Arnab Ray's Blog

Trump Tarrific

There was a time in the 80s and 90s when tariffs dominated national discourse. The World Trade Organization and the World Bank aggressively pushed globalization, the notion that goods and services would move freely across national boundaries as a win-win for both the “rich” and the “poor.” The resistance to this globalization agenda mainly came from the poorer countries (patronizingly called “developing” or “emerging markets” in World Bank literature) because they felt that without tariffs and other protectionist policies, their local industry would be wiped out by the multinational mega-conglomerates of Uncle Sam. Everything from Coke and Pepsi to KFC and McDonald’s to Miss World was seen as sinister conspiracies of the imperialistic West to do unto the developing countries what the assorted East India companies did to them hundreds of years ago—come for commerce, destroy local industry, and stay to govern. “Dunkel Draft” and “General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs” might not mean much to the young folk today, but trust me, they once aroused great passion in the days of friendship bands and Tamagotchis.

As the current President of the United States dismantles the entire edifice of globalization, while its supposed victims rush to negotiate with the US to ensure that globalization stays in place, how the tables have turned!

In the 80s and 90s, globalization was the panacea to all problems. It seemed too good to be true—manufacturing of “things people use,” from shirts to metal plates to building material to hair clips would move from Virginia to Vietnam, production costs would plummet from $5 to 50 cents, American society would pocket the $4.50 difference, and displaced workers would “move up the value chain” to better jobs.

Except that things don’t work like that. The notion that people naturally advance from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists to industrial workers to knowledge workers in an endless upward progression turns out to be wishful thinking—the balloon doesn’t expand at the same rate as it stretches. Also, developing nations, none more than China, deployed currency manipulation, tariffs, and allowed labor practices unburdened by democratic constraints like workers’ rights, environmental protection, and the disruption engendered by changing governments, to systematically drive down costs and through that compete with America on an unfair playing field. As my father once said, “The difference between China and India is China does not have to deal with Communists at the factory.”

So, while Chinese products flood America’s Walmarts and dollar stores, America’s biggest exports—Amazon, Facebook, Google—find themselves shut out from China and replaced by China clones, who simply rip off the original and stay protected by being backed by China’s authoritarian state. Even George Soros—once globalization’s high priest—now opposes China’s closed economic model, recognizing that his brainchild has been weaponized to essentially put Western democracies on a slow clock to destruction.

America today finds itself in the uncomfortable position of net consumer rather than producer—a relationship eerily reminiscent of colonized economies. Historical precedent isn’t encouraging: India under British rule transformed from producer to consumer of British goods, with manufacturing forcibly relocated at gunpoint. Except in this case, America did it to itself, through globalization policies, ostensibly pushed by the instruments of so-called American imperialism.

Oh the delicious irony.

With globalization’s failure apparent, America faces three distinct paths forward.

The Bernie approach aggressively taxes “billionaires” (it used to be “millionaires” once, till Bernie became one himself) through direct income taxation, with the government redistributing wealth through equity programs, reparations, UBI, or nationalized healthcare to create greater equality of outcomes. Though proponents often promise to target only the ultra-wealthy, expansive programs typically require broader tax bases. For example, Obamacare, which was supposed to not raise taxes on the middle class, actually did, as everyone who had healthcare through their employer picked up the tab of insuring the hitherto-uninsured by paying thousands of dollars out of pocket. The Bernie approach will still be progressive in nature: it will hit the wealthy more and the poor minimally.

The Trump approach implements broad tariffs—essentially a consumption tax falling on everyone regardless of income. Consumers would face the actual costs of goods (a $2,000 iPhone rather than $1,000 when factoring in labor and environmental standards), and again, the pain would be felt more by the poor than the rich.

In essence, the Bernie approach believes that government can reverse the effect of globalization; the Trump approach shocks the private industry into figuring out the solution. Which one you believe will work depends on whether you put your trust in government mandarins or captains of industry.

There’s also the procrastination approach: maintain the status quo by borrowing and printing money to fund an expanding welfare state supporting increasingly abandoned regions of America where poverty has become endemic. This strategy bets that the dollar’s reserve currency status will shield America from Zimbabwe-style outcomes—a bet that looks increasingly shaky as countries diversify away from dollar holdings. This outcome would fulfill what appears to be the Chinese Communist Party’s stated aim: de-dollarize the world and then let America’s currency collapse under their debt, and then sing the famous song from Namak Halal, “Shikari khud yahan shikar ban gya” (The hunter has now become the hunted).

The issue with Trump’s tariff strategy isn’t its underlying logic but its haphazard implementation. Surrounded by self-interested advisors, the resulting policy resembles a freshman economics project rather than sophisticated statecraft. Effective tariff regimes require selective application, model-based targeting, and gradual implementation—not the cartoonish formula of normalizing half the trade deficit with a country.

Imposing such a blunt-force solution is like prescribing Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s workout regimen to a 300-pound beginner. The approach is so hamfisted that it likely won’t survive even a full Trump term as the wealthy resist policies threatening their asset values, potentially opening the door to more radical redistributive approaches as he basically opens the door for an AOC to be the next President.

As billions are wiped out at the stock market, we’re watching amateur hour: a production where the script keeps changing, the actors forget their lines, and the audience pays for tickets with increasingly devalued currency. Whether this ends as comedy or tragedy remains to be seen, but one thing is certain—we’re long past the point where simple solutions, including doing nothing, can address America’s complex economic realities. The nightmare of globalization has birthed monsters we’ve only begun to recognize, putting in chains those that were supposed to own the key, and the terror of what comes next may eclipse even the darkest economic prophecies of our time.

On What Is Happening in Bangladesh

As a connoisseur of cringe, I have, over the years, kept a watchful eye on the Bangladeshi film industry: be it buxom dames charging at hanging tomatoes to the tune of “My youth is like a red tomato, squeeze it and bring out the juice, but a few days later” or Ananta Jalil reaching inside his chest to bring out his beating CGI heart as a CGI bullet hits it flush in the left atrium, or the legendary Dipjol threatening to stuff a missile up the hero’s ass (his precise words) or declaring, through song, his intent to fart at will, with each fart having the potential to incinerate (his precise words) anyone in its blast radius. These vignettes have not only provided me with many moments of gentle joy but also given me fascinating insights, as pop culture does, into the politics of Bangladesh. 

To come back to Dipjol (real name: Manowar Hussein Dipjol), the super-villain of many Bangladeshi movies with multiple layers of lard, he was often found playing rapacious characters while wearing well-recognized symbols of Hinduism and having henchmen wearing similar clothes, ostensibly to add one more level of menace to his already deadly charms.

Of late, while trawling the badlands of Facebook reels, I came across a clip from an un-named Bangladeshi movie, where the trauma of Bangladeshi Hindus during 71 is played for laughs: A Bangladeshi man is caught in the fields by a Pakistani soldier, who asks him to show him his organ to determine his religion, and the reluctant man goes into the fields, where he pulls it down, and the Pakistani soldier brings his glasses to check out if he is circumcized, finds out that the man under review is as he should be (i.e. not Hindu) and then tells the man who brought out his organ: “please do not mind, your thing is very very small, please take some medicines.” 

The casual Hindu hatred encoded in these instruments of pop culture is a shadow of the reality of Bangladesh: from 30% Hindu population before partition to 13.5% Hindu population at the time of Bangladeshi independence to 8% now.

The truth of what Hindus face in Bangladesh should be self-evident.

Except it is not. Or rather, it is persistently and consistently denied as part of the progressive school of thought. For instance, the genocide of Hindus during the Bangladesh War of Independence, directly witnessed by so many, is essentially denied in certain academic “research” that would slot into the library section called “genocide denial.” In it, the historian posits that violence against Hindus was grossly exaggerated, and whatever the Pakistani Army did were political reprisals against a rebelling population, political violence at worst, with no religious undertone. 

If this line of reasoning seems familiar, it is. In the last few weeks, it has been used, again, like the story outline of a Dipjol movie, to deny the selective targeting of Hindus and also Ahmadiyas in Bangladesh. New York Times originally headlined their piece as “Hindus in Bangladesh Face Revenge Attacks After Prime Minister’s Exit” before changing it to “Hindus in Bangladesh Face Attacks After Prime Minister’s Exit” as if the reason Hindus were being targeted was not that they were Hindus but because they were aligned with Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League. This was also the persistent narrative on Indian liberal Twitter, too, because, as we all know, Hinduphobia, as academics in the US tell us, does not exist, being merely a cover used by Hindu nationalists to push forward their minority-phobic agenda. 

So, there. 

Now, of course, the reason Hindus, by and large, supported the Awami League is because Sheikh Haseena has been the most secular of all Bangladeshi political leaders. As simple as that. However, correlation does not imply causation.

For example, Hindu households have been attacked that have had no connections to politics, including the house of a Leftist musician, which was burned down.

But why is this even a thing? When Ehsaan Jaffri was killed during the 2002 Gujarat riots, did anyone say he was killed not because he was a Muslim but because he was a Congress leader? No, they did not, and rightfully so. It was communal and not political violence. But the moment the religions are flipped, the narrative too is.

The other line pushed by many Indian accounts, again catering to a certain section of ideological thought, is to accuse Indian Hindus of spreading hate by simply talking about this violence. As a counter, they show that “sab change si” in Bangladesh, posting a few pictures of Muslim Bangladeshis guarding Hindu places of worship. Very admirable, but what does it prove?

First of all, if there was no targeting based on religion, why are people even defending these places? Second, I remember during the Sikh riots of 84, many Sikhs moved to Kolkata as violent pogroms against them were carried out. I was very young then, but old enough to remember the Gurdwara near our house full of out-of-state arrivals and Hindus of the locality standing guard outside—–and no one then used these stories to push the story that Sikhs were not targeted or that the virulence of the riots was exaggerated. 

The third line of argument, essentially the justification used by Kolkata Bengali “intellectuals” to stay silent, is that Bangladeshi Hindus are well capable of looking after themselves. They are Bangladeshis, not Indians. When Indian Hindus speak for them, this is actually the BJP thing, and saying no to the BJP is their first commandment.  It is the BJP’s game to use the grievance of Hindus as a strategic shield. to justify their own fascist agendas on Indian minorities, and so the mere mention of this on their social media feeds would strengthen the BJP, and that can never be allowed.

Instead, their focus on conflicts should stay on things within India, like Gaza.

Now, whether this studied silence is borne out of genuine belief or whether they realize the worth of the Bangladeshi market compared to the dwindling one of India’s Bengal (ex-TMC MP Mimi Chakraborty now stars opposite Bangladesh’s Shahrukh Khan—Shakib Khan in what they call “international blockbuster”) and the business need not to burn bridges, I cannot say for certain.

But given the spine of Bengali intellectuals and their adherence to dearly held principles, I think I know which one.

Here’s the thing. When Indian progressives cannot condemn anti-Hindu violence and instead vacillate between denial, trivialization, and justification, what they end up doing is strengthening the Hindu extremists on this side of the border. They can now genuinely point to these progressives and say, “See, this is how they are, totally silent now, they are not independent a all”, in the process undermining their voice when they speak up about atrocities on minorities in India. 

So, that’s why I had to say what I have said. It was what was needed. 

The Hero’s Journey

One of the world’s most persistent narrative tropes is that of the hero’s journey. The hero, as a boy, bides his time, unaware of his calling, be it Frodo or Neo or Harry Potter or Luke Sky Walker, till he meets a mentor, be it Gandalf or Morpheus or Dumbledore or Obi-Wan Kenobi, who teaches him the skills he needs to go up against the Dark Lord, be it Sauron or Agent Smith or Voldemort or Darth Vader. Along the way, he is helped by friends and companions, be it Samwise or Trinity or Hermione or Han Solo, and the story concludes with evil vanquished and the hero coming of age.

For decades, we have been told of the prophecy of Rahul Gandhi, a man divinely ordained to rule, representing the heroic force of the “idea of India” or the light side of the Force, as evidenced through multiple cover stories and lead articles heralding his rise. But, multiple times, he has fallen to the wiles of the Dark Side, who have been able to paint him as a “Pappu.” It was a devilish trick pushed forth by the All-Seeing-Eye, using Rahul’s own words against him, Incanto Meme-osa. However, there was a problem, one acknowledged by even the prophets who watched over him from afar.

What did the crown prince stand for?

Was he a janeudhari Hindu, who would outflank the Army from the Darkness from the right? Could he out-walk Frodo through Mordor to face off Sauron from the center, smothering him in his “Mohabbat ki Dukaan” blanket and his “Ek Aankh Maroon Bhankaaas” style? Or would he launch an attack from the left, with the light saber of social justice, showing to the world that the evil fascists have nothing to lose but their electoral bonds?

Who was he? What did he stand for?

It is this ambivalence that has characterized Rahul Gandhi’s journey so far, leading many of his critics, the Wormtongues and the Reeta Skeeters, to depict him as a “tabula rasa,” a blank slate who takes on the color of whoever has his ear. So when he is riding the MadhyaPradeshian Falcon captained by Kamal Nath, he veers close to the Kamal Phool. On the other hand, when he is with the Yoya, the wise Jedi master who speaks softly, like the compounder who tells you that the injection won’t hurt before plunging the needle, Rahul Gandhi spouts ideals of the Left, or more accurately, “of the Left, ideals he sprouts.”

But now, and this is why I believe we nearing the climax of the story, Rahul Gandhi has finally outlined his vision. Like it or leave it, this is definitely a line in the sand. 

The first cut of his sword came in his vision of India as a “union of states,” where he described India as not really a nation in the European sense of the term. (Link). In this conception of the country, the states retain their integrity even in their agglomeration into India. They are not to be seen as mere administrative units that can be cut up and merged by the federal government. If we accept this line of reasoning of the United States of India, the States have the right to withdraw their permission to be part of the Union since the state retains their fundamental autonomy. This was very illuminating, coming from the scion of the Nehru family, who, in their long rule over this country, had freely dismissed elected state governments, enforcing the primacy of the strong center over states, and opposed separatist movements in Punjab and Kashmir, claiming the exact opposite: that the identity of states as independent units ceased to be once they voluntarily united and adopted the Indian Constitution. 

The second cut of the sword was his slogan, “Jitni abaadi utni haq.” Following in the lines of progressive movements in the US, this philosophy eschews the old-liberal concept of equality for the notion of equity.  The philosophy that Rahul Gandhi has tethered himself to posits that if any desirable attribute (money, executive positions) is not correlated with the distribution of oppressed groups, the inequality of outcomes is symptomatic of systemic discrimination. Equality is thus seen as exacerbating the problem, which is why equity or positive discrimination is the only way forward for social justice.

Now, if he had left this as a slogan, that would not have been heroic. It would be seen as yet another bumper-sticker word salad thrown without understanding what proposing a pathway.

But no, unlike many politicians, Rahul Gandhi has gone into specifics of how he intends to bring about his vision of equity.

Rahul Gandhi says he wants to conduct two surveys: a caste survey and then a wealth survey, and then ensure that wealth is redistributed in a way. This leads one to believe that if a caste represents x% of the population, they shall have x% of jobs, x% of positions of power, and x% of the nation’s wealth.

A Pol Potterian vision of wealth distribution.

And as his opening gambit, he has promised to transfer 1 lac rupees per year to every household, with the money being direct-transfered to a woman, and through this he has promised to eradicate poverty “in one fell sweep”, an idea as brilliant and never-thought-before as the identity of the Elder Wand. One can see the shadow of Yoda with the Gandalf demeanor, who had written a paper asking for citizen’s wealth to be treated as a national resource, in the same way Luke Skywalker used lessons from Obi-Wan to best Darth Vader.

Some critics say that one should not read much into such pronouncements made in election manifestos. Given that Congress is unlikely to win, they can promise anything they want. It’s like me declaring that I will donate my entire salary to charity if I become the CEO of Google. 

Even if they win, we are told, they will be in a coalition government, and nothing of the killing fields of Cambodia will come to pass. What people are doing by clutching onto Rahul Gandhi’s promise of income redistribution is fear-mongering, a component of the Dark Arts, a means by which the Empire seeks to solidify its authority over the universe.

But this misses the point of the spell that Rahul Gandhi is really going for. He is moving the Overton window with a swish of his magic wand, bringing wealth re-distribution, the nationalization of wealth, caste-based equity, and overarching state rights as legitimate policy positions into the national conversation. This is precisely where the Congress has lost to their opponents, in that they have been able to define the rules of engagement on which elections have been fought: nationalism, mandir, Pakistan, terrorism, and obviously, if these are the Horcruxes in which Voldemort has scattered his soul, there is not much even a hundred Harrys can do.

Of course, Congress, his party, had decades in which to accomplish all of this, but they chose not to. As a matter of fact, it had been Congress’s policy to oppose this very agenda, which, truth be told, is to the left of what even the CPIM has proposed. But now, because Congress will not be dealing with the immediate consequences of these ideas, they are free to use extreme-woke-ideas as a long-term gambit—exactly the lesson Luke Skywalker learns at the end of Empire Strikes Back, of planting the idea of freedom even when the Evil Empire and Darth Vader are too strong to take on, setting him up for victory in “Return of the Jedi.”

The time for dilly-dallying is gone. Whatever criticism one may make of the Congress as it is today, indecision cannot be one of them.

They have shown their hand. 

Darth Shahious. Your move. 

IPL 2024: How The Teams Stack Up

Mumbai Indians: If the owners of Mumbai Indians could get Rihanna to dance at their pre-wedding, after her tweeting against them, make the three Khans lock steps together like marionettes on a string of cash, and leave Mark Zuckerberg to feel like yuppie middle class out-flexed by their richer cousins on the basis of the watch on his wrist, you can bet they have assembled a blockbuster of a team. Mumbai Indians made a couple of wrong bets in the last mega-auction, but the privilege of being the richest family in the country is that you can always outbuy your way out of a corner. In this case, “woh bhi peeche se angootha lagake”, buying Hardik Pandya from the Titans, throwing to the wind all pretense of fairness of equal purse, and if there is anything we know about Hardik after his interview on Karan Johar, that’s the way he likes it. Rohit Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Suryakumar Yadav, Tilak Verma, Hardik Pandya are a 1 to 5 of a national line-up, and then there is Bumrah, in case you have forgotten. Did I say “national line up”? Scratch that, this is even better, because while in Indian colors, these players may get injured from time to time, but put them on the Jio network, their signal never drops, whether it be on the field or playing “rumaal chor” to entertain the family at Antilla. Add to it this, God in the stands, and the Son of God on the bench, and how can this team lose?

Sure, their bowling seems weak, though, with their superstrong Indian core, they are the only franchise that can play 3 specialist foreign bowlers. However, their real problem is going to be whether they are a house divided. It’s no secret that Hardik Pandya pulled a “Margdarshak Mandal” move on Rohit Sharma, and as happens in a corporate coup, this creates bad blood in the line of succession. Add to it the rather dodgy choice of Mark Boucher as a coach, who has had a contentious time in South Africa, and Mumbai Indians look like a house divided. But, if you ask me, I put my trust in cash to unite all divisions, it is the adhesive glue for the most astringent of souls, and if there is anything the pre-wedding jamboree proved, it is this.

Lucknow Super Giants: This franchise is like the Yashwant Sinha of franchises—they make a lot of noise but no one cares. Last time, at least the excitement was around if Gautam Gambhir or his sock-puppet, Naveen ul-Haq, would get into a physical scuffle against old bete noire, but this time around, even that excitement won’t be there. The rumor is that K L Rahul, the Romeo to the Juliet of his own batting statistics, wants to bat middle-order to hone his skills for the T20 World Cup, and that is why they imported Devdutt Padikkal to be their opener. However, I find it tough to believe that KL will let go of the opportunity to have long innings to his name, in the only domain he fully controls.

The problem with LSG is that the Indian core they bet on at the last mega-auction, their promise has withered away. Deepak Hooda is now the second most famous Hooda in this country after Randeep, and Krunal Pandya is now the most well-liked Pandya brother in the country. Marcus Stoinis’s reliability, both in terms of performance and fitness, is at the level of a Premier Padmini from the ’90s, leaving the responsibility of making impactful scores to De Kock and Pooran, while K L Rahul generates Fantasy Points for those who have him on their team. Add to it that they have transferred out Avesh Khan and then lost their Mark Wood, their bowling looks flaccid, and with that their potential.

Sunrisers Hyderabad: The fans of this franchise targeted me last time with merciless online trolling for saying they had the worst team before the tournament began, and I want to tell these fans I bear no animus to them or this franchise, for they proved me right by coming dead last on the points table. Ever since their very public falling out with David Warner, their talismanic performer, I have felt that this franchise has struggled with player-management relations, along with bad auction table performance, though for some poetic reason, no one seems to point that out much. Their principal problem lies in the lack of a strong Indian batting core—Mayank Agarwal is no Shikhar Dhawan, Rahul Tripathi is inconsistent, Abdul Samad is “who now?” and Abhishek Sharma is their only reliable Indian talent, though nowhere a first India-XI pick.

Fans of SRH will say and with some justification that, even in their best years, they never had a strong Indian batting core but were bailed out by good Indian bowlers, and their foreign talent: Rashid Khan and David Warner. The Indian bowling talent seems tired: Bhuvi bowls at a pace a French lover would consider too slow, Umran Malik is now the Shehla Rashid of bowling in that those who placed their trust in them in the early stages of their career are solely disappointed by how they turned out, the glory days of T Natarajan seem long gone like those of the once-ubiquitous Nataraj pencils, and Washington Sundar and Shahbaz Ahmed will not win you matches with their spinning.

This leaves their hopes in the hands of their foreign core. Last time, they went all-in for the flavor of the year but “Harry Brook Bewafa Hai”. This time, they blew their purse on Pat Cummins, and then made him their captain. Now as a fan of the franchise that used to have Pat Cummins, let me tell you that the Cummins that plays for Australia and the one that turns up for IPL is the difference between Shakespeare and a ChatGPT simulation of Shakespeare, you are impressed initially, but stare it for a while and you realize something is off. Their better buys are Hasaranga at a surprisingly low price and the person who might be a potential Warner in terms of their aggression, talent, and attitude to batting: Travis Head. They look poised to do better than they did last time, and the only reason I say so is because of Head, and no I am not saying this for fear of being attacked by SRH fans.

Gujarat Titans: In a tournament started by a Modi and now controlled by a Shah, the Gujarat Titans can never be far from the crown. In terms of a squad, they have belied analysis. With what they have had on paper they have no business winning IPL and coming runners-up in their two years of existence, and yet they have, and one cannot blame EVMs here either. Their secret, I believe, has been the brains of Ashish Nehra, and if there is something that IPL has taught us, it is as much the player as well as the way the player is managed, and someone who can get match-winning performances out of Vijay Shankar and transforms Shubman Gill into a beast opener and David Miller into a late-career superstar and rescues Mohit Sharma from watering plants at a retirement home, is SOMETHING. So, even though the team once again looks weak on paper, now with a Hardik size hole and then a Shami sized one, it would take a brave man to bet against the guys who play their home games in the Narendra Modi stadium.

For the Titans to make the playoffs, new captain Gill needs to have another 800-run series, because he is the only Indian T20 first XI level player in the team, with consistent performances needed from Sai Sudarshan. Given their bare cupboard in terms of A-level Indian stars and the untested foreign core of Omarzai and Spencer Johnson, the pressure will be intense on the world’s best T20 player, Rashid Khan, to hold up a weak bowling unit. Not that the Titans cannot do it, and I would never write them off as it is a franchise like CSK that gets the best out of seemingly mediocre players (I would be very curious how Shahrukh Khan does, having transferred out of one of the franchises that does not manage players well) but given the trick their richest son of soil played on them, IPL 2024 might be a bridge too far for even this group of over-achievers.

Royal Challengers Bangalore: When Mumbai Indians “bought” Pandya off-auction, they had spent so much money that they would not have been able to put a full squad on the park. In came RCB, like electoral bonds from an anonymous source, and “saved them” (and I use the air quotes in full cognizance) by giving them the green to fill their team by taking Cameron Green off them. Now I am not saying that Green won’t be a good addition on the green of Chinnaswamy, but what that led to was RCB essentially fielding a Hong Kong Six of a team, in that it is a team of 6 batsmen and no bowlers.

Just like its once owner didn’t believe in paying back banks, Bangalore has never believed in having bowlers, after all this is the team that had Dinda. To buy Green, they had to sell Hazelwood, Hasaranga, and Harshal, the full core of their bowling. Since they play their home games on the best batting pitch of all the venues, with the bowling attack they have now, it does not matter how much Kohli, Faf, Green, Patidar, and Maxwell score, their opponents will always back themselves to score one more. Given that Faf, Maxwell, and Green will play, that leaves only one foreign bowler slot (so only one of Alzarri Joseph, Lockie Ferguson, and Reece Topley can slot in) and they have no specialist spinner worth their name, which means their bowling attack is cannon fodder in Chennai. Even their batting looks suspect—Faf is a retired player with diminishing potential every year, Kartik is mostly a commentator who plays a tournament to get ready for IPL and then plays IPL, Patidar’s confidence is likely broken after his disastrous Test series, and on top of this all, they have the pressure of knowing their bowling line-up is arguably one of the worst RCB has ever had, and that is saying a lot. Will they get their cup this year? The women’s team has broken the jinx, but as for the men, I shall leave it at “Ah well”.

Punjab Kings: Just like the Delhi Capitals, Punjab Kings have been the backup dancers of IPL, relegated to appearing out of focus in the background, while the real teams have held center-stage. This is one of the most intriguing things about the IPL, on paper they have decent teams every year, and except that one time, Punjab Kings has always been an also-ran, relegated to mid-table to lower-table finishes, irrespective of their composition of players. They have a decent Indian bowling pace lineup of Harshal Patel and Arshdeep Singh, with Rabada providing top-level foreign firepower and decent all-rounders in Woakes, Curran, and Raza, and decent spinners in Chahar and Brar and decent T20 players like Bairstow and Livingstone. Jitesh Sharma is decent, and so is Prabhsimran Singh, and if there is one thing I can say about Shikhar Dhawan is that he is a decent human being. But decency does not win tournaments, and given that Dhawan, their principal Indian batsman, like Karthik of RCB, is an IPL-only player nowadays, one never knows what kind of form, physical fitness, and mental state he is in. Their problem has been that their big-ticket foreign players, Curran and Livingstone and Bairstow, have dialed in their performances, and while they have been able to get great ROI from their local talent, an Atharva Taide or a Jitesh Sharma or a Prabhsimran Singh or Arshdeep Singh, their most expensive players have typically let them down. It’s a balanced team, more than most, but in the case of Punjab Kings, that still means nothing.

Delhi Capitals: One of the most entertaining sights at the auction has been Delhi Capitals uncle, getting into pitched auctions just to jack up prices, and sometimes ending up with the player, but mostly not, and then smiling through, reveling in the gentle joy of screwing things up for everyone, pretty much the most Delhi thing to do. Ricky Ponting as the coach is united in spirit with the spirit of the host city, but like the Punjab Kings, it has struggled to define a character for itself in the rich history of IPL, except as being the franchise that has bought every IPL superstar player: De Villiers, Glen Maxwell, Russell, Warner, and then thrown them away. Well, Warner has come back, and even at the fag end of his career, he remains their most reliable resource, and that in itself remains the biggest indictment of the Capitals. Of course, Rishabh Pant makes a return, but given his long layoff and his patchy T20 form even before his accident, expectations should be low. Harry Brook was someone they put a lot of money into, and he has withdrawn, leaving the batting looking sparse. Mitchell Marsh is never there for a full tournament in terms of staying injury-free, Fraser-McGurk might be caught out against quality spin, and with Prithwi Shaw you never know which player shows up: the grumpy, double-chin uncle after downing a few beers and butter chicken or the free-flowing inheritor of the legacy of Sehwag’s batting.

This is a pity, because Delhi has a formidable bowling line-up—Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav forming one of the most potent spin attacks for the dodgy Kotla wickets, and Khaleel and Mukesh Kumar for a varied Indian seam lineup with Nortje/Richardson as the spearhead. One of Yash Dhull and Kumar Kushagra should start out, and if they click, then yes, Delhi might be a contender, but there are just one too many if-s here.

Rajasthan Royals: I have often wondered what Royals see in Riyan Parag for which they keep him in the team unless it is for the social media clout of his onfield celebrations and aggression, which I think is called “expressing yourself”. He has had a tremendous domestic season, capped off by a celebration where he gestured that there is no one at his level, which might ironically be true, but it remains to be seen if his high idea of self is backed up by his performance. If it does, then there is very little that can stop Royals. An Indian core that is neighbor’s envy, owner’s pride with Jaiswal, Samson, Jurel, Ashwin, Avesh Khan and Chahal, with a foreign core of Buttler, Hetmeyer, Powell and Boult with back-ups for all foreign players in Burger (for Boult), Kohler-Cadmore (for Buttler), and Donovan Ferrera (Hetmeyer/Powell), with the flexibility to use Zampa when the pitches become tired at the end of the season, Royals have all their bases covered.

One could of course nitpick on the trade of Avesh for Padikkal, given Avesh’s poor form of late, but then with Prasidh Krishna injured, this indeed was a fortuitous trade, and I was surprised by their aggressive pursuit of Powell, given they had Hetmeyer, and feel that retaining Jason Holder, given the type of pitches we see in Jaipur would have been a better call. But otherwise, there is very little to complain about what is arguably the best-constructed team in all IPL.

Chennai Super Kings: The oldest truism of IPL is that nine teams compete to find out who will lose to CSK in the finals. Dhoni is essentially a non-playing captain, and the only player in the world who warrants a place in the side for DRS calls and leadership. This is an assertion with a control group, when Jadeja was made captain with the exact same squad, the franchise started losing spectacularly, which led to Dhoni being re-instated.

Dhoni works miracles—he can make Rahane bat like Chris Gayle, rescue Shivam Dube from the scrapheap of abandoned talent after underwhelming returns for RCB, between the talent of Ruturaj Gaikwad and Jagadeesan, who they bought the same year, choose the right guy and let the right guy go (where he was picked up KKR of course). Which is why the return of Shardul Thakur, from KKR of course, is a canny move—CSK buys low and sells high, unlike, well, KKR, which does the exact opposite.

One thing you will notice is that CSK, once the Dad’s Army, is no longer that, Dhoni has steadily moved the needle to young talent, and their acquisition of Sameer Rizvi was done keeping in mind the retentions for next year’s mega-auctions. With Devon Conway out, I believe Ruturaj opens with Ravindra, followed by Rahane, Moeen, Mitchell, Dube, Jadeja, and Thakur (Sameer Rizvi being an excellent impact player), and that is great line-up with two all-rounders, and then followed by Deepak Chahar, and the opportunity of playing Mustafizur on slow Chnennai pitches, this is the kind of XI Dhoni loves, of multi-function players, who he can juggle at will, based on match situations.

Kolkata Knight Riders: Let’s get the good out of the way first. The core Indian core of potential first XI T20 players is solid for KKR—Nitish Rana, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer, Rinku Singh, with Manish Pandey as an impact player. Not bad, not bad at all. Add to it Varun Chakravorty and Suyash, and again, pretty, pretty good.

The rest though is the effect of a lifetime of stupid decisions at the auction table and during retentions, thanks to the “brain” trust that has run the franchise. KKR has two major problems: lack of death bowling, which is why it is the franchise that has leaked the most runs at the end, and the lack of backup options, which is even more important for the franchise, as they carry two permanently injured super-stars: Shreyas Iyer and Andre Russell. They had the opportunity to solve both coming into the auction in 2024, but Pandit seemed more focused on how low-carb-friendly the snacks were, and Gambhir on scowling down everyone at the table. They could have bought steady backups, but once they lost Powell to Royals (they were starting off in the right direction), they stopped looking for the kind of talent they needed, a Rizvi or Kushagra. In a moment of grand circus, they dropped pretty much their entire purse on Mitchell Starc, yet another injury-prone star unlikely to last the entire season and who, like Cummins, likes to dial it in for IPL, and, this is very important, has had pretty underwhelming death bowling returns in the last few years for Australia. So to sum up, they spent a huge amount of money and solved none of their problems. Pretty much par for the course for a franchise that gave away Gill, that too while belonging to a fish-eating state, while retaining Russell, because he plays for their other franchises.

Much of Kolkata’s fortunes will depend on the pitch at the Eden. Because the Cricket Association of Bengal has never seen eye-to-eye with the franchise, the Eden pitch has become a clone of Chinnaswamy, with a focus on pace, which is exactly Knight Rider’s weak spot, a fact evidenced by them winning only two out of the eight games they played at their home venue. If Gambhir can remove the grass and crack the pitch up by the force of his angry glare, and bring it back to the slow, low turner of 2014, then yes, Knight Riders has a chance. They were lucky too, in that with Roy withdrawing, they got Salt, who I believe they should have bought at the auctions itself, given their lack of keeping options. Their seam bowling is not much better than RCB, and if the Eden is not a low turner, consistently post 180 plus scores to be even competitive.

Much is made of the fact that Gambhir is back, but he still carries “Modiji ki parivar” on his Twitter profile in deep TMC country, and this summarizes the state of the franchise, its internal inconsistencies, lack of thinking, and a continuous taking for granted of its passionate fan-base, in favor of cross-franchisee opportunities and monetization strategies.

I so do wish it wins IPL this time, but life unfortunately isn’t Zee Cine Awards for Jawaan and Pathan to sweep all awards. And so I am left to reconcile myself to the cosmic joke of having the same franchise own the two cities of my residence—Kolkata and Los Angeles, and to always be on the side that gnashes its teeth in anger.

On Dhruv Rathee’s Video

Dhruv Rathee, India’s premier Youtube content creator, recently posted a video titled “Is India Becoming A Dictatorship?” (The answer he provides is “Yes”). That video garnered 6 million views in a day, numbers a Shahrukh Khan movie trailer would be envious of. Now, I usually do not take it upon myself to react to videos being made online, but the sheer virality of this video and the “facts presented therein” require a counter, if for nothing else than one big reason.

As we move from a “search engine” world to a world dominated by generative AI, viral content, left without even a figleaf of a retort, will be consumed unchallenged by the Net-scrapers of the ChatGPTs and Geminis of the world. They will then become the new truth to be then built upon as a primary source. The fact that Gemini referred to Modi as a fascist and not Xi Jinping or Zelenskyy (Trump was kept out of Gemini’s analysis) is because of the corpus of “high-trust” media referring to Modi as a fascist (thanks to 500 dollars-an-article pieces produced for New York Times and Washington Post and al Jazeera). While one cannot prevent Al-Jazeera, the official state-sponsored media wing of an Islamic theocracy, from pretending to be progressive and using the bulwark of petro-dollars on one side and that of Amazon-dollars on the other paying for Washington Post to decide the very fabric of reality, one should at least try to present the “other side” while being cognizant of the asymmetric nature of the battle—- 6 million views per day on one side vs a blog that’s abandoned, words in long form scratched together for free versus an expensively produced video, extensively shared by other influencers whose politics aligns with Mr. Rathee.

This is a perfect segue to one of the points Dhruv makes to show that India is not a democracy under Modi. He says, “Fair elections mean that the politicians of the ruling party and the opposition get equal media time.” Dittoheads nod, except there is no such presumption in a democracy. Just because Dhruv will get 6 million views of his opinion in a day and mine will get 600 if I am lucky, does not mean that he is using illegitimate means to propagate his views. He has a bigger platform built on his own strategies (and kudos for that), and with that comes the immense power of any narrative he pushes. Just like Republic TV has a bigger platform than him and does exactly the same, except for the other side. In the US, for every Fox, there are multiple NBC, CBS, and ABC, and even today, when Trump is in opposition, they carry almost exclusively anti-Trump content, which does not, by implication, make America, not-a-democracy. Private channels choose to align based on the political alignment of their viewership and of their controlling bodies; it is a commercial decision; in India, Bengali media aligns with Mamata, and national media aligns with Modi—and none of this makes India a dictatorship. What does make a country a dictatorship is when you have state-owned television media and no other channel can operate—which is what India used to be till the early 90s, even though Dhruv Rathees of the day would still have called it a democracy.

Dhruv Rathee starts off by saying, “Elections are held in Russia and North Korea, but they are not democracies.” The difference is that neither North Korea nor Russia has states that are being ruled by opposition parties. Nor do they have opposition leaders accusing the leader of being corrupt and openly in the pocket of Adani-Ambani, and that is an obvious fact, except to those who are Bhakts of the opposite side. There was a time when the central government would routinely dismiss state governments ruled by opposition states and impose President’s Rule, but that was, once again, when India was ironically still a democracy, as per Mr. Rathee.

Dhruv Rathee isn’t making up facts. He just presents facts for one side. For instance, he brings up rigging in a mayoral election in a city while not bringing up elections in Bengal where the ruling party (not BJP) wins about 10% of local Panchayat seats without opposition or where supporters of BJP (the opposition there) are systematically culled and killed or their huts burned after assembly elections. Surely in Russia and North Korea, Kim’s opposition or Putin’s would not be able to kill Kim or Putin’s supporters. It is also interesting that Dhruv does not bring up China or any of the petro-theocracies as examples of dictatorships. I am inclined to dig deeper here, but I realize that it is a privilege only for Mr. Rathee to cast aspersions and explore hidden intentions.

While bringing up how the BJP is using law enforcement to target opposition leaders, he does forget a few facts. Like the leader of the opposition, a current shoo-in to win the next elections, being fined 360 million dollars for fraud in a loan where the bank from which he took the loan deposed in his support (i.e., there actually is no case of fraud), where the judge openly expressed his hatred of the opposition leader, where the chief prosecutor was elected on the promise to prosecute the leader of the opposition, in short, a systemic stacking the decks against a person. I am, of course, talking about Donald Trump being systematically destroyed, through multiple cuts, in courts (in the US, judges and district attorneys are elected) in states controlled by Democrats. But that still does not make America not-a-democracy. Neither is America a dictatorship when the FBI whistleblower who brings up charges against the current US president of having been bribed by a Ukrainian energy corporation is charged with lying and himself becomes subject to prosecution, while Biden spends billions of US dollars pursuing the interests of Ukraine. Nowhere am I saying that the US is a dictatorship or not a democracy. Just pointing out how other democracies, too, work.

But why can’t Dhruv cherry-pick facts? Sure, he can. But you cannot then turn around and say his hypothesis of India being a dictatorship is being supported by facts. Facts are not facts in support of a hypothesis if you ignore any facts that undermine your hypothesis. This is why in a drug trial, there is a control group provided a placebo, the “anti-hypothesis,” and you are obliged to report that, too, if you want to make an argument for the efficacy of your drug. A counter to his argument is the presentation of facts that run counter to his hypothesis, which can be summarized as follows:

The existence of states ruled by the opposition who are “actual opposition” and not rubber stamp, where BJP has been consistently decimatedThe exact same symptoms of dictatorship at the center are being manifested in the states ruled by opposition parties.The government frequently loses in The Supreme Court, which they would not have in a dictatorshipThe existence of anti-government commercial media in many statesMany democracies, like the US, have biased media, opposition leaders under prosecution, and evidence of misuse of power, which makes them flawed but not dictatorships.

There is a larger point that “Centrists” like I have made for decades—the dictatorial tendencies of Indian political parties when they come to power, be it BJP or Congress or TMC or DMK or AIADMK, their misuse of arms of government, the “win at all costs” election system and the systemic corruption that makes business houses susceptible to being arm-twisted by the politician. We have been accused of both-siding it, whereas the facts support exactly that—not just a both-sides in India, but that every democratic country has serious flaws, for greater or for worse. The universe of all facts, not the ones cherry-picked by Mr. Rathee, would support the hypothesis that India is and has always been a flawed democracy, just like the US. Yet people like Dhruv Rathee will make this a partisan issue, focussing only on BJP, because they are looking for popularity (and the sweet cash that comes as a result from the sheer Youtube revenue of 6 million views, leaving aside the official sponsor of the video). It is far easier to pander to one’s echo chamber, show up one’s country to be way worse than it actually is, and monetize it in the way the Republics of the world monetize the flip side of the same coin—jingoistic nationalism.

Which brings me to how I started this post. In today’s world, user-generated content, like Dhruv Rathee’s is deemed to be “trustworthy”, by the algorithms of Big Tech, purely on the basis of likes, engagements, and in-links. Letting them uncountered, giving in to the “it’s one man’s opinions why are you so triggered” is ultimately ceding the ground of objective reality to people with great social media capital, who use that privilege to define what truth is, cast in the mold of their own prejudices and affiliations.

Animal—the Review

There was once a Marxist scholar by the name of Gramsci. According to him, one of the biggest reasons why there had not been a revolution of the working classes, in the way prophecied by Marx and Lenin, was popular culture. Instead of spreading awareness about inequities and rousing the violent tendencies of the downtrodden, which is the Marxist wet dream, popular culture has acted like a drug, making everyone happy and satiated, papering over differences between the oppressed and the oppressor.

Gramsci would be happy if he saw the world today.

Movies are arrows in a culture war, as the very definition of “art” is sought to be cast within the ideological framework of what Marxists define as a “critical theory”— cinema is “good” only if it leads to “social justice,” and “bad” if it does not: entertainment be damned. Disney has defined its criteria for what it wants to make in terms of representation and equity, and the Oscars, from 2024, have set the line for what they consider to be “good cinema” in terms of diversity. Even though Disney’s franchises like Marvel and Star Wars fail consistently to engage and entertain the audience, and the Oscars grow irrelevant, the studio heads stay their course because of pressure from agenda-pushing billionaire shareholders with a missionary zeal to evangelize the world through cinema. By controlling the means of production of the fount of what defines morality, namely popular entertainment, they get to define what is fascism, what is racism, what is communalism, and if you disagree, you are all of these bad things. Popular entertainment is now the tool of the revolution, and their heralds are the Huffington Posts and Buzzfeeds of the world, and in India, their wannabe cousins (you know who they are). Together with their footsoldiers, ideologically aligned social media dittoheads drunk on the woke Kool-Aid, they will browbeat you into submitting to their new notion of what is right and what is wrong and what is justice and who must step back to pass the mike to whom.

As a dinosaur from the patriarchal, regressive past of Bollywood of the 90s who does not care for this politics, I try to avoid today’s cinema, especially in the popular sphere, at least till the time they come on streaming, where the only thing I am losing is time, as opposed to going to the theater, where I lose both time and money. “Animal,” when the movie came out to terrible reviews and amazing box office numbers, was, and that is what I thought then, yet another missile in this war, except this, was the anti-matter version of “critical theory programming,” the Patriot missile to the Scud, where the director was essentially passing every convention of the “woke Bollywood movie” through a “NOT” gate, flipping the gender and religious politics of “Netflix Bollywood.”, the Sith to the Jedi or the Jedi to the Sith, depending on which side of the culture war you were.

This, to me, was as non-sensical as that against which it was made. Why? Because “Animal,” the way I saw it, did not start from the point of story or character, as good works of cinematic art were once presumed to, but from ideology. This was the thesis to the Marxist “counter-thesis,” a silly, petulant “let me rub my dick in your face” (an actual metaphor repeated in the movie, at the very start, and at the very end) middle-finger (yes, I am mixing my metaphors here) to the progressive thought mafia, an extreme to another extreme, its target audience the “other echo-chamber,” a savvy business strategy for this age of polarized politics, but one that I personally wanted to have no truck with.

This was why I did not see “Rocky Aur Rani ki Prem Kahani” in theaters. I could make out from the trailer and the promotional publicity, that this was not so much a movie with an honest intent to entertain, but an apologia, with Karan Johar apologizing to his cocktail circuit for his role in furthering structural inequities through different expressions of “-archy” and “-phobia” and “-shaming” in his body of work.

Once Rocky Aur Rani came on streaming, I did see it, and it was everything I thought it would be, Karan Johar donning the burlap sack for all his sins in the eyes of the Church of the Progressive. And it was terrible and boring because it was trying too hard to push its agenda, but I sometimes couldn’t even understand what it was trying to say, like when Ranveer was shown to be progressive because he tries on his mother-in-law’s bra at a shop because women wash men’s underwear so this is somehow…I guess this was a point too evolved for my regressive brain. There was so much over-the-top self-flagellation in Rocky Aur Rani that it degenerated into self-parody. Even though the movie did poorly for such a AAA release with top stars, it got Karan Johar back into the good books of the cognoscenti, and with the money he has, maybe that was a good enough return on investment for him.

But not for me, or for the time I put into it.

With similar trepidation, I turned on my Netflix to see “Animal” streaming, hoping to have my apprehensions of what it was confirmed.

Boy, was I mistaken. Never judge a book by its cover.

“Animal” is mind-blowing, in true “Gunda” style.

Just like Gunda, Kanti Shah’s magnum opus, was a critique of modern consumerism, the pharma industry, corporate politics, and the inequities of law, a woke movie in the shell of something diametrically opposite, a Dadaist masterpiece because none of it was intentional, Animal is a grenade within a nuclear bomb, you go in expecting Sunny Leone, but out pops Sunny Gavaskar.

The similarity with Gunda is unintentional, I am sure, and that’s what makes it so epic. Not only does the highlight action set piece happens on a tarmac, and not only is there “Kundan lagayoonga tera badan pe Chandan” type over-the-top brotherly grief at the end, enough talk about free-hanging dicks and no underwear “khulla”-ness, and “mard banoonga haan” to satiate all devotees of the cult of Gunda, along with memorable performances by Shakti Kapoor in both, the inspiration runs much deeper. If there are intentional inspirations and homages, it is to the beats of Godfather, from the assassination attempt to the side-chick in Sicily to the climactic departure of Kay, with dashes of Kill Bill (but if the Crazy 88 were singing and dancing during the fight sequence) and Scarface in the bathtub, but it is the un-engineered alignment with Gunda that elevates Animal to something surprising, in the best traditions of art. That and another unintentional homage to the song from a Kamal Sadanah-Divya Bharati starrer, “Rang”, whose lines went “Na jaaaye Musoorie, Na jaaye Dehra Dun, Aeroplane ke andar manaye honeymoon” in the scene where the hero and heroine consummate their marriage in a private plane.

I know that’s a lot to unpack. So let me explain.

Ranvijay Singh, played by Ranbir Kapoor very early on in the movie, explains what an “alpha male” is. “Alpha male,” a concept first introduced by primatologist Frans De Waal, not to be confused with Dravid the Wall, is a term made popular by Whatsapp evolutionary biologists and X-addicts with a crush on Jordan Peterson. When men lived in tribes, only better than animals, there used to be “alpha males” who, by dint of their masculinity, confidence, arrogance, and power, attracted all the females. The women, fluttering their eyelids, then flocked to these “asli mards,” for offspring. This left un-mated the “betas” (not to be confused with Anil Kapoor when he had chest hair and crooned to “Koyel se teri boli”), who then fought back against the “alphas” through morality and monogamy, or as Ranvijay Singh says, through “poetry and false promises of romantic love,” in order to level the playing field of “Khela hobe.”

I rolled my eyes when I saw it because I knew immediately where this was going. Oh God, now we are going to see Ranbir Kapoor embark on the path of “alpha-ness” in true “Mard ko dard naheen hota” style, a Howard Roark from Fountainhead cosplaying as Sanju from Sanjay Dutt, crossed with Inspector Kale of Gunda who said “Badshah ke behen ho ya fakeer ke beti har kisi ko ana parta alpha male ke neeche bajane ke liye citi” (Ok, he didn’t say “alpha male” but bear with me).

Boy, was I mistaken. The movie, rather than celebrating alphaness, is a takedown of “toxic masculinity” in the greatest tradition of Disney and the Academy Awards. Throughout the three hours of its running length (the director, Mr. Vanga, does not believe in editing his work, just like he does not like shaving body hair in different areas), the character, played by Ranbir Kapoor keeps on whining and whining about his daddy, Balbir Singh, played by Anil Kapoor, because Daddy, bo hoo, did not give him the attention he wanted.

Now, as the movie shows him, Balbir Singh is a dad against whom one should not have much to complain about. He buys his son everything money can buy, stands by him as he does criminal acts, bails him out, and spoils him much more. Yet the “man-baby” cannot forget that one day of the Michael Jackson concert, and his emotional unavailability, the archetypal snowflake whose complaint is he was not hugged enough as a child. Alpha male indeed ! When his wife, played by Rashmika Mandana, mutters something under her breath, swallowing half her dialog, about his father, Ranvijay Singh, instead of engaging in “alpha-level” stoic silence, Mr. Alpha lashes out at his wife, looking for attention, in the way people do when they say “I am angry at you but I won’t tell you why.” This mard ko continuous dard hota hai, and he needs to brandish huge phallic guns, to do the “tu mard bana” activities defined in “Gunda”. When he cheats on his wife, he does not say, as an alpha would, “This is what defines the alpha”, but instead makes up some gobbledygook like “I was trying to seduce her to give up her plan.”

And this is where the biggest, most beautiful surprise is. Animal posits that those who consider themselves “alpha males” are rarely that; they are overcompensating “betas” with daddy issues, whining and seeking attention for mild emotional hurts, saying, “I do not care for your validation, khayega kela” (yes, Gunda again), while continuously complaining they do not get validation. If this isn’t the biggest takedown of toxic masculinity, I do not know what is. To this, when you add some super surreal scenes like the army of hardy gun-wielding bodyguards breaking into song and dance during a pitched, over-the-top action sequence, Bobby Deol doing haseena ka paseena with haseenon ka mela, you wonder whether you are watching a movie or a magic trick, one thing promised, one thing shown, then vanished and then brought back, like Nitish Kumar from NDA to JDU and back.

A true masterpiece, subversive in spirit, that turns the culture war on its head.

The World Cup Defeat

Losses in the World Cup are difficult to forget. When you win, you get swept up by the emotion of it all; the players become legends, and the plays become history, and it’s all very kinetic, like first love. Defeats are different; they settle in like a bad flu, a long Covid of regret, and you tend to remember even more, like unrequited love, the way I still remember the 2003 World Cup final as a PhD student in Stony Brook, crying after the game, out in the cold outside the graduate students commons, or Eden Gardens 1996, when it took me so much time to even process what had happened. Maybe, in a way, I still do not know.

In 2023, older, wiser, and more cynical, sporting defeats do not cut that hard, or so I tell myself, and by this age, the world has revealed itself as a cruel place of hard betrayals, and so sport seems merely a sidelight to the three-ring shit-circus that is life. So when India loses, as it did to Australia today, I tell myself: None of this matters; they play for IPL millions anyway, and soon BCCI will move us to the next shiny object, and this will be just another lousy night spent awake, and none of this is worth ruminating on, discussing, and definitely not worth fighting random strangers on Twitter on.

And yet here I am.

Why did we lose? There are many reasons, and I will be going over them. Some of them could have been avoided, and some of them could not. But perhaps the most galling reason for our defeat was the pitch we played on. Because of the current political dispensation, every marquee game, be it against Pakistan or the World Cup final, has to be played in Ahmedabad. This means what constitutes “home advantage” has to be subsumed within this political context. And if the Ahmedabad pitch is a tired, broken pitch used for the India-Pakistan game and then left out, like worn jeans, so be it.

Of course, they will tell you this pitch was as it was so that India would win. No. When you are the best team in the tournament, as India definitely was, and ten successive wins prove this, what you really want is a fair, sporting pitch where the conditions do not change too much between innings, a batting pitch where runs can be scored with some room for bowlers of all sorts to thrive, or what the British called a sporting wicket. Given a pitch like this, nine out of ten, the better team wins. As in Jo’Burg in 2003, when Australia, the far better team, decimated India on a featherbed of a track.

We would have won this time, most likely, given India was the better team, if we had a track like the Wankede or Chinnaswamy or even a consistently turning track like Chepauk.

Instead, what we got was a half-baked pitch of varying bounce, underprepared deliberately, capricious, and changing every hour with overhead conditions, precisely the kind of strip that levels differences between teams. Win the toss, have a good session, and even Bangladesh can beat us on tracks like this, and we chose to face Australia here.

Which brings us to the toss. Anyone still recovering from the ’96 World Cup semi-finals knows what the thermonuclear phrase “the toss” is.

Why are we talking about the toss? Rohit Sharma would have batted himself had we won the toss; the man said that, and I am sure he said that. Right?

Yes, he did. And it is evident to anyone who has followed the game for decades that he lied. He said what he said at the toss so as not to give the Australians the psychological advantage of knowing that they took the right call and that the Indians were starting on the back foot. How do I know? Because on the same pitch, when it was much better, India chose to chase against Pakistan, and also because later on, after the game was over, Rohit Sharma himself said that he knew that the pitch was going to get better for batting.

But if India was indeed the superior team, like the Windies of the 80s or the Aussies of the 90s, they would have won even from this, right?

Maybe. But that still does not excuse throwing away our most significant advantage, our superiority, almost before a ball was bowled.

There was nothing wrong in the pitch; it was the Indian batsmen, I am told on Twitter. Kohli is selfish, and Rahul is greedy. They should have increased their strike rates and taken more risks, and look at Head and Labuschagne, and so on and so forth.

Sigh. This is where one has to understand again the nature of the strip at Ahmedabad.

Head and Labuschagne batted when the strip was at its best, under lights with a wet ball where the ball comes onto the bat, and Kohli and Rahul batted when it was at its worst when the pitch was baking under the sun, two-paced and holding up. If Kohli and Rahul had tried to bat like Head and Labuschagne, India would have folded up before 200.

What I found particularly amusing were “cricket experts” on Twitter using Kohli’s strike rate as a reference to how Rahul should have batted. “Kohli was going at nearly a run-a-ball, and Rahul was at a strike rate that was half, so Rahul lost us the game.”

The amusing part is that a game before, they were using Rahul and Iyer’s strike rate as a reference as to how Kohli should have batted!

Batting in an ODI is like building an investment portfolio. You need balance.

Kohli is the part of the portfolio that is in bonds and government securities, with a steady and predictable rate of return; Gill is an investment in an index, Iyer individual stocks; Rohit is a pre-IPO startup as in high-risk and high-gain; Sky is Crypto, as in did well in the 2020 and now garbage. Rahul, who had an excellent World Cup, had the most complex role of all: to be a self-balancing target retirement fund depending on the match situation, and in that, he did as well as he could have done on the pitch he was given.

He had to become a savings account today, and he did.

Kohli also played an excellent innings, given the state of the pitch. He was fortunate enough to bat when the pitch was at its best, and he got off to a flier with one four after another, cutting through the field like Aravinda in his prime, and that is why he had the better strike rate of the two batsmen, he got a good start.

Rahul came in once the pitch was on the descendant, and with Iyer gone and basically, one specialist batsman and a bowling all-rounder left, he batted in a way that was the only way he could, given the match circumstances.

Now, coming back to the comparisons with Head and Labuschagne. Besides the fact that the two Australian batsmen got to use a much better state of the pitch, what I found absolutely lacking from expert commentary on Twitter was any recognition of the fact that the lengths they were being bowled to were very different from what the Australian bowlers gave Kohli and Rahul. The Indian bowlers were bowling attacking lengths, the seamers pitching the ball up, hoping for swing (of which there was none after the tenth over or so), or flighting it up hoping for bite (the dew moisture binding together the pitch and reducing its abrasiveness compared to late afternoon). So, of course, Head and Labuschagne scored more freely, and even here, you will notice that while Head went at a run-a-ball till the very end when he exploded, Labuschagne played much more circumspect, and that is precisely how ODI cricket works.

But then, who can we blame for India’s defeat if we are not allowed the cliches of “India should have scored more runs” or “India should have accelerated earlier but not lost wickets”?

Wait, I am coming to it.

There were four distinct phases of the pitch. One was when the game started, India’s first ten overs. This was when the pitch was THE best to bat on, with no swing, the ball coming onto the bat because of the roller. The big letdown here was Shubman Gill. He had no excuse; it was a nothing shot off a nothing delivery, and yes, maybe the short ball came to a tad slower because of the pitch, but nothing someone of his caliber should not be able to handle. Over the tournament, he was the biggest disappointment from the Indian side, maybe because so much was expected from him, and given that Ahmedabad was his home ground in IPL, one would have hoped that he would have shown more intent. Of course, people get out. It’s just that he got out in the most inglorious way possible at a time when runs were the easiest to come by, putting more pressure on Rohit Sharma.

So far, and it is churlish of me, not to mention, I agree, the Australians. When the pitch was the best to bat on, India’s first ten overs, they played error-free cricket. They saved close to 20/25 runs in the first ten overs itself, diamond dust in the light of how the pitch would behave in a few minutes, and the worth of that fielding isn’t just in the number of runs saved but in the opportunity cost of what India lost in terms of flow and rhythm. The catch that Head took was game-turning, like Kapil catching Richards, running the wrong way, and without their absolute error-free cricket, great lengths, excellent fielding, and perfect field placement, India could have been 100/0 at 10 overs.

No matter how the pitch behaved after that, India would have had a solid base.

But if only.

The second phase of the pitch was when it was the worst, by far, to bat on. Given their lousy start of losing three wickets, Kohli and Rahul did as well as one can do under the circumstances, and yes, once again, Australia took their time (they bowled two overs after the formal end of innings) and played brilliant, error-free, cricket. Maxwell bowled one half-tracker, but Rahul put that away for a boundary. The reason I remember this one half-tracker was because of how perfect Australia’s bowling and fielding were, so one blemish stood out. They were not trying too hard; they were just doing the right things consistently, taking their time, and adjusting. What one commentator called “the holding game.”

I emphasize this as I segue to the third phase of the pitch—the first ten overs of Australia’s batting, which was going to be the worst time for the team batting second. Here is where, in my opinion, India actually lost the plot. (This phase is not to be confused with the two-and-a-half phase of the pitch when Pritam performed, which was the worst time for all humanity, an embarrassing spectacle of epic proportions).

While Australia focused on cutting out errors and just putting the ball in the right place when India batted in their first ten overs, India rushed in, full-tilt, to make things happen. In contrast to Australia, India made three unforced errors in the very first over itself. True, Warner went a bit later, but again, cricket is a game of rhythm and flow; a diving catch off the first ball would have made Australia one down for zero, prevented the four that Warner got in a low-scorer, who knows what could have come to pass?

When the ball swings that much, bowlers have to just put the ball in the right place, but neither Bumrah nor Shami seemed to be able to do that. The ball swung excessively, and this gave Travis Head and Mitchell Marsh space to free their arms when what was needed was the kind of mild swing that got Iyer edging back earlier in the day. Runs bled at a rate much higher than a low score could accommodate, and if we are going to blame K L Rahul rather than his batting, it was his keeping I would call out.

He is not a natural keeper, and it is harsh to bring this up, given how well he has adopted a role that was not natural to him throughout the tournament. Still, today was a reminder of why, in low-scoring pressure games, you need a specialist keeper.

It might also be cruel to pin the blame on Shami, given what a phenomenal tournament he has had and how we were in the final in the first place because of him, but on the big day, when the nation was looking up to him, he was a big letdown in terms of his release and his lack of control of the swing. India got a big slice of luck when Steven Smith made a huge DRS call error, but the way I saw it, the game was gone in the first ten overs, when we had only three wickets down of Australia.

As the Afghanis can attest to, even seven wickets is too few to beat the Australians, given how deep they bat. Still, going into the fourth phase of the pitch, when the conditions would markedly help the team batting second, India was at least two wickets behind. Of course, there was no swing or spin later on, under lights and on the wet outfield, and the only way for India to come back would have been for Australia to make some substantial unforced errors, but they did not.

Full marks to Travis Head for soaking up the pressure and error-free batting, and I hope Indians reward him with a juicy IPL contract with Punjab Kings (he was let go by RCB), after which we shall never hear of him again.

Overall, India played a great tournament. Today, they were let down by the powers-that-be that gave them the worst pitch possible on which to win, but as Rohit Sharma said, no excuses; India, in the final analysis, was also not able to rise above the circumstances, as true champions are supposed to, and Australia, despite being nowhere close to the Australia they once were, did the right things when it mattered. If anything my life has taught me, it’s that this is what true champions are made of, in sports and in the world outside.

And so we live with another defeat, a pang of regret that will flair up from time to time as we reminisce about that day in November, but one that will be buried under the avalanche of other disappointments and failures where we will not be able to have the comfort of pointing at someone else as being the one responsible.

Jawan: The Review

Is Jawan a good film worth watching? If you even dare to ask this question, then you obviously aren’t the target audience of this movie. Jawan is like the highlights package of a T20 game shorn of all superficialities of story, progression, and characterization, with every second of its running length devoted to creating a religious experience for devotees of the religion of Shahrukh Khan.

Trying to analyze or review Jawan like it is a movie is to miss the point. Just like blind belief cannot be rationalized, so is Jawan impervious to deconstruction using the conventional parameters of judging cinema. And this is through careful design, Attlee and Red Chillies have figured out that the target audience is not interested in seeing Shahrukh Khan in anything where he is a mortal. If they did, then Zero or Fan or Dear Zindagi or When Harry Met Sejal would have made the kind of money that a Shahrukh Khan movie is expected to make.

In a post-Covid world of low-cost streaming, a movie made to conventional standards, by itself, cannot bring butts into seats at scale. Why bother when I can watch it in a few weeks, legally at home?

But a religious experience can.

And that precisely is Jawan.

Jawan follows the following template: Shahrukh Khan enters, the camera pans up, Shahrukh Khan breaks the fourth wall and delivers dialog to the audience, Shahrukh Khan bashes generic villains to a pumping background track, Shahrukh Khan smiles, rinse and repeat. Shahrukh Khan has no weaknesses; whatever obstacles there are in the hero’s journey are resolved within a few seconds, as if there is a countdown clock, after which the devotee may start to feel angry that the divinity of their God is being challenged. To his credit, Shahrukh Khan looks like a God, especially the older character, and if there is anything that is truly divine, it is how he has maintained his physique at his age, when for most other actors of his generation, doing a role like this would have given off late-career Dev Anand vibes. Not Shahrukh Khan; he looks prime, and in his prime, and without that physical perfection, Jawan would have been a parody.

Which it is not. Jawan is a perfectly engineered product in that it connects the customer with their needs, giving them what they truly want and not what they think they want.

I realized, as I left the cinema theater, that my being not a devotee, or at least not one anymore (I used to cosplay as Ramjaane in the 90s), I was not really the target audience. This is why, during the movie itself, my mind went to other things—like the inspirations from not just “Money Heist” but also the old Shahrukh Khan movie “Army” except here Shahrukh Khan was both Shahrukh Khan as well as Sridevi, and why they did not develop the back stories of all the “girls” in Azad’s Army, given that they started and then seemed to abandon that theme, possibly because it might make devotees feel the absence of God in the current time. I mean, I was hoping that the hacker’s backstory was that she was duped of her life savings by a shady ed-tech whose brand ambassador was this….Oh, I think I now know why not all of them have backstories.

The other thing that my mind vacillated to was how terribly underwhelming the villain was, despite the powerhouse actor playing it. It seemed, once again, that the makers are afraid of making anyone else, go toe-to-toe in a meaningful way with the divinity that is at the core of the experience. But, to the one for whom the movie is made, such thoughts of inspiration and “how many times I have seen this before” are blasphemous and will not enter, and if they enter, you are in the wrong place at a screening of Jawan.

Besides, of course, the drug that is religion, there is that of politics. Hindi movies have traditionally stayed clear of referring to current political events, especially if that runs counter to the narrative of the dominant party, be it Congress or BJP. It was fairly evident from the pre-release hype that Jawan, with its Tamil director Attlee, where movies are more political and “anti-Brahminical”, would buck the trend because his “anti-establishment” temper is like the Telegraph newspaper’s, they can be provocative to the party at the center because the ruling dispensation where they operate is on their side. Given that the INDIA alliance finds that the airwaves have been closed to them by virtue of the BJP government’s hold on news channels, their political propaganda being written into a major blockbuster might have been a messaging game-changer for the next elections.

If there indeed is a bigger brand than Modi today, it is Shahrukh Khan’s.

Jawan tries. It definitely says that Kafeel Khan was framed when it came to the oxygen cylinders running out in Yogiji’s UP, and it definitely is in alignment with Rahul Gandhi’s talking points on loans and farmers. The villain is made to look like Modi (in the 90s, there were movies where Paresh Rawal played a Lalloo Yadav lookalike) and is given Modi lines like “Waah kya scene hai.” The “Bete ko haath lagane se pahele baap se baat kaar“, lands the best because it ties into the travails of Shahrukh Khan, the person, and because it is delivered in the exact right way, by one of the last remaining Bollywood superstars who know what true dialogue-baazi is.

But in terms of landing the killer political blow, it falters. So eager is Attlee to move onto the next Shahrukh Khan sequence that he does not let the emotional impact of his political messaging when it is at its most strident, settle in. When Shahrukh Khan delivers the climactic fourth-wall-breaking speech, it is a very generic message, emotional yet unifying, anodyne in that it is universally populist, far short of what would have made political dynamite for 2024. One can see very clearly a divergence of voice between that of Shahrukh Khan and that of Attlee, one who has fans and businesses across jurisdictions wherein he needs to keep everyone happy, and the other who spouts hot air in a state where he is sheltered from any fallout. And it is this divergence that prevents Jawan from becoming what Mahua Moitra and Jairam Ramesh would have hoped for it to be.

But for most of Jawan’s audience, none of this is of any importance. It is a direct connection with a God-like being, where he will speak to his devotees directly, where everything else, the characters and the story are like ceremonial lamps that exist only to establish the halo.

If you walk into the theater to experience devotion of the purest form, to peal out in joyous rapture with fellow devotees, Jawan does not disappoint.

For the uninitiated, the skeptical and the rational, your mileage may vary.

But honestly, you do not matter.

Jawan is not for you.

Oppenheimer: The Review

[Some mild spoilers]

I am not what you would call a Nolan fanboy. I might have been once. But over the years, I have grown increasingly tired of Christopher Nolan as a director. That is because he, in my opinion, has taken his audience for granted. He has eschewed the telling of a story in favor of directorial pyrotechnics. As a superstar himself, he seems compelled to somehow put himself in front of his own movie, like a person in the theater standing up right in front of you when you least want him to.

Dunkirk was a visual spectacle, made for Imax, but it did not last in my mind. I absolutely loved it when I saw it, but quickly forgot.

Tenet was an absolute trainwreck, not merely a bad movie, but inscrutable, and deliberately so, as if Nolan is saying to his audience, “I give a flying fuck if you understand this movie or not. By the way, if you do not, you are a stupid person anyways, and not worthy of my genius.” And because he is a brand, no one in the studios has the cojones to temper his arrogance. So Nolan’s greatness survives purely on the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome: “Everyone else says his movies are great, so I must say so too, else I will be labeled stupid.”

Oppenheimer, though, is a welcome break from the navel-gazing downward spiral of a once-visionary director. It does have some abrupt staccato cuts, all done in order to do the Nolanian “reveal”, which actually does not work here, in my opinion, and sometimes you get the feeling again that Nolan does not really care if the audience is with him or not. But somehow just when you feel you are about to turn off, Oppenheimer clicks you in by your belt and takes you for a hell of a ride. 

Oppenheimer is not an easy watch, definitely not for the first hour, but once it hits its straps, Nolan brings to bear every cinematic trick in his magic hat. It’s like a heist movie without a heist, so palpable is the sense of excitement, tension, and urgency, over, what once you think about it, is a research and development project that we know killed tens of thousands of people and changed the world forever, in the worst way possible. The way Nolan does his magic is arguably what makes him Nolan: sound and visual engineering of the highest pedigree. Music, sound, silence, and visuals are perfectly coordinated,  blinding white light and dark shadows, atomic orbitals and raindrops falling on puddles, allowing for an “inception” of emotion into the audience’s minds, even when they are not completely understanding what’s going on in front of them. This is cinematic legerdemain of the highest order, and worth applauding, though I am still not convinced that the emotional impact of Oppenheimer will carry to a TV screen. If the first time you watch Oppenheimer is on streaming, this last paragraph will be as inscrutable to you as Tenet.

For me, though, in order for a movie to be called “great”, it has to say something about human beings or the human condition.

And that’s where Oppenheimer shines.

It’s not just shiny mirrors and indirection.

It is not just a 3-hour rollercoaster ride on a stationary seat.

It is not Dunkirk.  

Oppenheimer is a fascinating, multi-layered study of conflict. There are many conflicts going on–between the “small minds” and the “big minds”, between husband and wife, between Communism and Capitalism, the Allied and the Axis, and laying bare each strand of the conflict is beyond this post.  

But let’s look at the most important conflict of all, a conflict that rages inside Oppenheimer’s mind.

It stems from guilt. Anyone familiar with the Oppenheimer story knows this. On seeing the test detonation of an atomic device, Oppenheimer has a change of heart. The terrifying realization of what he has done dawns on him, and he utters those lines from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am Death, destroyer of worlds”. Seized upon by remorse, he becomes a public spokesman for nuclear arms control. At the height of the cold war, his continued opposition to the nuclear program leads to whispers that he was an agent of the Communists, with whom he had association years ago, ultimately resulting in him, a once-national-hero, losing favor with the ruling dispensation. President Truman even calls him a “crybaby”, an incident that finds its way into the movie, except that the President did not say this within earshot of Oppenheimer. Though Oppenheimer’s legacy was subsequently exhumed, post-McCarthy years, he never quite recovers from the very public attacks on him and died, with a cloud over his head.

This is a good story and a known story, but in Oppenheimer, it is not the only story. In one of the opening sequences of the movie, Oppenheimer is introduced as a quiet, introverted student who, on being bullied by his tutor, injects potassium cyanide into his apple. Once the silent rage subsidizes, he rushes back to destroy the apple before it kills his tutor. This establishes a character trait of the titular character, blinding, unthinking rage, the one that rages behind an apparently calm exterior. As a Jewish man in the US, when he first hears of what the Nazis are doing to Jews, it’s the anger that drives him to say “yes” to becoming the project director of the Manhattan Project, despite his “ultra-liberal” worldview.

It’s not that he realizes what he has done only when he sees the explosion. He knows fully well what he is doing from day one. Post-facto guilt is very much a part of his character, from trying to poison his tutor to cheating on his wife.

Rage is not the only reason for Oppenheimer leading the Manhattan Project. Nor is his later regret a consequence of his anger subsiding. As a matter of fact, rage might be only a small part of Oppenheimer’s overall psychological profile.

What he is really looking for is glory.

It is part of the unique pathology of geniuses, and there is no doubt Oppenheimer was one, this relentless pursuit of glory. Maybe that last sentence is not fully correct, all of us desire glory, but geniuses, whether it be in science or arts or sports, are already halfway there.

Oppenheimer is chasing glory, the kind of glory that is mythic, and it is not a coincidence that the movie begins with him being compared to Prometheus, a Greek demi-god who brought fire to humans and endured eternal damnation for that.

As the head of the Manhattan Project with an insane budget of 2 billion dollars in the 1940s, Oppenheimer is fully seduced by the power he has, the boss of the best minds in America, a direct audience with the most powerful men in the land, the brains to understand it all, and the knowledge that the fate of the Western world effectively rests in his hands. 

Though he has occasional pangs of conscience, be it with respect to his serial philandering or his role in creating a weapon of mass destruction, he never takes his inner voice seriously. He is too preoccupied with power. It is only once the project is coming to an end that the rush subsides, and Oppenheimer contemplates the impact of his actions. There is a scene where the military takes the bomb from him and tells him essentially that we will take it from here. When Oppenheimer sees the successful detonation of his device, he is at the acme of his power, and it is in this context one should interpret the line, ” I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is not some great expression of guilt, but something exactly the opposite, the full articulation of his God complex. Once the experiment is successful, he realizes that his power is over; someone else will indeed take it from here, and he will have no say in how many bombs will be dropped, and where, now or ever.

That’s when he starts having thoughts of pacificism.

During the project, Edward Teller, one of the scientists working under Oppenheimer, proposes the hydrogen bomb. From a purely scientific perspective, it is a superior technology, in that it is much more destructive than Oppenheimer’s atom bomb. Here though, Oppenheimer becomes strangely reluctant to pursue that line of research, citing his moral compass. A hydrogen bomb is too destructive, of no utility in terms of war, simply a weapon of civilizational destruction. The hypocrisy is evident, the hydrogen bomb is nothing but the inevitable improvement of his own pet project, and this is not lost on Edward Teller, who, despite being a pupil and otherwise devotee of Oppenheimer, later turns on him. What he says to the committee deliberating on Oppenheimer’s fate is that while he does not doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the country, he would not endorse him keeping his security clearance. The security clearance is the metaphor for Oppenheimer’s power; without it, he is a mere mortal, and that is what Edward Teller is saying, Oppenheimer cannot be trusted with power.

One cannot but find parallels with Geoffrey Hinton, the father of AI, quitting Google and then criticizing his past employer for research he did for them. Did he suddenly realize the impact of his work? Did he suddenly develop a conscience? Or did he, at the end of his career, on seeing some of the large language models in use today from other corporations, that have definitely drawn on his work, have a hydrogen bomb moment?

Maybe a future Nolan can tell us.

Which brings us back to Oppenheimer, the movie. The Nolan-ian twist is that you were not watching a biopic; you were watching a superhero-supervillain fable.

For Oppenheimer is both, depending on where you stand, a destroyer of worlds or the winner of the war, assembling other Avengers of super-scientists to create a united front against evil, or Thanos himself with his dark army, drunk with the hubris of having the power to exterminate humanity in a blinding flash of light with a flick of his mind.

An amazing work of art.

Pathaan–the Review

Now that I have seen Pathaan on Amazon Prime, I shall first doff my cap and give a salute to those who bought tickets and went to see Pathaan in the theaters as a form of protest, your own personal resistance to the Hindu majoritarian fascist-nationalist-patriarchic government and their supporters. Your contribution to the collection of this movie, at the personal cost of your brain cells, all done in order that democracy shall survive, will be written in the annals (yes, note the pun) of history, as an act of resistance at the cost of self-imperilment, like the lone protester in front of a tank in Tianmen Square. Except there was not just one of you, but hundreds of 100 crores of rupee-contributing men and women, which just showed that there is no “ekla chalo re” when it comes to Pathaan.

Then, I will turn around and address those who boycotted the movie (or claimed to) because it was anti-national and anti-Hindu. It is nothing of the sort. Love for Bharat-Mataa is announced every few minutes, in a way that would make Manoj Kumar say “Aaj ka din bada mahaan hai”. For those who were upset about the association of the saffron color with “besharam rang”, let me assure you that what that color does for Deepika is the greatest advertisement for the bhagwa color captured on film, she heals from a bullet wound in the stomach in less than a day, while wearing the colors of saffron.

Now that we have dealt with the politics, for in today’s worlds of dueling outrage factories, this has to be done for every movie, let us look at Pathaan as something advertised as cinema. It is a collection of, to borrow a metaphor from the movie, broken eggshells of other better movies—Black Widow breaking out in Avengers, the heist scene in Black Panther, the mechanical apparatus of the Falcon, multiple heist situations from the Mission Impossible franchise, sequences from Bond movies, even a death scene from the Wrath of Khan, collected, and this I imagine since the movie gives me so little scope to, stitched together by the cinematic memories of 20-something “VP of content”s at Yashraj, SoBo nepo-kids in a nepo-organization, unmoored culturally from the market for which they are making movies, taking creative decisions involving crores of rupees, and adding scraps of things heard on social media like “Article 370” to give it some intellectual heft, while the adults with the “Chopra” surname are involved in the Netflix hagiography on their family, dropping in occasionally to make sure the movie is deemed inoffensive enough, and that none of the Buzzfeed-Huffingtonpost sensibilities of the creative team sink in too much into the narrative.

But does it work?

If we believe the box-office collections, then yes, it does. If something makes money, then that is its validation. Nothing more is needed. And in its defense, the movie takes great pain to present the hero, Shahrukh Khan, in God-like splendor, in the exact way his devotees want to see him, and there lies the core of its success: it does not challenge the core of its audience, the Shahrukh Khan fans, the cinematic equivalent of news channels that engineer their entire lineup to reflect the biases of their audience, no matter what they privately may think, so that their world-view is cushioned and validated. If the intent of art is to challenge, then no, you are looking in the wrong place.

To be honest, if you are expecting “art” while walking into a movie from the guys who brought you the “Tiger” franchise, and “War”, or as they call themselves the “Yashraj spy universe”, a statement that would make John Le Scarred, the joke is on you.

What you could expect is fun. And for me, that is where Pathaan fails. It is dreadfully boring, and this is someone who does not have particularly high standards, in that I consider Tiranga a classic, where Raj Kumar pulls out the fuse conductor, an impossibility of physics which both conducts as well as prevents it (the fuse part) and even found “War”, part of the same universe, entertaining.

One reason is the terrible special effects. For something this big budget, and not shy of pulling action set pieces from other movies, one just expected better. Some of the “fighting on train tops” and “heist scenes” and “missile firing” had such a Malegaon-effect vibe to be positively embarrassing, especially since you could see the original inspiration in your mind’s eye. As an example, Salman Khan seemed to be cut-pasted from the sets of Big Boss onto the roof of a train, and the way he and Shahrukh Khan hold Gatlin guns and operate them like electric toothbrushes, at least required quite a bit more in terms of digital believability.

The story lacks the minimum of coherence in a genre where expectations of originality are never high. Character development is as brief as a Yousuf Pathan innings, the villains helpfully explain their schemes before they execute them, and the twists can be seen a mile away. John Ab-Reham-Karo, in true signature style, drains his character of any menace or relatability, a six-packed void of emotion, charm and character, like the universe before the Big Bang, and is at the core of Pathaan’s “webex at 7 am in the morning” excitement quotient. Deepika Padukone has many scenes, but aside from her dance moves in “Besharam Rang” where she simulates peristalsis of the intestine, leaves very little impact on the narrative, much less, for instance, than her appearance in anti-CAA protests in JNU.

Okay there was maybe one moment from Pathaan that I genuinely enjoyed. No, not the phallic missile and the small-pox receptacles resembling giant testicles that have distilled water in them, but a very Marvel post-credits scene. In it, Shahrukh Khan and Salman Khan, Pathaan and Tiger in the spy-universe, like two Greek Gods sitting on Mount Olympus looking down at the world of mortals, complain on how long they have to go on doing this, saving the world while ruminating on the lack of talent to replace them. It is a clever fourth-wall-breaking bit, where they are very obviously talking about the un-bankability of the new generation of Bollywood heroes, and the reliance on the industry on these two titans to provide commercial oxygen for the rest, thirty years after they debuted, doing the same old things till, as you can hear Salman Khan say, their backs hurt.

That, to me, was entertaining. And fun. The pity is that it took them an entire two and a half hours of vacuous nothingness, to get there.