Tinkers of Emotions

Image from The Daily Star

I wept bitterly like a child when my cat died. He was killed on the road by a vehicle. It took me quite a while to accept the loss. “I never knew that I was such an emotional person,” I told a friend later. Even now, a month after the cat’s death, his memories bring tears to my eyes.

I used to think that I had no emotions, that I was just a robot who went about doing a lot of things mechanically. True that I used to reflect a lot about many things. The reflections were of an intellectual nature; emotions seldom came into play.

Really? When I introspect now, I realise that Mr Modi and his kind of politics make me emotional. I have written quite a lot about Modi and his politics and, as someone told me the other day, much of that writing is driven by “passion”. Yes, Modi makes me emotional. The kind of emotions that Modi arouses in my heart are diametrically opposite of what my cat’s death aroused. The cat arouses feelings of tenderness in my heart. Modi arouses feelings of revulsion.

Modi arouses strong emotions in most Indians. I realised this from my conversations with people these days as well as from what people write about him in various social media and blogs. People either love him or hate him. Some even go to the extent of adoring him. For a considerably large number of Indians, Modi is a messianic figure, the redeemer of Hinduism.

Religion is an emotion for most believers. Modi knows that and he has exploited that emotion from the time he entered politics. Today in India, everything from a boulder on a Himalayan hillside to a grain of sand on the Ganga’s shore has a religion. Even the bills passed in the Parliament have a religion.

Mistrust and hatred are the final offshoot of all that religion, unfortunately. Sane people would expect religion to make people kinder and more loving. When the opposite is what we get, we need to look at the situation, understand it and seek remedies.

What India needs today is a healthy detachment from emotive rhetoric, the kind that has been popularised by Mr Modi and his acolytes like Yogi Adityanath. Have you noticed the hatred that burns in their eyes? Venom flows in their veins and comes out as riveting rhetoric that mesmerises a whole nation. This rhetoric is India’s nemesis today.

India stands in need of real statesmen. There is not one in sight. That’s the nation’s tragedy. What we have are tinkers of base emotions.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 315: Politicians today tinker with emotions. Debate. Write for or against. #PoliticsandEmotions