Not so fizzy: Mocking Rahul Gandhi for his Coca Cola, McDonald's remarks is wilfully missing the point
“Coca Cola company ka naam suna hai aapne? Ab aap mujhe batao, Coca Cola company ko kisne shuru kiya? Mai aapko batata hu kaun tha. Coca Cola company ko suru karne waala ek shikanji bechne waala wyakti tha. Wo Amreeka mein shikanji bechta tha. Paani mein cheeni milata tha. Uske experience ka aadar hua, hunar ka aadar hua, paisa mila aur Coca Cola company bani… McDonald’s company ka naam suna hoga aapne. Sab jagah dikhti hai McDonald’s company. Isko chaalu kisne kiya?Kya karta tha wo? Koi bata sakta hai mujhe? Dhaaba chalata tha (Have you heard of the Coca Cola? Do you know who started it? I shall tell you. It was started by a man who used to sell lemonade in America. He used to mix water and sugar. His experience and his talents were appreciated and he got money to build what Coca Cola into what it is today… You must have heard of McDonald’s. It’s everywhere. Who started it? He used to run a roadside eatery),” professed Rahul Gandhi at the OBC Sammelan in New Delhi, leading to much ridiculing and mockery on social media.
LIVE: Congress President @RahulGandhi addresses the #OBCSammelan https://t.co/nakYv0xBEj
— Congress (@INCIndia) June 11, 2018
The Congress president, no matter how hard he tries to redefine his image on both ground-level and social media, as a serious leader of the Opposition and a contender for prime ministership, ends up becoming the butt of all jokes. It’s both his fault — and not. His political career is littered with gaffes and faux pas, that range from claiming that the Dalit community "needs the escape velocity of Jupiter" to achieve success, to attesting that “poverty is just a state of mind.”
And even when he’s not fudging up speeches, it is hard to not see him as the simple-minded prince of a once-powerful dynasty who holds high offices only because of his lineage, not talent or hard work. Rahul Gandhi is the lowest of low-hanging fruits in the political playing field and it is unfortunate that whatever he says is always going to be perceived — at least by his political opponents and a vast majority of the population that has grown up hating the Congress party — as a droll who doesn’t understand the real world, and should stick to watching Chhota Bheem (a children’s cartoon show).
The Coca Cola and the McDonald’s remark, in the same vein, received its fair share of derision.
But was Rahul Gandhi wrong?
As per Coca Cola’s website, in 1886, an Atlanta-based pharmacist called Dr John S Pemberton created the soft drink that could be sold at soda fountains: “He created a flavoured syrup, took it to his neighbourhood pharmacy, where it was mixed with carbonated water and deemed ‘excellent’ by those who sampled it.”
Calling his concoction “shikanji”, a kind of Indian lemonade, may not be the most accurate description — he could’ve said “kaala khatta” — but it’s also not terribly inaccurate. Sugary syrup mixed with aerated water is what both “shikanji” and Coca Cola essentially are. What is more important, however, is not the one hundred per cent factual accuracy of this anecdote but the motive behind making such a statement. The Congress president was highlighting a success story, where a global brand, a company worth billions of dollars, a household name, would not have existed but for these humble beginnings.
Similarly, in the case of McDonald’s as well, he wasn’t terribly inaccurate. Dick and Mac McDonald, according to the company’s website, moved to California to try their luck in the movie business. They failed to click; however, they proved successful in operating drive-in restaurants. In 1948, their risk of streamlining their operations and introducing their Speedee Service System, featuring 15 cent hamburgers, paid off, and decades later, who doesn’t know what McDonald’s is?
In his speech, Rahul Gandhi gave many more examples: Henry Ford, Soichiro Honda and Karl Benz, who started out as mechanics (again, not terribly inaccurate) and went on to build the biggest names in the automobile industry — Ford Motor Company, Honda and Mercedes-Benz.
The point Rahul Gandhi was trying to make, through these examples, was that it is ordinary folks with extraordinary abilities that create success stories. And yet, he notes, it is the same ordinary people in India who are denied these opportunities.
Politics is a game of being able to reach the masses, to grab their attention. Making “desi” comparisons — “shikanji” and “dhaba” — does not make Rahul Gandhi an idiot. Quite the contrary, it only goes to show that the man knows how to make a global story relatable to his audience.
Of course, those making fun of Gandhi don’t care for such nuances.
What is funny, however, is that the BJP cadre, one which can defend selling “pakodas” as a fulfilment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of job creation, finds comparing McDonald’s to a “dhaba” worthy of derision.