Gujarat-Nitesh Rane’ Barkha Dutt called Nitesh Rane’s tweets ‘abusive, unacceptable comments against Gujaratis in Mumbai.’ Vir Sanghvi ?@virsanghvi tweeted immediately: ‘Dear Nitesh Rane, my ‘Gujju’ family was in Mumbai long before your father was born and we will be there long after Daddy and u are forgotten.’ Someone even went on to remark that if DNA reports of Nitesh Rane and Digvijay Singh were compared it would be a 100% Tunch match!

The Telangana TRS chief also wants all Andhra-ites to leave their State and let the vacant positions in Government jobs benefit the Telangana-ites… if this trend catches on, we’ll have everyone leaving some state or the other. The Gorkhas don’t want anyone else in their state, the Marathi manus will be left making their own language movies in Mumbai, the Bengalis will spend generations singing some sort of sangeet that they don’t want to share, and we all know what is going to happen in Talangana and Andhra… the other states are no less.

Specky listened to me and then said, ‘But this is a serious matter.’

‘Don’t take them so seriously,’ I said, ‘they are clowning around and the latest ones are simply Rane and that leader from Telangana. Warming up to this comedy act are Akhilesh and his Yadav gang. There’ll soon be others you haven’t even heard of.’

Then I told her that all this was a part of a much bigger plot. ‘All this comedy,’ I said, ‘is to keep us humoured so we don’t start another common-man gang… because if that happens there will be total anarchy. Look at what is happening in Egypt. The social media getting people together and making the masses rise as one is all crap.’ I then told her that all this comic posturing will lead to mass exodus from every state… and where will everyone go?

‘Guess,’ I prompted, ‘just hazard a guess.’

‘No idea,’ she said.

‘Delhi,’ I said, ‘Delhi is the city where we’ll find the entire population of India moving in with bag and baggage.’ Where else can we all go, after all? The capital has a large heart and keeps creating colonies with a state orientation… and when the massive exodus happens, Sheila Dixit will simply finger the government at the Centre to expand the NCR.

I asked Specky, ‘Now did you get the overall picture?’ Seeing her confused, I told her that the NCR would, with one swift and deliberate legislation annex the entire country into the NCR. ‘So everyone will belong to the NCR… and we’ll all be Delhi-ites then,’ I said with a flourish of my hands, ‘this is the capital plan of our politicians. So until that happens, they will really need to increase their comic tempo to a crescendo that makes an exodus possible.’

Specky was uncertain about my comedy-influenced-exodus theory and she said, ‘I’m still not sure…’

I gave her a couple of extra cushions, surfed through the channels to the where they were talking about Rane, and said, ‘Enjoy the comedy.’

Arvind Passey
03 August 2013

Article published in Awazaapki.com. Read it here.

.