Humour

Calculate this, Chetan Bhagat [And yes, you asked for it]

Angshukanta ChakrabortyApril 21, 2016 | 20:33 IST

Dear Chetan,

Greetings from Team DailyO (yes, that's @DailyO_ on Twitter, that crucial underscore underscores our difference from @DailyO, a handlebar for daily orgasms, we presume - we may be wrong).

 

We are writing to you since we hate disappointing people in general, and you in particular. In this season of open letters, how can we turn down an open dare from someone who has mainstreamed commentary in algebraic equations?

Although you addressed the "Nerds" [since when did you stop psychoanalysing your best friends on social media and graduate to chummy dudespeak?] and gave them a cryptic "Percentage Problems - Math is Fun" thing to engage with during their loo or coffee breaks, or in between gawking at Sunny Leone's latest Google-able image and that Narendra Modi desktop theme, we hereby feel obliged to notify you that the "H" and "M" joke, well it fell flat on its face.

You know flat like that letter of yours to Kashmiri youth, or that D+M>H versus D+H+M linear non-equation you had dabbled with in February this year.

[Oh yes, we do get paid to trawl your timeline, both on and off Twitter. So, no hassles there. Plus, we also think your fortnightly assault on our collective senses - or, what the "nerds" you often do a hotline with know as your "column" - in the Times of India needs a desperate change of name. "The Underage Optimist", seriously? Who do you think you are, Rahul Baba?]

Coming back to your half-baked mathematical jokes as commentary in 140 characters, Chetan, can you please spare us your IIT-IIM stamped political blah blah blah?

 

See the point is: communal rabble-rousing is still communal rabble-rousing, even if it comes wrapped in a sixth-grade-math-is-cool package made especially for Gujarat or Rajasthan schoolchildren.

You know what you have done? You have just set the template for math question papers in states like G and R and M. Possibly, that's the way they will introduce history and civics to sixth grade kids henceforth.

Sample these:

If H = 80% = majority and M = 20% = minority, must the Constitution (drafted by a D, who later turned a B) be held hostage to the whimsies of M, or be rewritten for the H, by the H, of the H?

Or:

When H = 80% and demand a #RamT, while M = 20% and mourn the loss of #BabriM, calculate by when #Ayodhya will be #RamT-positive, assuming a five-year Central Government (that "hearts" H) term runs its full course?

Before, you congratulate yourself yet again, and DM the DL [that's direct message the Dear Leader, for your convenience] already, please understand what Shoaib Daniyal has been trying to tell you, and your chaddi-buddies in the RSS/VHP Greater Sangh Parivar, for a while.

Your little window dressing to that old, hackneyed "hum paanch, humare pachees" logic - #DudeJustGetOverIt

Populations don't grow by a fixed rate, and they don't respect fear-mongering masquerading as data from certain quarters. For Indian Muslim population to indeed "overtake" Indian Hindus, or M>H in ChetanSpeak, our combined population would overshoot the global estimate by a massive margin, which, you, even with your limited AM quotient (applied math, for H=100%-heaven's sake), can understand to be a near impossibility.

Even though India may in 30-35 years become the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, that percentage would still be around 18 per cent, or a little above 20 crores, in a country of 120 crores and growing.

Hardly "alarming", actually.

So, for M>H in the Indian context, you need to colonise Mars first, because clearly for Planet Earth to endure that Battle of Growth Rates, it needs to gobble up a fellow solar orbiter, just to solve the ensuing housing crisis. So, no Project Hindu a la Project Tiger, yet on the horizon, pal. The easier option, Chetan, is to get your brain scanned for HSAP [that's Hindu Supremacy As Psychobabble, in case you got curious].

Oh, and happy birthday in advance. That brain scan idea - consider it our Koh-i-Noor to you.   

 
Last updated: April 22, 2016 | 13:19
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