Irrelevant discourse on the irrelevance of Raj Thackeray

Irony like Dutch graphic artist MC Escher's iconic sketch “Drawing Hands” is a self-referencing paradoxical loop. The moment the Maharashtra Assembly election results were out, political pundits unknowingly, exhibiting the same behaviour that Raj Thackeray effectively used to ride to popularity, wrote him off. His irrelevance to Maharashtra politics became the accepted wisdom of the day.

Those writing him off need to pause and reflect on their own haste in proclaiming him irrelevant. This age that we live in makes instant gratification and low shelf life for any and everything a compulsion.

The wheel turns at ever increasing speed: ideas, products and people must fly off the shelves of our existence's super store. Else we'll get bored. And that is one virus deadlier than Ebola.

We just can't afford boredom. We have developed systems, mechanisms, social institutions, internet, malls, movie making, just look around - almost everything to keep boredom at bay.

But now we've gone a step ahead. It's not just about avoiding boredom, but about who grabs the eyeballs first, who kills with the First Mover advantage. “Maximise the rent sought” is the only wisdom for success in our world. 

And that's where a Raj Thackeray becomes relevant. When grabbing the eyeballs first is the only rule of the game, lumpenism comes handy. The battle for the mind space is not in sedentary babudom or colonially redolent Vidhan Sabhas and Vidhan Parishads.

The battle is on in the streets, in newspaper headlines, on television primetime, on billboards and hoardings, in most retweets and Facebook likes. If you can capture the top of the mind space, if you are riding every surging wave of recall, you've won the battle. Can you shout me out? If you can, the day is yours.  

Showing every employment snatching bhaiya his place in the social pantheon of Marathi Manoos, getting Starbucks and McDonald's to put up signages in Marathi, attempting to make Maharashtra toll naka mukt are no mean feats.

A Raj Thackeray lurks in every Maharashtrian's consciousness – an identity I bestow on every person living in Maharashtra - when she/he passes any of these places. What makes these pundits think he has become irrelevant? The man understands nuisance value. The man will reinvent himself because he has a creative relationship to nuisance.  

We're in the age of hustling. The lumpen proletariat ‎has become the lumpen politician. Perhaps, the lumpen statesman too, the lumpen bureaucrat, the lumpen media baron, the lumpen businessman, the lumpen intellectual, the lumpen spiritualist. Even gangsters are devoid of ethics these days and have become lumpen gangsters.  

This brings us back to the Jataka tale we quoted in the very first article where a monkey destroys a mynah's nest for giving unsolicited advice. We've become that monkey. We are living in the age of such monkeys.  

To refer to Escher's sketch - the hand that is drawing is getting drawn itself - do these political pundits and journalists eager to pronounce irrelevance understand this?