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What do Indians not love in achhe din?

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Kaveree Bamzai
Kaveree BamzaiMay 31, 2016 | 11:25

What do Indians not love in achhe din?

So let us count the things we don't like.

We don't like Africans, unless they are white.

We don't like words like attack. It reminds us of a certain coup story.

We don't like jokes, especially about legends, which is everyone with a Bharat Ratna - an exalted breed of men and women who refuse to stand up for a young man falsely accused of insulting legends.

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We don't like those who mimic the Maharashtrian accent. If we could, we would ensure that Minglish would be the national language.

We don't like movies which depict drug use, especially in areas where it is actually used. We believe too much reality is bad for the movies.

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We are considering a national petition that will forever divide the calendar into the Era Before Modi and the Era After Modi.

We don't like universities that aim to develop the mind. We are not sure we like that four-letter word.

We don't like history, unless we are rewriting it. A complex process that involves first erasing certain names, and then appropriating some.

We don't like the Gandhis, unless they are members of the BJP, or are married into the family and have a wonderful predisposition for buying and selling flats from Gurgaon to London - it makes them so easy to target.

We don't like anything that happened Before Modi. We are considering a national petition that will forever divide the calendar into the Era Before Modi and the Era After Modi, otherwise known as "Burre Din" and "Ek Nayi Subah".

We don't like institutional heads with independent minds. They tend to have anti-national thoughts. How do we know? Because we know it all. And what we don't know is told to us by Subramanian Swamy.

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We don't like flaunting degrees, especially those we don't have.

We don't like women with a point of view that is not prescribed by men. We especially don't like women who can articulate their thoughts in 140 characters on Twitter.

We don't like the media, unless they are sufficiently servile and eternally unquestioning.

Actually, scratch that. We just don't like questions. They interrupt our train of self congratulatory thought.

Welcome to the new world of thought control. As in Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights (oh I am sorry, another thing we don't like, authors who write books in complicated English), everyone is energetically engaged in working on the machine of the future. And what does the machine produce? "Glory, honour, pride. Glory is the future."

And anyone who questions it is a terrorist with a diseased mind that is a "bearer of the plague".

The plague is upon us, because we were of the mistaken belief that we live in a democracy. We were told that the Indian way of life was to be and let everyone else be.

We were under the impression that we could think as we pleased, laugh as we pleased, eat and drink as we pleased, and certainly speak as we pleased. We didn't have nationalism inspectors like Giriraj Kishore and truth evangelists such as Subramanian Swamy.

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We were told we belonged to the Age of Freedom. Otherwise known as Achhe Din.

Nobody told us it was a joke.

Last updated: September 22, 2017 | 23:08
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