Skip to main content

King of slogans



Fiction

The unrivalled Prime Minister metamorphosed into a king over the years in a kind of Darwinian mutation. Many years ago, when he became the Prime Minister, the citizens of his country were interested in such democratic processes as elections. Those were days of bewitching slogans. Sabka saath sabka vikas. Swachh Bharat. Make in India. The slogans were as endless as they were enchanting.
The Prime Minister was a wizard of slogans. Abracadabra, he would say on something like Mann ki Baath, and miracles would materialise from nowhere like Ambanis or Adanis. The mutton in a Khan’s refrigerator would change miraculously into beef after the said Khan was lynched in public by a mob that called themselves gau-rakshaks.
Lynching became the national entertainment. Kaun banega crorepati and Bigg Boss lost their TRP rating to wayside lynching. Khan banega shikar became a new nationalist slogan. Khans thought it was their kismet. At least until, inshallah, some bloody bin-Laden or al-Baghdadi came to challenge kismet with a deadly kiss. Bomb kiss. Religious kiss.
In the meanwhile, lynching marched on with the fetid fervour of perverted crusaders. They did not believe in karma, the indigenous version of kismet. Supernatural concepts such as kismet and karma are for the weak and the oppressed. When you have the power, the hegemony as academicians call it, you need vengeance.
Vengeance is the dharma of the ideal kingdom. According to that modern Ram Raj dharma, an honest police officer is consigned to the prison so that rapists, murderers and extortionists can rule the provinces assigned to them by the king. Gau rakhsha.
Even justice is vengeance in that new dharma. There is no evidence that any temple was demolished in order to construct a mosque. We know that the idols were sneaked into the masjid in 1947. Nevertheless, the majority of the citizens believe that the place where the masjid stood is the birthplace of their god. Therefore, a temple shall be constructed now where the masjid stood.
Vengeance for history’s sake.
Vengeance for ego’s sake.
Vengeance for the king’s sake.
The king is dead, long live the king.
The citizens are delighted. The majority, that is.
Vengeance gratifies the majority soul.
Vengeance is the latest slogan.
#TruthStrangerThanFiction

Comments

  1. The trouble is not with the KING but the brainwashed countrymen who have been made unable to differentiate between justice and vengeance. The SC's decision on the temple-mosque issue is faulty as it has given verdict in favour of those considered as guilty of violation of law (by demolishing the mosque structure on 06.12.1992) by none other than itself. The KING is fooling its subjects but why are the subjects happy to be considered as HIS SUBJECTS ? a

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People love vengeance. Vengeance is far more attractive than any virtue. Majority are foolish and villainous. Intellectuals have been muted.

      Delete

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

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

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...

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...

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...