Kerala, JNU, bounty, Bastar & UP: 5 recent controversies that sucked your blood for free
Today I want to talk about a controversial topic: controversies. We are suckers for controversies, especially the empty kind where we do not know the head or tail of an issue because there isn't one in the first place.
We want to sustain our outrage and externalise the rage within us because our own personal lives are an irreparable mess. To distract ourselves from our own existential issues, we fib and crib about controversies that are created by crooks to distract us from their failures. Whoa!
Wasn't that confusing as hell? Let me compound that with the following assertions, picked from the latest news, err, controversies. I call it this week's High 5.
1) Kerala: RSS and CPM workers have been hacking at each other for decades, but every time there is a murder, we scream murder. It's a "dog bites man" story pretending to be a "man bites dog" story, from "god's own country".
How easily we imbibe marketing campaigns as if they were real! How on earth is Kerala God's Own Country?
If you keep its decent toddy aside, what country are you talking about? It's a regular state. Besides, there's no evidence of god, forget about that god taking any special interest or making any special claim about the state.
Three Abrahamic religions that cohabit the polytheist Hindus in the state were born in the Middle East, where most Keralites go seeking the moolah.
Himachal and Uttarakhand call themselves Devbhumi. Just because Kerala says it in English doesn't make it special. Yes, it's a state with high literacy and low self-esteem. Still better than states with low literacy and high self-esteem.
But not god's own country? If it were so, god would take some interest in these bottomwipes knifing each other, no?
2) Bounties: Kerala brings us to this. Some Sangh fellow in Ujjain declared a Rs 1-crore bounty on Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan's head. He said whoever brought Pinarayi's head to him, he would sell his belongings and pay the beheader Rs 1 crore.
I am not giving his name out here because that's the most even he hopes for. Who on earth gives a flying one for a two-bit unwashed underwear from Ujjain, just because it's bhagwa? Now this guy's mug is on TV. This naughty man-child from Ujjain is famous or notorious all over the vast expanse of the land.
He is like that maulvi from UP who gave out a fatwa on that Canadian Tarek Fateh's head. That cretin too was looking for airtime. These morons know nobody in India is so out of mind to go kill somebody because somebody else said so.
You go to jail for murder. What do you do with that much money in jail? This is not Pakistan, not yet. But these calls for murder get free publicity. Notoriety is good enough to land a Bigg Boss contract. But this Ujjain loser was so disappointing that even RSS distanced itself from this guy. I mean how bad one must look to have RSS say it's got nothing to do with you!
3) Nationalists: An autorickshaw union's chairman has declared the union wouldn't pick up passengers who are anti-nationals. This guy drives an autorickshaw and has the nostrils to smell out anti-nationals because experience suggests nationalists and anti-nationals smell equally bad.
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Even if some diehard anti-national nerd has it tattooed on her buttcrack, she isn't showing it to an autodriver. So how exactly does he figure out who to stand up? Yes, nobody asked him that?
The media took his word and made it a story. This guy's mug is now on TV. His name in newspapers, without winning a gold medal in commonwealth assholery. Everybody is a nationalist or nobody is.
It depends on where you stand. If it happens to be the auto stand, rest assured there will be an auto driver ready to fleece you. That's the only nationalism they know. No-meter, Peter!
4) JNU: This is a university to reckon with. But being on the arid Aravalli, there's a lot of weed, high on grass, floating around the expansive campus on slogans emptier than Gurmehar Kaur's placards. This place provides us with servile civil servants and indomitable rights activists.
This place also produces many sloganeering geniuses who don't know their Palestine from their elbow. They just want to Free Palestine from America-Israel-Indian Axis. Some of them can't make out the line between Muslims and Islamism and most of these Glorious Bastar-ds believe Kashmir is occupied by India.
Well, if weed can distort your vision, it can definitely distort history, and geography. This intellect-less weed grows in an intellectually fertile ground where empty Leftist slogans meet empty Rightist slogans and produce a virtual controversy every hour if media cared for their fecundity.
Graffiti on the wall makes the boys feel Banksy, until they find a government, non-government job and plant their Palestines in babu chairs until retiring a kleptocrat.
5) Polarisation: Aren't you tired of this word already? Everybody is talking about polarisation as if it happened day before yesterday and they were not invited. Well, our societies have been polarised for a very long time. Even if we take the history of independent India, it began with polarisation.
Millions died or were displaced because India was polarised and partitioned on the basis of religion. The whole purpose of religion is to divide people. As long as there are different places of worship and different books to blindly follow, there will be different people.
Divisive politics thrives because people are divided. People are not divided because of divisive politics. Politicians profit from this division and whenever the gap is the widest, politicians make the most of the crack. A polarised society serves politics in need. Now is the time politics needs it.
When people pow-wow about polarisation on TV news, it's polarisation at its best. When someone blows his top against polarisation, he is aiding polarisation and proving the point. So stop polarising further and talk about something else. Like the weather! We can all agree it's hot because the climate change, once again, is a polarising debate.