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

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics

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

Mango Trees and Cats

Appu and Dessie, two of our cats, love to sleep under the two mango trees in front of our house these days. During the daytime, that is, when the temperature threatens to brush 40 degrees Celsius. The shade beneath the mango trees remains a cool 28 degrees or so. Mango trees have this tremendous cooling effect. When I constructed the house, the area in front had no touch of greenery as you can see in the pic below.  Now the same area, which was totally arid then, looks like what's below:  Appu and Dessie find their bower in that coolness.  I wanted to have a lot of colours around my house. I tried growing all sorts of flower plants and failed rather miserably. The climate changes are beyond the plants’ tolerance levels. Moreover, all sorts of insects and pests come from nowhere and damage the plants. Crotons survive and even thrive. I haven’t given up hope with the others yet. There are a few adeniums, rhoeos, ixoras, zinnias and so on growing in the pots. They are trying their

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let