Garv se Kaho "What?"

Foreigners new to Japan initially find it hard to understand the calendar here. According to the Japanese calendar, this is the 27^th year of the Heisei era, which started in January 1989 when Akihito, became the new emperor following the death of his father Hirohito. Hirohito’s era from 1926 to 1989 is called the Showa era and he is now known as the Showa emperor. This is used officially too, so you should know how to convert from the Gregorian to the Showa (I was born in the Showa era!) or Heisei when filling in your date of birth in some government form.

The Gregorian calendar has the birth of Jesus as the starting point. How did they come up with that date? Don’t ask unnecessary questions. We demand unquestionable faith. Coming to the current era, we, now have a chance to devise a new calendar.

I recently found out that I may not have been proud to be an Indian till 2014. This was revealed by our prime minister, who is now the “greatest leader of the greatest nation on the earth”. That sobriquet, till recently, was owned by whichever douchebag was the president of the USA at that time. So, at some point of time in the past Nixon and GW Bush were the greatest leaders of the “free world”.

Now that mantle has been appropriated by Mr. Modi, if you believe the noise in the Hindu web world. Global leaders are kowtowing to him (though it is our leader who is going around). Everybody is respecting Indians (except maybe Indians). We have reached superpower status where we can project our *#$% into other people’s affairs and get away with it like the USA (we could try Maldives? Maybe not). Canada gave Indians visa on arrival (VOA) status (Don’t try it. It is the other way round. We gave VOA to Canadians). Perhaps if we repeat it enough times all these will come true.

With nothing to be proud of pre-2014, we ought to divide our calendar as BM and AD, i.e. “Before Modi” was elected PM in 2014 (hereinafter “AD 1”), while retaining AD but altering its meaning to Anno Domini Nostri Modi.

“Hey, hey, what about Gandhi? Surely you can be proud of him!” You might ask. Well, what about him? Look at him. The man was walking around in a loincloth. Was it a designer langoti? Was it monogrammed with his initials MKG? In gold? No. I doubt whether the langoti even had the black dots and lines the dhobis put to identify clothes. On the other hand you won’t catch our PM in the same dress twice. Pretty soon he will have the RSS musclemen in designer khaki knickers (made in China).

“How about the Gupta period? Y’know, the Golden Age blah, blah we learned at school”. Stop asking questions. We’ll instruct you on what to learn, do, eat, think, wear, etc. in due course of time. Just follow our lead. The last time we were close to being proud was about 7000 years ago when we had intergalactic space machines and our gurus were doing head transplants. Got it?

So, now I am a proud Indian. Proud of things we are instructed to be proud of. Proud of the fake Macaulay minute of 2-2-1835 in sepia print floating around in the Internet, where he saw a super country when he travelled the length and breadth of India. Did he come down to Trivandrum? If he did, he could have seen my great-great-great grandmother walking nude waist up because it was a great period and feminists were having a “Free the Nipple” campaign of their time, and not because of some crazy caste rules, as the fake historians would make you believe.

(What Macaulay actually said)

There is a right-wing narrative being slowly scripted now, of what a super race we are (were), of how we had invented everything that had to be invented, of how all these foreigners looted us, etc. Some of it may be legit, but quite a bit are based on dodgy historical interpretations and on mythology.

And it is being implemented stealthily and incrementally. A beef ban here, a new history book there, a religious nut in an education board here, a dress code there, a false quote (Macaulay) in social media here, a fake Vivekananda smart-ass riposte to a white man there. It is slowly building up and at some point of time it will reach the critical mass needed to engulf a naïve public who is taught not to think for themselves and not to question authority. The modus operandi is somewhat similar to the right wing in the USA, where the Christian right (in some States) wants the Genesis to be taught as science along with evolution. So, it is possible that in the near future we might be taught there is nothing to be proud of Gandhi, Nehru or Tagore, or that we did the first live television broadcast of a major war thousands of years before CNN brought the Gulf War to the living rooms.

Any which way you look at it, we are screwed.

We will be screwed left, right and centre – by the lame and limp left; by the rabid, rampant right; and the corrupt and clueless centre. And, to rub it in further, we’ll be screwed all over by the corporates, for whom these three exist.

A prime example is Trivandrum. Mr. Modi, the Calendar Divider and the Generous, recently gave a billion dollars to Mongolia, which has a population about the same as Trivandrum district! At the same time, these three groupings (the left, the right and the centre) are falling over each other trying to screw Trivandrum, whether it is over a mass rapid transport system, the Vizhinjam port, a waste management system or any other development whatsoever.

My only hope is that one day Mr. Modi the Generous will throw some spare change our way from the air when he flies over our airspace to some distant land.

 

Quarterly Musings?

 

Well, 2014 is into its second quarter and here I am sitting in a place that is so far removed from Trivandrum, the election heat as well as the real heat there seems surreal. It is -1°C and snowing outside where I am now. The year started off crazily for me, when I was woken up at 6 am on January 1^st by a distress call from Kanyakumari. I was sleeping at my friend’s place, where I had gone to welcome in the New Year, saw the city explode into colours across a 180° arc at midnight from his apartment balcony, drank and played cards till the wee hours. The call was from a group of Japanese college kids, who had gone to celebrate the New Year at the land’s end of India. “We have been robbed”, the girl said. And I felt relieved. Nobody drowned! So far, so good. She said the police just came and went and did nothing.

 

So, there I was, in Kanyakumari at 9 am, Jan 1, 2014. The police station is less than 100m from the hotel (Shivas something) where these kids stayed, but it might as well have been in another planet. They were robbed of couple of Macbooks, 2 smartphones and a watch, probably by the hotel staff who were watching them getting drunk and sleeping without locking their door. The kids called the police, who came after some time and asked a few questions to the night clerk and left, and refused to register any complaint. The kids were dumbstruck! Why in the world would policemen refuse to file a complaint and investigate a theft? Well, welcome to India, I said.

 

I took the two guys who lost the stuff and went to the police station. Only acceptable language is Tamil! The police and the hotel guys all seemed to be in this racket together. I somehow managed to impress upon the SI and ASI the need to file a complaint and give a copy each to the two kids, which they gave by noon and we left the place. They lost stuff, but stuff can be replaced, and I was surprised at the speed at which the kids recovered and decided to enjoy their rest of the vacation in Kerala. (As I was leaving, I also saw these same police guys totally ignore a man from Meghalaya, who too was robbed, and who couldn’t speak Tamil. In hindsight, I should have helped him out too, but I was hurrying to get the kids out of that place, partially driven by the shame I felt as an Indian, and partially by hunger.)

 

So, that was my New Year. A reality check of how things work, rather don’t work, in our country.

 

I was not planning to write about the election, nor anything else, for that matter, but since I started writing I might as well throw my two cents in. Last time, I persuaded at least one person to vote for Mr Tharoor. Here was a man of international stature, famed author, journalist (I used to enjoy his articles in the International Herald Tribune) and above all, a man with experience living in international cities. The only negative I could think of was his involvement with the mother of all inefficient, ineffective bureaucracies, the UN! Just kidding.

 

The expectations were quite high. He did perform well compared to all his immediate predecessors. But, was that enough is the question. I, personally was expecting a Rolls Royce, but think we got a Honda Accord. To be fair, the Honda Accord is an excellent upgrade, especially given the Ambassador and Standard Herald models we had before that. Still, I must say I was a bit disappointed. And, though not his fault, the fact that the State government didn’t care about our city hurt too.

 

So, how is the field this time? The positives, stated above, are still valid for Mr Tharoor. The controversy (controversies?) surrounding his personal life, though, is a bummer.

 

The BJP candidate could spring a surprise, as they have succeeded in creating lot of hype, similar to some states and cities. It could also end up as usual – all fart and no $hit.

 

The only thing everybody know about the Left candidate is that nobody knows him. It is a tragedy, and a pointer to the sad state of affairs in our State, that the Left is resorting to caste-based politics and pandering to mullahs, bishops and living gods for survival. He might win, if that particular group vote en-bloc for him, as it is wont to do.

 

A message to AAP – get rid of those ridiculous caps. You started off well by ridding yourself of that Anna Hazare clown. Now get rid of those caps. And, get some people who can speak the lingo, i.e. Malayalam, like the common man to be your spokespersons.

 

All said and done, the buttons have been pressed, the machines have been packed and we have a month to find out who will eventually disappoint us.

 

I am, however, not so sure of the voting machines. Did we have a transparent process for introducing them? Was the technology verified independently? Some did malfunction here and there. Could these be tampered with?

 

Most of us would like to think it is all fool-proof, but this is India and anything can happen.

 

Here’s a story. Long back, in the 1980s, if you were a Mallu in Bangalore trying to take the Island Express back home urgently and needed a reservation, you went to the railway canteen on the 1^st floor of Majestic station and checked out Mr N, a waiter there, and he would give you a ticket, at least an RAC seat, for a small extra. Then, at the turn of the decade, going into the nineties, Indian Railways began computerizing their reservation system. Everybody thought Mr N would go out of business. He didn’t. He just moved his base to Krishnarajapuram, a small station near Bangalore, and continued with his merry ways. You had to travel that extra mile to see him. That was all. 

 

 

P.S. I would have voted for only one person (perhaps two) this time. Her name is Sheeba, and she is a candidate from Alathur. She, it seems, asked her staff not to put up any flex boards as part of her campaign. I hope she wins. Just go to Vellayambalam and take a look at those huge faces sneering down from ugly flex boards on what could have been one of the most beautiful roundabouts in Trivandrum.