Skip to main content

Zeitgeist


This is the last post in the A-to-Z series that I have been writing in April. Most of the posts in the series touched explicitly or implicitly the post-truth politics of present India. Post-truth is the zeitgeist of India now. Facts don’t matter here. Emotions do. Slogans do. We have a Prime Minister who loves to play with words. He keeps on giving us new slogans every year, if not more frequently. Remember slogans or jingles like Achhe din aane waale hain? Make in India (which has now become Break in India), Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Minimum Government Maximum Governance, Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas… Hollow slogans. That has been the zeitgeist of India from 2014. Hollow. Resounding hollowness.

What is the reality behind those slogans and rhetoric? I found the following illustration from a Malayalam weekly the most apt depiction of our present reality. 


You know what it means. A thickly populated area in the national capital is bulldozed after Mr Modi’s supporters orchestrated a riot-like situation there. Some 200-odd people carrying tridents and rods march into the area playing high decibel music on a DJ system under the pretext of celebrating Hanuman Jayanti. Why choose a place like Jahangirpuri for such a celebration? You know the answer. It was a tailor-made communal clash. Tailor-made communal clashes are integral parts of present India’s zeitgeist. I bet we can expect many more of them soon.

If you think Modi and his supporters are the only people who are possessed by this zeitgeist you are mistaken. Kejriwal is going out of the way to own that spirit. He has suddenly become a Hanuman bhakt. He visits Hanuman temples, sings Hanuman chalisa there, and arranges Sundara Kanda of Ramayana to be recited in the temples of his constituency.  

Rahul Gandhi also flirted with gods for a while. Since he doesn’t know the game, it didn’t work. Nothing works in his case. Poor man in a wrong place. He doesn’t understand the zeitgeist at all.

While the hollow zeitgeist marches on holding tridents and rods, the country is reeling under price rise, ever-increasing taxes, unemployment, poverty, and overall misery. Nobody in the ruling party seems concerned. They are concerned about Rama and Hanuman. Zeitgeist of GST Raj. 


Last month the Gujarat High Court remarked that it was easier to reach the moon than understand the intricacies of the GST tax system. The truth is that the entire politics of Narendra Modi is beyond any human understanding. May the 33 million gods of our pantheon save us!

PS. This is the last part of #BlogchatterA2Z

Comments

  1. magiceyeApril 30, 2022 at 11:32 AM

    Perfect conclusion to the series...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Afshan ShaikApril 30, 2022 at 3:52 PM

    Zeitgeist a new word for me almost sounds like "Poltergeist" if u know what I mean. I was wondering what u would write as an end post. This is like a perfect epilogue to all ur remaining posts. It was good knowing u and ur blog...


    Congrats on completing a to z. From "The Pensive"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 30, 2022 at 4:28 PM

      Poltergeist 😅 The similarity is not only in sound!

      Hope you will return to this space occasionally though A2Z is over.

      Delete
  3. Yamini MacLeanApril 30, 2022 at 5:30 PM

    Hari OM
    Yes, a good roundup to conclude this month's offerings... and I wish it only pertained to India (no disprespect), but we have a completely scary situation here in the UK (I haven't dared look to see how OZ is shaping up). Ours is not comparable in the misuse of religious application, but there is so much going on under the table and folk appear to be totally blind to the encroachment on freedoms. Fascism is alive and swelling...

    Thanks for an entertaining, engaging and enthralling April - now keep it going!!! YAM xx
    Z=Zany

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 30, 2022 at 7:49 PM

      April became richer with your presnce here, Yam. You made this space international. Your comments added to my interest in the world beyond Delhi.

      Delete
  4. Janaki/Ishaan SaiApril 30, 2022 at 6:44 PM

    Can't agree more. And in the absence of a strong opposition this will continue. Hope our 33 million God's help our country with a strong opposition and get us out of this circus!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 30, 2022 at 7:52 PM

      Lack of opposition is detrimental even to gods, as our scriptures show. Modi is scaling heights that he doesn't even understand. A big fall is imminent.

      Delete
  5. Prasanna RaghavanApril 30, 2022 at 8:22 PM

    Oh well, how nicely your post captures the spirit of India of the present. But that spirit embodied in the facades of those muppathimukkodi gods of India were constructed India, not originated there!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 30, 2022 at 8:54 PM

      A constructed India, you said it. Orchestrated, as I put it in the post. Fabrications.

      Delete
  6. GBMay 1, 2022 at 6:57 PM

    Lovely! I love reading your posts. One of the few people who speak the real truth in a world filled with deception.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuMay 2, 2022 at 11:01 PM

    The situation is grim and the economic crisis is really to worry about. I could not stop laughing after reading the last line ! Amazing write , as always.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Deepa DuraisamyMay 5, 2022 at 7:20 PM

    It's almost as if several in our populace are waiting with bated breath, more of a wait and watch game to see how the country shapes up in the coming decades. So much of 'Zeitgeist' (a new word for me!) becomes game changes, or rather a fork in the road. The whole world seems to be going crazy.

    Cheers,
    Deepa from FictionPies

    ReplyDelete

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 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...
18 comments
Read more

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...
14 comments
Read more

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...
11 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