The POTUS who Taught us how it's done!

Isn't it amazing how the POtUs went from being a gaunt withered white haired flagpole who could barely pull his weight in congress to being this sassy wand wielding, verrrry with it, white haired Gandalf who has all the answers to Americas problems just before the marching band strikes the last tune? 

He was black and all things puny, and polite...which meant he sucked at playing super power poker with Putin and not getting Papa Xi's overtures right. From undermining Pakistan the nuclear pal to missing India's golden 56 inch wide economic hug.

He didn't know anything this man, who belonged to too many types of people's, including being hussein somewhere too - bang in the middle of his name. I mean how messed up is that for the all whites?!!

Enter last year in office and maah goodness! The man can jive. He can sing and flirt and tease the world economy and foreign policy out of bored punk slumber. He is Beyoncé in the world of hot. He can make Iran smile and UK dance. He knows just how to beat the crap out of the bad boys stuck in the middle of nowhere... Or was it the Middle East? He knows, mah man, he knows how to woo them all.

Go vote he says, cuz Trump ain't got the groove and The Clintons are o so perfect in their white teeth ways and sanitised systems that can control America again. Yes they can. Believe me they will.
Because face it - #BarackObama just knows what America needs. And right now America needs his wife to run for the next term. She nailed it, Mrs O did.

Poor Modi needs to start from scratch with Unca Scrooge. Russia...who knows what Kremlin really thinks anymore except they have the old soviet territories they walk into with tanks and it's ok and Syria never happened. Hell man, who knows what's China up to? I mean Tibet never happened and North Korea is just playing with daddy's new toys. But hey they got to be spying on ya with their fancy tech. Fire up your firewalls peeps.

Isisisisisisisisisis sounds like a rattle snake before it strikes and the US condemns ladies and gentlemen. A few hundred civilians dead in Syria and the US condemns the attacks in France and Germany. Me too. Me too.

So yo, bro. You guys have it all figured out. No fence with the Mexicans and a brand new hug for sexy Mr Canada. All that's cool yo. But, Could you stay on your continent this decade Mr United States? Because you do leave more than just carbon footprints where you go. You leave behind too many dead and maimed and no reporters to tell the story. You go all in. And we love your drones. We do we do.

Don't whine he says. Go vote. And keep the mad hatter out of office this time will ya? Or is that too much to ask of your country Mr Obama?

Oh baby. We will miss you, yes we will. Hit it.

WHITE, BLUE AND BRUISED: BENGAL VOTES 2016

 

Calcutta, 18th April 2016

 
Have you ever been to a Dance bar? Yes, the ones that come with sleazy neon signs, narrow entrances and predictable police raids in the middle of the night?

Do you recall being blinded, first by the signboards outside and then by the utter darkness that greets you once you enter the haloed portals inside? You gradually get used to the rhythm of the bollywood trash playing and the heaving motions that never cease. 

That bilious sensation greets me each time I take a walk on the streets of Calcutta. I feel I have unwittingly walked into an unannounced session of unsolicited pleasure at one such bar. The stench of unchecked corruption and rough callous hands of unbridled power grab at me every single time. Only the garish gyrations of autocracy is not so overtly visible to the naked eye as it is in the bylanes of Mumbai's relatively harmless dens.

Beware Calcutta is now unrecognisable to the trained eye. 

Rest assured, for a newcomer, the ol'Calcutta charm is there in all its pin-up finery. The decrepit buildings, the kakababu and his begun-bhaja, mudi and egg fritters, the evening newsreading prolétariat and it's incessant whinings about the failed state, the ethereal Ganga and her boredom with her silt laden boundaries, the staid brown boats coated with its algae and allergies to the romancing couples inside its dingy bowels, the fragmented graffiti which has very little limerick or wit left but sits painted gaudily on walls in fresh greens and oranges and whites, declaring in not very subtle tones it's silent loyalties, the state transport buses that bulge dangerously near the doorstep as the conductor hails out *ladies, ladies coming through*, the yellow cab that looks tired fighting his way along routes with newer sharper Uber siblings, the tonga wallah puffing on a near finished stick of tobacco with stained lips, the slightly jaded and pink'd walls of Victoria sit still as she patiently stares at an ever impatient city honking past its ricketty horse lined outer walls of defence, the poor creatures braying their near starvation pangs. Well, Calcutta looks almost the same. 

Almost. 

Everyone with half a brain can tell you something is off and yes, everyone knows what that is all about. Since everyone ushered the change in, so democratically and unequivocally, admitting anything has gone south in these teeny tiny 5 years would be very unbengali indeed! So we do what the quintessential Bengali does best - look out of the proverbial window, like good, trained dogs, feeling the hot breeze of change lash at our proud faces and turn to the sea for some salt to rub on our wounds.  

The change has been anything but sudden. 5 years is a fairly long time in any country's social discourse, and for this frail city it has been a  very long time coming. But there it is. In all its white and blue splendour. Painted, re painted and lit up. Pavements crop up where streets haven't been paved. Composite steel structures stand erected, jostling for space with dimly lit ancestral properties and old banyans breathing their last. Malls overpower ponds and old delicate mansions make room for lego sets, propped up on a real estate bubble. 

It has been a city in decay for a while and yet it didn't ask for such logic defying repairs. Never before has the colour Blue so vehemently stamped *change* as it has in this city. All traces of a red communist fortress have been systematically erased, some out of fear, some disdain, some pure malice. The political eclipse of Calcutta is near complete. The common man is soaking it all in, trying to come to terms with the *poriborton*, the literal and the psychosomatic. There is a wonderful paralysis that has gripped any idea of the aesthetic and the brutal domination of the crude has begun. That hasn't been very slow in its wake.

There are no protests of course. The Party wouldn't hear of it. Who minds a cleaner Ghat or a wider sidewalk mehearties, don't be silly now.  We are all good. We are all bigger, better, brighter, see?


In my mind's eye, I can almost see the ever loving Mother smiling  beatifically down on her children of Joy as they change their colour scheme and their political palette to blue. Blue with fear, blue with disbelief. It's fiery shade has left the existential angst driven Bong's voice of dissent no louder than a whisper of disagreement at best. Gatherings of more than four are countered with lathicharge or a night out in the local prison cell. Humour that once graced the walls of this disarming halt of Charnock is reduced to a smirk and splash of tricolour.

We are all in awe actually. In shock. It is stupefying to acknowlge what she has pulled off, to be fair. She has dared the gods of politics and called their bluff and now Eden will never be the same again. Never has any city since Roman times, been claimed by its victor with such efficiency and glee. 

The elections are an ill-tempered joke, held seasonally, fashionably, regularly, to convince the arbitrary and argumentative bengali mind that all is well in the state of Denmark. 

Names that remained on the fringes, thugs if you may, stand tall and proud, thieves and body snatchers rob in broad daylight and women slink about, hiding in the darkened shadows of this once safe city. But don't worry, your sidewalks look freshly painted. Your ego needs a walk, remember? Wide blue and white, dripping with malcontent and malodour, painted for your walking pleasure.

Indeed your tax money is well spent in this state where the collective debt stands at a near apocalyptic 3 trillion, but then your fences are mended and you have trident lights to cheer you up. There is very little to be blue about, honestly. You have so much to be grateful for. Bengal is rising, for once. Rising, like a giant ogre, akin to its new social order, fearsome, bareknuckled, loud, garish, glowing in all its pretty dresses for a party that is likely to never get over...and you must obediently wait for the lights to come on, blue and white, lining your streets, your conscience and your conciousness, telling you, not very softly, that it isn't time for change. Not yet.

ME HINDU, TU HINDU

Paranoia is not a word that often grips a believer or a faith keeper. It is a word reserved for those who find peace in conspiracy theories, in words that go on heresay, moving swiftly along the tongues of uneducated parlance.

In discourses that initiate fools into comprehending something significant enough to be life altering.

It has sadly come to pass, along the many folds of sanskrit verses and divine chants, this word that leaves the modern post colonial Hindoo in cold sweat. This creepy sense of unease that lies buried lightly in a pile of ceremonial excesses. It has given way unceremoniously to muted angst, outed in hushed debates in living rooms, accompanied by loud noises on the tele.

It is we the unfortunate souls who have yet to learn to live with this foul, clingy, P word. We, the born unto death Hindoos.
 
Never took unkindly to the idea, mind you, this whole *being born into a Hindoo Household* bit. Vermillion smudges, crushed marigolds, tuneless but divine chanting, wet naked feet rushing to prayer, blowing conches, sweetmeats and sprinkled holy waters, discarded idols under peepul trees et al. Love the idea of being a Hindoo. It has its own charm.

What I worship the most though, about being one of this faith, was that it allowed me to be careless about this space. This Siachen of all debates right now. This identity of identities. This threatened idea that must be guarded because it has suddenly dawned upon the uninitiated that never before have we the Hindoos been invaded by preachers and thinkers of other ideologues.

Never has our unparalleled ability to diffuse and assimilate been able to bear the brunt of this social onslaught and build stronger diverse nations from its ruins.
Nah. We the meek, ever floundering low lives, who cannot handle a little this and that from the outside world full of intolerant ideas.
Ergo, we are now officially a suspicious lot. But then we do believe all that the holy tele tells us; which by definition makes us nationalists by proxy. Or so I am told.

But hush now. Any dissent and we transmorgrify into conspirers, out to thwart the very idea of a unipolar Hind, which in hinsight has had to deal with nothing but unaccounted for multi cultural and religiously barbaric assaults on its puritanical walls of history.

And by the sheer weight of that tiny fact, are of this country and therefore its' only rightful people. Has such an uncanny ring, this whole thing, like being the heir to the house of Slytherin.
You see, I have not read the holy texts, yours or mine. I have heard stories however. Fairy tales, of chariots and flying vimanas and talking fishes and half human avatars emerging from torn bellies of monsters to vanquish evil.

Stories, the grandparents found novel ways to tell, retell, paraphrase and abridge for my tiny brain to process. Later these sagas reemerged as substantial need to knows. Some tedious, some easy to fathom narratives. Stories that found loyal listeners at gatherings that surrounded holy fires, heaped with ladels of saturated fat and yes, faith. Religious things one does to stay on the benign side of pristine clay models that get feasted or fasted upon by the family elders in the brightly lit ceremonies that typify evenings spent understanding which smiling goddess one ought to have prayed to longer for upcoming exams and other pubescent sins.

That's the Hindoo I am. Unholy but Hindoo. And there lies the sheer beauty of being a Hindoo. For me.

The impunity to write, speak and narrate versions of holy trysts and doctrines, retell them as cartoons, fastrack yagnas, skip havans, chat through prarthna sabhas, giggle through all night jagrans, pay attention to excerpts from geeta, pray to Ravana or worship Sita, fight for animal rights when fellow Hindoos attempt to behead a goat in devotional rituals of Kali or go fasting for 9 days of the year to commemorate a hero's homecoming with a musical soirée.

You can do all of the above and more and live to discuss it all its banality over cakes and tea. Rest assured, no sacred lightening shall ever strike you down for such blasphemy. This lifetime pass of getting away with holy sacrilege is the sole privilege of being born Hindoo. And I for one, relish it.
This unusual exception is the prize of being Hindoo. To be savoured and preserved in all its imperfections. To reassure to the mildly devotional, his sanity and the absurd joy it brings to him every time, that His many unaccounted number of books have let him be. At peace with his unfetished ideas of god. He can believe, or not. He can pray, or not. He can do temple runs, or not. She/He can be. OR NOT.

This theory by definition lends a key insight into what I think stands tall to this idea of being one: choice. It is the single biggest differentiator between religion per se and the nonchalance of being born a Hindoo. We are, as you would have guessed by now, not one made of one Religare, but of plural beliefs. We are not crusaders. We rarely invade. We do not have any one single unifying deity or ideology that holds an unequivocal road to our existance and code of conduct. We have way too many to count. We are therefore naturally and inherently Diverse.

It is there, right there, for everyone to stare at and wonder. It should not amaze us. We can't help but endorse a multiverse society. And here enters the paradox and now paranoia of who we are. Today.
Let's take a hard look at some of these gods. Why are these gods such dudes (pardon my French)? Why do I care so much about being his devotee anyway?

Thing is, this god is very human... he drinks. dopes. gambles. Kills. Forgives. Plots and wages war ... gets angry when his wife dies, their children have daddy issues ... she likes walking on her husbands bare chest, her sisters have cool superpowers. They sing, dance like there's no tomorrow. Some do not endorse monogamy and a few even have mistresses in most port towns in paradise. They are exceptional warriors, especially the female prototype. They do not believe in procastinating nor do they indulge in unqualified boon granting. They are normally open to animal rights issues since they are usually ferried on one or the other. They come in all sizes. They do not ask for untimely donations unless it's time for their annual carnival downtown. Basically, they want me to eat drink and make merry. And yes, behave.

So what unhinged us from endorsing this euphoric tribe of nearly perfect beings? Why does paranoia touch our blissfully content narrative? Why are we so fidgety with this delightful version of divinity? What’s to interpret in this fun idea of faith?

It is an insecurity at its most inexplicable. For a population that stands at a comfortable 67% (give or take a few dots) and a mighty number globally too, it finds itself puny in a face off with his largely benevolent minority brothers. Sadly we are now aware that we have become little more than a caricature of our ancestor's embodiment of goodness, we have forgotten how good it used to be. A time when you could pray, rejoice, fast and feast with a complete absence of apology.

The Hindoo now seeks refuge in the easiest calling to cowards. His paranoia isn't complete but it is settling in. He asks for interpreters. Demands structures, parties, codes, laws. Definition. He wants a set dialogue. He wants you to notice he is the fearless sword weilding Hindoo. He is done with the anonymity of being just another person who mumbles when they chant. He wants to matter as he swells in numbers of *us*. He is now well and truly paranoid.

And that's where he has ceased to be a Hindoo. He is now a creature of majority. As opposed to his post natal free flying destiny, he is the all powerful, almost celestial being who controls. This is not a weak identity mind you, so be careful.

It is however an exceptionally rigid one. It moves in crowds, finds no solace in singularity and freedoms. It calls out to assemble.

Given how flexible, calm and composed his former gods of karma were about issues of loyalty, this version bites. The old world gods never ran to a one stop shop ID pass for all saints. They never were in a hurry to eradicate the reincarnation program for second chances, cleansing all my tainted Hindoo soulmates. We were allowed to be wrong and human and sinners and worshippers and saints. All of us. And we Never prayed to one “god of all gods”. Uh huh. No. Too many of them in line for this one.

For me, a tiny little fly on this vast wall of religious dialectics, this is insanity of such proportion that it threatens to unravel everything eloquent about the identity that stood head and shoulders above the very concept of the herd.

For those who seek to believe or believe they seek the truth hidden behind the richly painted faces of our idols and man alike, the P word is like throwing dark matter in the face of the all knowing Almighty.

This paranoia of being undone by others. Of not being able to stand erect in the face of stronger believers and different rites of passage. Of remaining happy, human and Hindoo.

Truth be told, there is no Hindoo so to say. Yet, it is all there is. It is the very essence of being alive. Loud, boisterous, charming, ugly, delightful, colourful, miserable, dying and reborn all at once. There is no room for paranoia. We are the madness that is life. The Hindoo is intangible, a soul that understands the unending truth of being here, alive, in this moment, undefined by anything or anyone. We are singularly and uniquely the happiest form of the collective. And it has room for everyone.
In a world where the brute force of nature will prevail eventually, I stand here and permit you to laugh at me as I reject all that modernity brings with it, its' ideas and its' boxes, its' upheld need for conformity and dependance on false realities.

Because today, I promise you, your Hindoo will never become my Hindoo. I for one, break this cycle of stupidity and I look to you with hope.