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
47 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...
10 comments
Read more

Our gods must have died laughing

A friend forwarded a video clip this morning. It is an extract from a speech that celebrated Malayalam movie actor Sreenivasan delivered years ago. In the year 1984, Sreenivasan decided to marry the woman he was in love with. But his career in movies had just started and so he hadn’t made much money. Knowing his financial condition, another actor, Innocent, gave him Rs 400. Innocent wasn’t doing well either in the profession. “Alice’s bangle,” Innocent said. He had pawned or sold his wife’s bangle to get that amount for his friend. Then Sreenivasan went to Mammootty, who eventually became Malayalam’s superstar, to request for help. Mammootty gave him Rs 2000. Citing the goodness of the two men, Sreenivasan said that the wedding necklace ( mangalsutra ) he put ceremoniously around the neck of his Hindu wife was funded by a Christian (Innocent) and a Muslim (Mammootty). “What does religion matter?” Sreenivasan asks in the video. “You either refuse to believe in any or believe in a...
11 comments
Read more