Skip to main content

Advani and Modi

Cartoon from Deepika
This morning's Malayalam newspaper, Deepika, delighted readers with the above cartoon on the front page. Modi is portrayed as Bhima in quest of the Sougandhika flower.  He encounters Hanuman on the way and is unable to meet the challenge posed by Hanuman.  Finally Bhima will understand the real power of his interceptor and seek his blessings.

Fabulous cartoon, I mused.  It depicts the present situation tersely.  And there's a deep irony too in it.

Neither Modi nor Advani is worthy of any comparison with the epic characters.  Both have acted from selfish motives thus far and continue to do so.

But the nature of the Kurukshetra has changed too today.  Today our heroes are no better than these characters.

  

Comments

  1. Why is the umbilical chord coming out of his ass?

    ReplyDelete
  2. what a fabulous depiction of the current situation through cartoon based on mythology.

    ReplyDelete
  3. well.. even I think of depicting humans of the age with mythological gems of hinduism.. but then I feel even if I compare negative shades of mythology with the villains of the date .. would insult the villains of mythology who had some ideologies to follow and the heroes can never be compared ..no matter how much we try..
    Selfish are both the leaders..and its better to select the less selfish given a choice .. :)
    Well depicted cartoon .. all i wish i could read one of our national languages and would have known the talent's name who made it !! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jack, the cartoonist is Raju Nair, fairly well known in Kerala.

      Delete
  4. haha...great! but recent progress has now reversed the rolls.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wow nice and humorous... love ur post

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wow, an exact and superb comparison :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. yes true...they are not worthy of this comparision at all!!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  8. the cartoon is actually very deep. It has shown a great comparison. Thanks for sharing it here :)

    Richa

    ReplyDelete
  9. On the face of it yes, there seems like there is an analogy. But as you rightly pointed out, neither of them can be compared to characters Vyasa(or whoever) portrayed. Nevertheless, a more apt cartoon would have been a Hanuman (Modi) hiding behind his saviors Ram&Lakshman(RSS) who are shooting down Bali(Advani) who himself is a bhakth of the same gods who help Hanuman eliminate him.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Even a cartoon is an aesthetic expression. This cartoonist had every right to think this way, I'm sure.

      Delete
  10. Hasn't anyone' religious sensibilities been offended yet? That would be a surprise!

    RE

    ReplyDelete
  11. An apt and humorous potrayal of the conflict of the top BJP leaders angling for the primeministerial berth!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And Bhima will win the blessings of Hanuman and get his Sougandhika!

      Delete
  12. Hello, this is slightly off the topic here but I thought there is a need to get this in picture...Outlook survey on 'Most influential Indians 2013' and once you log in the most horrible thing I came across was for each state they have 5 nominations...delhi is ruled by Gandhi's it seems and Gujarat has no place for Modi...To me this looked like a really biased survey. And it's not fair on people who dont know these details. Once the results are out we all will get busy tweeting/ blogging/ writing without knowing fully on how it was conducted... Need you to look into this and share comment on this....

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hahha excellent - Raju Nair has surpassed Amul Poster Ads this time. Rules are the same, motive of winning is intact, be it war or politics.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Vyoma. It's nice to see your comments. Welcome to this space.

      Delete
  14. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  15. This is really a wonderful piece of creative writing. I really liked it.
    You can read similar things on our website too.
    Just visit us at https://edupediapublications.org/

    ReplyDelete

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

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...