Skip to main content

Modiesque India



The great writer Franz Kafka contributed the word Kafkaesque to English.  The worlds in Kafka’s novels are a veritable nightmare which is a metaphorical extension of our real life.  I suggest a new word to English: Modiesque.  My definition will be: “adjective: characteristic of a system that is at once oppressive and supportive, oppressive to the majority and supportive to a chosen group of people, and in which the majority of the oppressed perceive themselves as beneficiaries because of false propaganda.  Synonym: post-truth.”


Renuka Chowdhury of Congress who dared to laugh at Modiesque India is an intelligent woman.  Like most intelligent Indians today, she is helpless in dealing with the Modiesque India.  So she chose to laugh.  Any intelligent Indian would love to laugh.  I think I am also intelligent though not as much as Arnab Gau-swami.  Renuka can afford to laugh because the Indians like me pay her salaries and perks.  Gau-swami can laugh - though he chooses to bawl and yelp instead for reasons known only to him - because he belongs to the same economic class as our MPs, enjoying post-truth luxuries.


I would like to laugh too.  Who does not?  So I watch Patanjali advertisements and laugh.  I watch our godmen’s homilies and laugh.  The news channels are the best entertainments nowadays because they bring before us the classical jokers of Modiesque India.

But I have lost my laughter somewhere down the Modiesque highway on which petrol pumps loot my last penny for owning a Maruti Alto.  The farmer next-door who tells me that suicide is the only option left for him because his branch of State Bank of India is going to confiscate his house and property for his inability to repay his agricultural loan steals my laughter.  The children who go hungry in the orphanage in my home town because they live in Modiesque India which puts restrictions on charity in the name of gods have stolen my smile. 

Dear Ms Renuka Chowdhury, I would love to laugh like you even if the laughter gets labelled as the laughter of a puranic raakshasa (राक्षस).  You and I are intelligent enough to know how labels are created especially in today’s India.  I know you don’t give a damn to those labels.  I too don’t.  But that doesn’t solve the problem.  I want to laugh.  Can you or anyone in power in our country today return to me my smile at least, let alone my laughter?





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
35 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
12 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more