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.

 

Emerging, Submerging...De Vannu, Da Poyi

Kerala, as we all know, ‘emerged’ when Parasuraman threw his parasu (axe) from Gokarna to Kanyakumari. Why Gokarna? Why not from Ratnagiri, or Porbandar? He must have had his reasons. Some guys, however, didn’t see eye to eye with Parasuraman on his tomahawk-launch land-grab. They took their parasu to Kaliyikkavila and slashed all the way south to Kanyakumari, and then to Kasaragod and cut off all the way north to Gokarna, essentially thumbing their noses at Parasuraman. To be fair to those guys, Parasuraman, unlike Sardar Patel, didn’t have any clue of linguistic divisions. Otherwise, why would a 200-odd kilometre stretch of Tulu and Kannada speaking land be a part of Mallu-land?

The fact is that Kerala had already ‘emerged,’ though the exact date of the axe-launch is not available. At least, that is what I believed until I saw the words “Emerging Kerala” recently. This suggested that we, after all, haven’t ‘emerged’ and it is still an ongoing process.  So, what’s cooking? Were all those parasu stories, well, just stories? Are these people ridiculing the beliefs of millions?

From what I gather, this is again a new-age land grab. Like the 64 brahmin families Parasuraman brought from outside, this time around we’ll see Arabs and others being offered land and other sops to stay put. We don’t know if weapons are going to be thrown around for the sea to recede or whether existing land will be carved up. What we do know is that someone is going to take a hatchet to that green cover we have, or whatever is left of it, pretty soon. Incidentally, no one mentions about the local population, their needs, their lives; neither Parasuraman, nor our new lords. 

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We often lament about the lack of do-gooders in our society. Accident victims bleeding to death in front of hundreds, people not helping others in distress, etc. Well, guess what? There are still a few of these good Samaritans around, though they only come out of the woodwork once in a while. Recently one such guy came out of nowhere. My guess is that this is the guy who always drives in front of me at 20 km/hr speed while blocking both lanes. He is the guy who follows the Kerala rule of “line driving,” which states that if there are two lanes in one direction, you drive on the dividing line so that both the left and right side mirrors (folded) of your car are equidistant from that line. He was so aghast at the thought of seeing an F1 car zooming at speeds above 40km/hr through Kawdiar that he immediately pulled a rule out of his posterior sphincter and filed a PIL against it. The government was stunned and dropped the idea. It didn’t matter that no one, not even unhealed cripples sitting on boards with wheels, traverse that stretch below 100 km/hr.  

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Cabotage: A thick creamy soup made from cabbage and potage, originally developed by the Kerala government to fool, sorry, feed the public during famines (“Let them drink soup,” the government was supposed to have said when told that the people didn’t have potable water to drink).

Cabotage law: This law states that any ship arriving at a physically existing (Cochin) or never-to-exist imaginary port (Vizhinjam) is allowed to dump 10 lakh TEUs of cabotage soup into the sea as long as the ship’s captain and cook are Indians and there is a rave party in progress on the deck.

The government decided to relax that law to allow foreign captains also to join the party as long as they are not Pakistanis or Chinese, and they have a three-year relationship with a native.

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Other recent events that entertained me:

- The impromptu romantic evening of candle-light dinners gifted to 600 million Indians by the government, which deliberately switched off the power grid, in a bid to increase the population.

- The dope Hazare giving up on his fast-unto-death stunts.

- Another hartal, which is essential in cleansing our air, as vehicles don’t run on that day, and kids and workers get a day off.

 

- Our CM declaring that his government is taking a scientific approach to garbage. I think he was talking about using gas masks to approach garbage and go around it. He will also throw in a pair of gumboots for good measure.

- And our Olympics – when are we going to see reason and import some African athletes?