Skip to main content

Ashoka Becomes a Nationalist

Image by Copilot Designer


I was in the Virtual Reality Museum when a commotion broke out. Something went wrong somewhere in the museum. When the lights came back on, Ashoka stepped out of the digital screen and greeted me in the most amiable way. I pinched myself to make sure whether I was dreaming. When the power went off, I was speaking with Ashoka – Emperor of Kalinga, 3rd century BCE – in a VR interaction. Now this is real, Ashoka stood in flesh and blood right before me.

 The last question I had asked him in our VR encounter was about his conquest of Kalinga. Didn’t he know that the war would be disastrous even before he began it? That was my question.

“The war was necessary,” Ashoka said as he stood in front of me. “Necessary for my spiritual transformation.”

He was tired of all the luxury in the palace. There was abundance of everything from food to sex to comforts. “What I lacked was meaning,” he said. So he went and killed those Kalingans who were rebels anyway and had to be dealt with some time or another. “And all those corpses that lay scattered on the battlefield gave me what I was searching for: meaning. Death is the ultimate meaning of life.”

“We find meaning now in WhatsApp forwards,” I said.

“I know,” Ashoka’s response was prompt. “There’s so much hate and falsity in them.”

“We call it nationalism,” I clarified.

“Back in those days we were concerned about morality, compassion, welfare…” He stopped as if I wouldn’t understand the meanings of those words. They are still there in our dictionaries, I wanted to say.

“We are concerned about GDP, defence budget, and TRPs,” I said. “They create our meanings.”

“I know,” Ashoka nodded. “I was once offered a Padma Award. On a condition. That I have to endorse the government’s stand on everything. I have to praise the government on camera. I refused, of course. Dhamma wouldn’t let me do that.”

“Did it end there?” I wondered. Those who resist the government’s wishes don’t escape official wrath. CBI, ED, Income Tax… any office can come and raid your home, office…

“It didn’t,” Ashoka said. “They decided to rewrite my history. They made me a nationalist.”

“Rewriting history is one of our favourite national pursuits now,” I said. “We call it decolonising of history.”

“You can never decolonise public life,” Ashoka sighed. “You replace one type of colonialism with another. The Mughals go, then the British go, and then the colonialism of Hindutva arrives.”

We became conscious of being watched by someone. “Pegasus,” muttered Ashoka. “There’s espionage everywhere. I’d better return.” The lights flickered again. When they came back, Ashoka had dissolved back into the screen.

My phone buzzed. It was a WhatsApp message from a friend. “Did you know Ashoka fought the first nationalist war in Indian history? Share before it’s deleted.”

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025

 Previous Post: The Buddha in the Central Vista

Comments

  1. Ambica GulatiOctober 30, 2025 at 12:37 PM

    Good lord! Colonizing is definitely a human tendency and all raids are like Ajay Devgan's movies.. totally staged and manipulated. I am happy VR isn't the real world.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 30, 2025 at 12:50 PM

      What's bizarre is when people start colonising their own country.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanOctober 30, 2025 at 3:29 PM

    Hari Om
    Loved this virtual discussion! Hit some home runs... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 30, 2025 at 6:36 PM

      It'd be interesting if we could actually re-create the ancient heroes and talk to them!

      Delete
  3. magiceyeOctober 30, 2025 at 5:08 PM

    Haha good take!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jose D. MaliekalOctober 30, 2025 at 9:55 PM

    RSS, has crooked intelligence to distort the meaning of words.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Liz A.October 31, 2025 at 1:20 AM

    Deep sigh...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuNovember 16, 2025 at 9:26 PM

    Another master stroke from you & this line “We find meaning now in WhatsApp forwards,” I said, made me burst out laughing !! Lol !!

    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

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 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...
19 comments
Read more

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
15 comments
Read more