New Heroes

Fiction

Sahadev thought of unfriending Jitesh many times.  The man was pure nonsense.  But he was sincere.  He believed sincerely that India belonged to the Hindus and only the Hindus.  He believed that his Prime Minister was the only leader left in the country and the only good leader in the whole world today.  He believed that the Prime Minister, his political party and his religious organisations were the noblest things that ever existed.  Once he even went to the extent of writing in his status update that he wouldn’t hesitate to drink the PM’s urine if he had to do so to prove his loyalty. 

Sahadev found him repulsive even without that urine thing.  When he wrote in his blog that 500 RSS people gathered in Pune under the leadership of Nathuram Godse on the first Independence Day and hoisted a triangular saffron flag with the swastika emblazoned on it, Jitesh abused him for distorting history.  He quoted some Nath, a neo-historian, to prove that RSS was never opposed to the Tricolour as Sahadev maintained stubbornly. 

“U r full of hat,” wrote Jitesh in the comments box, “and base against the PM & his party.”  He meant hate and bias respectively. 

Jitesh was a social science teacher in a senior secondary school.  He believed that the entire Indian history written in the post-Independence period was a fabrication of the Congies and the Commies.  The real history lay buried beneath masjids erected over mandirs.  He perceived himself as a crusading excavator.

Sahadev had worked with him for a brief period in a school.  The acquaintance made them friends on Facebook.  The friendship remained a mere digital contract until the government at the Centre changed and the old form of corruption gave way to a new one.  Economic versus historical became the new antitheses in the political dialectics.  Economic corruption is sheer greed and little else.  Historical corruption is vermin in the poison.  It distorts reality, warps human minds, and makes people enemies of each other.  Sahadev saw himself as a crusader for truth.

“Truth is always relative, bhai,” Rakesh, physics teacher, counselled him. 

“Always?” asked Sahadev.  “What about the laws of physics?  E = mc² or For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?”

“They are relative too.  Didn’t Einstein disprove some of Newton, and Heisenberg some of Einstein?  Science is just an open window.  New truths keep coming in changing the old ones.”

“Would you say that all these truths were already written in our ancient Vedas?”  Sahadev didn’t know what made him ask that.  Rakesh had never displayed any sign of the new fad called Sanghi thinking.

“Of course!” Rakesh exclaimed as if to say Isn’t that just an obvious, too obvious, truth?  “Whatever is here is found elsewhere. But whatever is not here is nowhere else – that’s written in our ancient scriptures,” Rakesh said conclusively.

“That’s the introduction to the Mahabharata…”

“Isn’t that an Indian scripture?”

The phone bell interrupted the conversation.  “What!”

“What happened?” Rakesh asked when Sahadev overcame his consternation.

“Jitesh has been appointed as the Chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research!”

“Jitesh who?” asked Rakesh.

“A new hero!”