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?