Arnab Ray's Blog, page 11

A Brief Analysis Of Some of 2017’s Oscar Best Picture Nominees

[Has SPOILERS]

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Of the movies that are nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, I have seen four: La-La Land, Moonlight, Arrival and Manchester By the Sea. They are all obviously very accomplished films, and while of course like pretty much everyone else I liked a few of these more than the others, as a writer I found it fascinating how similar structurally each of these films were, as in each raises a question, and then leaves you without a convenient or conventional resolution.

For Arrival, it is “What if you knew the future? Would you do the present?”. Arrival takes this basic premise, wraps it around a somewhat fantastic story of aliens with a language that allows you to visualize time as a cycle, and layers deep personal tragedy over it. A linguist played by Amy Adams, who by virtue of learning the language of the aliens, is able to see the future in which her marriage dissolves and her daughter dies, but still she takes the decision to have that future. The tragedy here, once you think about it and this is where the ending is unconventional, is not so much the death of her daughter and her failed marriage, but the fact that she chooses that knowingly, chooses heartbreak, because she also sees the happiness in the other moments that also lies on that path.

La-La Land also plays with time. The hero and the heroine are made for each other, and deeply in love, but yet decide to break up in order to follow their dreams. Both reach where they want to in life, till one night, she walks into his bar, Casablanca style, with her husband, and the hero and the heroine share, and this is where the movie gets elevated from a simple musical with dollops of 1920s Americana nostalgia, to something special, a waking dream, of an alternative timeline where they are not as successful but where they are together. Dream ends, our heroine gives one long withering look at the hero, and walks away with her husband. The premise of “Is personal success and stability more important than true love?” is not new, but I don’t think I have seen this resolution before, done quite this way.

Moonlight. of the four movies, I enjoyed least and that was perhaps because I did not understand the deeper racial and sexual undertones. Instead what I found were stereotypical depictions of African Americans, from the golden-hearted drug-dealer to the dead-beat junkie mom. Of course the argument works both ways, what I find stereotypical, others may claim is reality, but whatever it be, I did not “get” Moonlight. Which of course did not prevent me from appreciating the terrific acting, from two different actors playing the same character, and yet getting the mannerisms and the movement of the eyes spot-perfect, and from appreciating the beautifully unresolved ending. The title character, a gay African-American, meets the only man he has ever loved, his childhood friend (my Bollywood addled mind made a connection to Kuch Kuch Hota Hai while watching). He awkwardly expresses his love, and the film ends with the hero embracing his friend, but it does not resolve his pain or his confusion, or show, as movies do, that they lived happily ever after. All that is shown is that our hero attains peace, but whether it be for the moment or forever, it leaves the audience to figure out.

Which brings me to my favorite movie of the year. Manchester By The Sea. An absolutely devastating study in grief, it premises itself on the question of “Is it possible to move on?” The character played by Casey Affleck, once a fun-loving and funny man, left his hometown Manchester when, because of a mistake on his part, his house burned down, killing his three children. Since then estranged from his wife, he has moved to Boston to work as a custodian of an apartment complex, where he spends his time brooding, snapping at the apartment residents and picking fights in bars so that he can get beaten up. But then he has to return to Manchester to act as a legal guardian of the son of his elder brother. A lesser film would have shown Casey Affleck finding redemption, if not fully but definitely partially, by adopting his brother’s son and moving back to Manchester and establishing contact with his ex-wife, and this is where Manchester By the Sea is at its most devastating, he does neither. Giving custody-ship of his nephew, someone he is shown to care intensely for, to a family friend, and rejecting his ex-wife’s awkward offer to patch up, he moves back to Boston, because as he tells his wife, in a scene that should be all that’s required to give Casey Affleck the Oscar, that “there is nothing there”. There is no redemption or resolution, even if the police and his wife are willing to forgive him for the accident, he never will become himself, because “I can’t beat it.” Manchester By the Sea is amazing in its power, precisely because it gives us the bleakest and perhaps the most realistic resolution possible, that in life there are some tragedies over which there is no getting over, some tragedies that suck out whatever it is was inside us, leaving a hollow shell of a human being. Parents, be cautioned. Do not see this movie without an adequate supply of handkerchiefs. Because I needed it.

In all, a very strong field of movies, with some very startling creative choices.

 

 

 

 

Trolls and LOLs

About a month ago, I was invited to be on a panel at Kolkata Lit Meet: “Trolls and LOLs”, on the supposed pernicious menace of trolls. You can watch the video here, but let me summarize the crux of what I said there.

There is undeniably a notion of “bait and switch” when you ask those outraged by trolling to define it. “Oh trolling is the issuance of death and rape threats”, they say. This is obviously a red line, one that every half decent person regardless of political affiliation can agree with, and as incidents in Bangladesh have shown us, not something that can or should be taken lightly. Any threat of physical form, even those said in a supposed “yaar mazaak kar raha tha” way, should be treated with utmost seriousness, and there should be zero tolerance in dealing with such malignant filth.

The only problem is that only a small portion of what is deemed “trolling” by our political and media superclass passes of as such. Then what is it? Ask again and this time, the answer is “Oh it is abuse.” By abuse, they presumably mean gaalis, like the way there is in my latest book Sultan of Delhi: Ascension (clever plug). Gaalis are pervasive on social media, it is true, just as it is on a busy intersection during 8 am office-time rush, but one wonders why those who some of these media mavens who have no compunction in using the vilest of swear words at their opponents, are so sensitive when other people engage in the same behavior.

So what is trolling? And why is it so dangerous? Apparently we are told that a certain political party, okay the BJP, has an army of trolls, and some of them are, gasp, followed by Narendra Modi, which is the cause of the problem. But what exactly is the problem? Is it that they are coordinating their tweets? If that is the problem, why is it not a problem when fans of stars do it or social media companies do it to promote brands? Is it that people are being paid for what they are writing on social media? Then why do journalists get paid for their work? Or is the problem that we are responsible for the tweets of the people we follow? In which case I follow Ashutosh and I shudder to think what karmic retribution that will entail in my afterlife.

The question for me is not academic. It is very personal.

Because after the session, in an after-party the next day, a very prominent journalist(The reason I do not mention her name is because I do not want this piece to be about her, but about me), who had blocked me years ago on Twitter, came walked up to me and smilingly called me a troll. Again, half-facetiously, but she did call me a troll. To my face. My reaction was to brush it off, good-humoredly, and to even engage her in conversation on other topics. Not that I could not have responded, but I have been brought up not to, not like that, when we are both guests of someone else.

So let’s go over that again. Apparently I am a troll. Now I have, in all these years that I have been online, never used gaalis, never issued threats, never been anonymous, never done paid tweets or blogs, never tweeted off a script, never worked for a political party, am not followed by Narendra Modi, and have written a number of  books, good enough to warrant a session in the same lit fest where said journalist had her session.

And yet I am a troll.

So what have I done? Since 2004, when I started this blog, I have spoken up against prevalent media narratives. I have also spoken against bad movies, bad IPL selections (Mashrafe Mortaza), bad anything, and criticizing movies brings the most impassioned hateful comments (be it a Sridevi movie or a SRK), but nothing quite invites the blowback that political blogging does. Whatever I have said or written, I have done so, without getting paid and with no expectation of getting something in return. And if I had any expectations of any benefit, I must suck badly at my manipulations for I have only suffered for my opinions, and I have said all that before, so won’t repeat it again.

Once again, what have I done? I have made fun of our media mavens, just like I have made fun of many other people and Himesh Reshammiya. I have pointed out the inconsistencies in their opinions over the years and their strategic silences and equally silent volubility through screenshots, snarky tweets, and blogposts, the magnetic depolarizations of their moral compass, and the tyranny of their selective distances, and the fluidity of their ink drying up at strategic times.

Yes. Guilty on that count.

So here is the thing.

The reason I am a troll is because trolling, once you get past the hand-waving and obfuscation, is actually about criticism.  No one likes criticism. Even I don’t, and yes I am talking to you, those who give one-star reviews of my books on Goodreads. The only thing is because I do not have a news channel of my own, or a program on it, or speaking privileges in Parliament, saying bad things about me is not a national emergency. But criticizing the circle of politicians and mediamen is. One has the power of the law behind them, and the other the bullying power of their bully pulpit.

If you sit through videos of Thinkfests and ThoughtConClaves, which I do from time to time, you will see a recurrent theme emerging from the public pronouncements of our media mavens, a few general talking points.

Journalists should hold truth to power, but everyone  is scared of the government and corporate interests that control the media. Everyone except me, journalist like Sekhar Suman in Tridev fighting Bhujang while “paap se dhari phaati phaati, adharm se asmaan, Arnab Goswami se kaanpi insaaniyaat, raj kar rahe hai Haiwaan”.
People need to stop calling us “presstitutes” or “sickulars” or “Congi agents” or “anti nationals”, because not all of us are bought, some of us are guided by our conscience and by the principles of good journalism. In other words, labels are bad.
The present government is silencing the media. Which is why journalists are scared to ask inconvenient questions.

Sounds good.

However, when a private citizen holds truth to their power, their entire argument is flipped on its head.

Private citizens are actually the secret arm of the government, being employed to silence the media (apparently through the simple expedient of tweeting). Even though I make crores and have an opinion show on prime time and my evenings are spend rubbing shoulders with the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, I am somehow the “weak”, that needs to be protected from random people who have to stand in line for 3 hours to get a driving license.
Labels are good. These people criticizing me are all bought, none of them are guided by their conscience or by the principles of fact-finding, but are “Bhakts”, “Internet Hindus”, “patriarchal NRIs” and that catch-all “trolls”.
Laws need to be passed to bring these people asking me inconvenient questions, and social media platforms should take steps to ban these people from using said platforms.

One more thing that I think I might have forgotten to mention during my talk, or I might have, it’s been long. It seems that trolls have a religion, and they have a party. When Zaira Wasim, a private citizen, was mercilessly and in most vile language, abused and threatened on social media, which led to her issuing an apology for her “behavior”, no one put a religion on the supposed-trolls, because that would be absolutely politically incorrect. Unless of course you use the term “Internet Hindu”, when it becomes part of the conversational zeitgeist. As to only one political party that engages in trolling aka BJP, it only appears so to our media influencers in the English media space because of their own perception bias. Since they are usually aligned against one particular party, the anti-establishment being actually anti-one-establishment, it stands to reason that principally supporters of that party will troll them. If you are a reviewer who gives 5 stars to every Shahrukh Khan film, it is highly unlikely you will get abused by SRK-ians, and because of that you will think that all trolls are fans of Bhai.

So how do I not become a troll? I can either sit on the fence and not comment on public forums, and maintain universal likeability. I can tweet praises of their books and their coverage of political events, even when they, as a whole media group, decide to shill for Akhilesh Yadav. I can choose not to compare their fawning over political figures in softball interviews with Jaya Bhaduri Bachchan as Guddi fluttering her eyelids at Dharmendra. I can align myself exclusively with one ideological camp, which means at least one side will rally behind me, and invite me to their  clique jamborees. I need to do take care as not all ideological camps are born equal. Because of the slant of English media (Hindi media is slanted to the other side), planting your post in the “liberal” (note the quotes) camp drastically reduces the chance of celebrities calling you a troll to your face in a genteel after-party.

Which means I need to work on this. Not be called a troll.

But every time I try, a voice in my head says:

Beta, tumse yeh na ho paayega.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The GreatBong MixTape For Your Valentine

1. Narangi Latke:

Nothing quiet sets the mood for love than a generous serving of fruit. In “Krantikshetra”, a band of terrorists lay siege to one of India’s premier schools. Now some other educational institutes might have, in the same situation, asked for Hindustan’s fragmentation, but this school, having as its student worthies like Harish (who seems to be stuck in school longer than Kanhaiya Kumar is stuck in universities), decide to engage in a song-and-dance number to distract said dastardly terrorists. Eminent faculty Dr. Shakti Kapoor is chosen for the purpose, along with a comely female student, and he regales the evil men with a song about the secret lives of plants.

Malnthara baag mein, nazook nazook daal pe, narangi laatke

From slender branches hang oranges, ripe for…for what’s the word…plucking. [Trivia: In the movie, they changed the words to “Narangi Lage Re” for some strange reason but the soundtrack has the original]

2. Angoor Ka Dana:

What’s better than one song about fruits to get you in the mood for love? Two songs about fruits. If song number one is about oranges, this one is about grapes. More precisely about how grapes become raisins, presented in a more digestible way than your average program on Discovery Channel. In it, the lady uses herself as a metaphor for a grape and requests people not to insert needles because if they do, the juice will leak out and she will become a raisin. On second thoughts, I don’t think that’s how raisins are made, but then again, if we can’t use a bit of imagination on Valentine’s Day when can we?

3. Prem Patra Aaya Hai:

The secret to a great romantic relationship is communication. Now in my time, (the 90s), there was no Whatsapp for jokes and Snapchats for dickpicks. Lovers communicated by hand-written letters, and there can be no Greatbong mixtape without a song that captures the joy of receiving that piece of paper with your lover’s handwriting. Maybe this song does go overboard a bit, but it does remain my favorite letter song of the 90s, perhaps because it has Avinash Wadhawan (most famous for “Oh Krishna You Are The Greatest Musician Of This World) and a sequence where the hero imagines he is making out with his lady-love, only to find it is a cow he has been caressing, thus inching out by a postcard “Khat Maine Tere Naam Likha” from Kajol’s debut film “Bekhudi”.

4. Tanha Dil Ghabrata Hai:

 

If song number three is the letter song, this is the telephone song. We made love over landlines. Phone calls were expensive, they got disconnected or crossed, and the worst was that they were in the living room, right where father would be sitting reading the newspaper. This song starring the cute real world couple of Bhagyasree and Himalaya (factoid: I watched Himalaya’s debut film “Qaid Main Hai Bulbul” with one other person (male) in an empty theater) captures beautifully the joy of receiving a call from that girl you slipped a note in school. Of course here, being rich, the couples have cordless phones, which in my days, was reserved for those affluent or those who has a NRI uncle kind enough to get one from phoren. For me, no such luck.

5. Khabar Mere Marne Ki:

 

Har kisiko naheen milta yahaan pyar zindagi mein. It’s even worse if you went to engineering college. A playlist for love cannot but have a song for unrequited love, and this one is it. Sung by Sonu Nigam, it shows, in a way that only 90s videos can, the depth of despair at witnessing one’s love is getting married to someone else, making you so desperate that you close your eyes in pleasure as two men kiss you from either side.

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6. Gup Chup

Those who have been in love know that misunderstandings happen. So do mistakes. Like after a long day of work, you go to bed with your “behenoi” on the roof instead of your husband, and your only excuse for the transgression, next morning, is “behenoi tha piya jaisa lamba” (Both were of the same length), also known as the Ahalya defense. In such situations, it is in your best interest, like Mamata Kulkarni, to ask forgiveness from Ranaji. One of the most brilliantly picturized songs from the 90s, this has it all. Shahrukh and Salman in the background. Johnny Lever in drag. Mamata Kulkarni in Chris Gayle like form. Ranjeet. And Amrish Puri’s expressions. I am sorry millenials, you will not enjoy anything like this in your lives. Ever.

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7. Chu Chu

No 90s inspired romantic playlist is complete without a Illa Arun/Sapna Awasthi type song. While Gupchup does belong to that style, Chu Chu is the more true representation of the genre, having all the keywords “murga”, “kabootar”, and the appropriate moaning sounds. While some may argue for “Choli ke peeche hai” or “Tick Tock Tick Tock”, what sets this song apart from the rest, at least for me, is what it conveys. If you come across a girl whose “man ke chidiya bole” (the bird of her mind) Chu Chu Chu, you know your acchedin is about to begin. Very rare this was in the 90s, so you wanted to put a ring on that bird. Seriously.

8. Bholi Bhali Ladki

Sometimes the purpose of a mix-tape, presented rather innocuously to your loved lady, is inception. To bury an idea, like a sui in angoor ka dana, in her mind.

So you had to plant the question. Oh innocent girl. When?

And for that, this song.

It does not merit an explanation. Just a listen.

9. Kal Raat Saiyaan Ne Aisi Bowling

I have always had a liking for women who like cricket. And this song, which somehow never made it to the screen in Vijaypath, is about a torrid spell of bowling, like Michael Holding to Boycott or Mitch Johnson to Jonathan Trott. At one point in the song, like Suresh Raina, the heroine is pleading for the hero to not bowl bouncers but to pitch it slow, at another point, she is ruing the intensity with which he is rubbing the ball, like a worried match referee. What makes this song so delightful is the kind of detail used in describing the passage of play, detail that you would be hardpressed to find anywhere outside a Prem Panicker match report from the late 90s. Love is a game, they say, and if she gets this song, both of you shall emerge winners.

10. I am Coming

Mithunda. A song that goes “Humpty Dumpty. Wee Willie Winkie. Ting-a-Linga-Ling (which actually sounds like Tingle In the Ling). I am coming. ”

What more can one say?

Except Happy Valentine’s Day.

 

Kaabil and Raees—A Joint Review

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The 90s are back.

Not that I have become thin again or that LK Advani once again has a chance to become the Prime Minister. No, the reason that the 90s are back, at least for the greater part of four hours, is because Raees and Kaabil are retreads of well-worn 90s formula, faithfully rehashing as it does ancient tropes, with only a thin patina of 2010s gloss airbrushed over them.

Which in itself is not bad, for  90s junkies like me, except that both fail in bringing something even mildly new to the familiar.

First Kaabil. You know something is off by two decades when in the first five minutes, there is a joke made on Hrithik Roshan and Yami Gautam’s babies being as white as goras. Not that one can fail to not notice Yami Gautam, the patron saint of fairness creams and its favorite brand ambassador, whose whiteness which, like snows on a mountain, can cause tone-blindness if not looked upon with shades, the joke, which would have passed unnoticed in the 90s, does sound a bit, just a tad off-color in this day and age.

And then we go back further. Yami Gautam, like Mithunda’s sister in each of his Ootie movies, is raped. And then, exactly like Mithunda’s sister, she commits suicide, clearly articulating the reason behind the act, namely that she is not the same for her husband after being defiled, and that of all the things she can tolerate, there is no greater torture than to see her husband’s (or in the case of Mithunda, brother and father’s) humiliation. While I am pretty sure I have heard this sentiment expressed in countless Hindi movies of the 90s, this so-called “Gudiya bigaar gayee aur sabka mooh kala ho gya” trope is absolutely atavistic in this day and age, leaving one wondering if it’s 2 am, and you are having trouble falling asleep, and have tuned into Zee Gold, to watch “Mera Pati Sirf Mera Hai” or actually in a multiplex watching a 2017 release.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love Sanjay Gupta. Those who have read “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” would know the reverence I hold “Aatish–Feel the Fire” in, and how it influenced the person I am today. Also a lot of world cinema I later came to appreciate  I first encountered second hand in his films, from the work of Chow Yun Fat to Park Chan-wook. I equally admire Rakesh Roshan as a producer, and for every UN-recognized atrocity like making Viveik Oberoi a super-mutant in Krrish 3, he has given us a Karan Arjun and a Koyla, from which are culled many of the iconic lines that defined my generation from Rakhi’s “Mere bete Karan Arjun ayenge” to Amrish Puri’s “Brahma ne tumhe itna bootiphool banaya, toh phir tan par kapda pahenkar kyon ghumti ho?”

Unfortunately, Kaabil has none of this kind of awesomeness. Instead, it is as predictable as Raina in front of a short ball. As Roshan goes on his journey of roaring retribution, you know who is going and in what sequence and how. Though Roshan tries his best to bring credibility to his role, underplaying his role, it is let down by a really weak story, and surprisingly, given that Ronit Roy is such a knock-out actor, a really flaccid villain, making me nostalgic for the “bad men” of Aatish, who when their evil brother was killed would say “Woh mere saapne mein aayega, mujhe bolega naheen ki Dada tu hijra hain? Ghulam, Dada Hijra naheen hai”.

At one stage, Roshan tells the police “You will be know it all, but you won’t be able to do anything”. Watching Kaabil is a bit like that, you pretty much know it all from the trailers, but then you start watching, and you realize you can’t do anything.

Raees is similar in its retro-ness, except that the formula it chooses to follow is the Scarface knock-off, essayed with Glen McGrath-like metronomicity by Sanjay Dutt over multiple films, of the gangster rising from humble origins, overthrowing his bosses, tangling with politicians, and of the idealistic policeman who brings him down. Unfortunately, in India, you can never make the superstar black, forget even solidly grey, and much of the film wastes too much time in lionizing the protagonist. He helps the poor. He gives lectures on secularism. He kills but he feels bad. He smuggles in RDX but he was not aware he was, and he breaks down at the consequences of his actions, and essentially turns himself, so wracked by guilt he is. Given that the film is apparently inspired by true events of a bootlegger-turned-arms-smuggler associate of Dawood, one would have hoped that the film would be honest enough to not to scrub the protagonist, but a combination of the need to maintain the image of a superstar and, this is a conjecture, the politics of the very political director, put paid to that.

This part I do understand. What I cannot fathom is the choice of the heroine, who, and I don’t care how great she acts in Pakistani TV series, is seriously underwhelming in every scene, and I wish I had a fast forward button in the theater every time she came on to the screen.

What makes Raees rise above Kaabil though is Shahrukh Khan. There is an intense physicality to his acting, which is what made me a fan once upon a time, but over the years, the dictates of commerce and the weakness of his directors have made him cross over the line of subtlety  to hammy overacting, the eyes reddening and the lips trembling in rage, but here, SRK is in almost total control, in the kind of role he was born to play. Returning to to his anti-hero roots he shows he still got it, his performance totally “chawanni-fek citi-maaro” in a single-screen way, as he dominates every sequence, no matter how cliched its execution is, so much so that he makes Raees watchable, despite the predictability of it all.

However watchability no longer cuts it, in the race to the top of Bollywood’s top-of-the-pile. You need the perfect mix of familiarity, uniqueness, concept, and marketing, as Bajrangi Bhaijaan and PK and Dangal showed, in order to rake in the real big bucks. Which is why both Raees and Kaabil will possibly not go beyond the middle of the pole, being as they are adequate star-vehicles, but lacking that rocket fuel, whose formula you wish you knew but whose absence you can easily detect.

 

 

 

Trump: Week One

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One of the intellectually lazy, actually the word should be moronic but I am trying to be kind here, connections often made by our liberal media cognoscenti is between Trump and Modi, between the Republicans and the BJP, between the Right of India and the Right of the US, and if a poke in the eye as to the difference was ever needed, it was delivered by a succession of Trump’s executive orders. To put it in perspective, if Modi had come to power in 2014 and within a week, asked for the construction of a wall on the Bengal border, allocated more resources to search and weed out illegal Bangladeshi refugees already in India, threatened the government of West Bengal of withdrawal of federal aid if they continued to turn their back to influx of Bangladeshi refugees, put in place a number of policies that would essentially make legal Muslim migration an impossibility, and, then just for fun, asked for stringent laws across the country to ban cow slaughter, and asked Parliament for a plan to build the Ram Temple in 180 days, and made sex-determination of fetuses legal, and made Yogi Adityanath his number two man in government, then, yes, perhaps there would be a smidgen of similarity between the two.

Whatever you may have thought of Trump, one thing you have to accept. He does not waste much time. Within a week of coming to power, he has put in place, through executive orders, the foundation planks of some of the most extreme of his election promises. The hand of alt-right bannerman and the right ear of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon has never been clearer. Needless to say, stopping PhD students in linguistics or professors in biology from entering the country, some of whom have been here for years and have green cards, and some of whom are from Iran, the land of Shias who the ISIS hate the most, will do nothing to curb the ISIS menace or radical Sunni terror. Not that Trump cares. He doesn’t because a bulk of his supporters, the so-called alt-right, don’t care either. For them, this is red meat, the humiliation and defenestration of the undesirable “minorities”. For now, Trump has gone as far as he can, while being within the limits of the Constitution, which a blanket “Muslim ban” would possibly have violated, though I doubt just this would be deemed satisfactory if this is all that Trump does in four years.

That’s why Bannon is there. To keep the pressure on. And he he hasn’t done badly. This is just Week One. And it is already Christmas in January for the Breitbart crowd.

For a lot of Indian NRI Hindus, I observe regrettably an emotion that ranges from “Won’t happen to me because Trump loves Hindus” to schadenfreude because those affected are Muslims. While I would not have the courage to stick my neck out and predict what Trump will do next week, let me posit a sobering hypothesis. Steve Bannon’s army, or one of Trump’s core constituents, may rail against the Muslims and the Mexicans, but they know that their odds of being killed in a road accident are higher than of being killed by Islamic terror, and that the Mexicans aren’t the ones who are taking the jobs they would care for. Their real enemies, they believe or are made to, are the Chinese who have taken their manufacturing jobs and, hold your breath for while, Indians who have taken their IT gigs. So the sabre rattling against China will go on, on trade, but then again Trump and his team knows, and remember Trump understands his own interests if not anything else, that an all-out trade-war with China will not end well.

Fighting with nations is hard. China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia.

Individuals, well that’s quite easy.

Which leaves the H1B program, the perfect low-hanging fruit for Trump to score some brownie points with his constituents, made even lower by the fact that Donald Trump’s businesses won’t be affected by its gutting. And trust me, if Indian Cobol developers are summarily sent back, there won’t even be the gentle consolation of crowds of ACLU lawyers with “Free legal help for those affected” at the airport, or impassioned articles in the Times.

So be careful in your neutrality or delight, dear desis. Be very careful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dhulagarh and the Media Narrative

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In this excellent piece in Newslaundry, titled “Dhulagarh Riots: Why did Bengal media ignore it?”, Deepanjana Pal writes:

For approximately four hours, Dhulagarh burned. Shops were set on fire in the local bazaar and looted. The mob attacked homes, looting them and lobbing bombs – crude contraptions that are far more dangerous cousins of the pataka – at them. Eye witnesses say Hindu households were targeted. “You have to understand, everyone knows everyone in places that are this small,” said one reporter. “Hindus and Muslims live in separate neighbourhoods, but together. So when this happened, some of them recognised those who were attacking them and when they didn’t recognise them, they knew these were outsiders.” One temple was attacked and its idol – of Kali, the goddess best known for her all-destroying rage – was broken. There are reports of Hindu families having fled to neighbouring villages.

All this violence took place in broad daylight. In the videos that have been circulated, no one is seen wearing masks. It’s all out in the open and witnessed by locals who tried to get in touch with journalists. From the videos and photographs that were shared, it almost seems like the locals did the actual on-ground reporting. They were desperate to talk and be heard. Unfortunately, few listened and Dhulagarh was barely mentioned in mainstream Bengali news. (emphasis mine)

“What we were told was that since this is a communal issue, we should approach it cautiously and underplay it so that things don’t flare up,” said one journalist.

So the excuse being offered is that because reporting a communal incident might provoke other communal incidents, mediamen refuse to cover communal flareups.

The only problem with this is simply this.

It is not true.

Large sections of media, be it in Bengal or at the national level, has absolutely no problem, in Bengal or otherwise, in reporting communal incidents. They covered Dadri for months. Gujarat, 2002, they are still covering, and it is now 15 years.

It is only when the incidents run counter to their stated narrative, that India is being ruled by a fascist Hindu Hitler-wannabe who has instituted a reign of majoritarian terror, that the Indian media  behave the same way as parents do when their children ask “Does Santa really exist? If he does why is the gift he brought the same as the one that has been lying in the trunk of our car for the last two days?”, namely with silence and then with an attempt to change the conversation. In Bengal there is the other reason for covering up communal incidents. Pretty much most of the media is mortally afraid of the TMC or indebted to it (usually both),  and anything that shows the party in a bad light, a party that has been pulled by no less than the High Court for appeasement of a certain community, will not make it past the desks of the editors.

But for now, let us concentrate on our nation’s media mavens, the ones who win “Best Journalism Awards” instituted by their own channels, whose name echoes in time as the Bane of NRIs in Madison Square Garden.

You know where I am going with this.

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While the riots are going on, when media involvement usually forces the government to act, when bad things can be prevented through press intervention, one of our country’s premier “journalist”s, based out of Delhi, parrots the Trinamool Congress line and denies the riots. He subsequently then puts “” around riots, in the same way I have put it around “journalist” in the preceding sentence.

It is only after Zee TV gets involved, perhaps because their politics is more aligned with BJP, that his own channel India Today, perhaps because one cannot let a rival take the TRPs with a story, goes to the region and files a report, of helpless people having their life-savings looted, of a mother ruing her son’s irreplaceable study notes being burned in addition to having all their valuables taken, that the whole of India at least has the opportunity to look at the world, as it is.

Of course an FIR is filed against Zee TV for reporting the incident. Usually something like this brings forward a tidal wave of press outrage, of impassioned editorials and flowing pens, ruing the fascism of the Hindu majoritarians, but since this time, very inconveniently,  it was not quite fitting into their narrative, we were treated to the manufactured diversion of “trolling in social media”. Double points here, because it is an issue that personally affects these media mavens, in the same way that Arnab Goswami’s barbs did, so it’s absolutely deserving of hours of media coverage, and impassioned chest-beating. The trolls make our social media life miserable. What? Your child’s laptop, the one you saved for years, was looted, and you have no house to stay in? Sorry, pal, tyranny of distance, my moral compass just can’t point there. Here, have some quotation marks.

The irony of this kind of targeted censorship is that it ends up hurting the very agenda that is close to their hearts. Since the media will try its level best not to report a particular type of communal violence, it then becomes very easy for Hindu fanatics to cook up or grossly exaggerate incidents of communal violence, then use social media to spread their message, and people will be more inclined to believe whatever they get on their FB walls or Whatsapp,  the lack of coverage in mainstream media, perversely, validating the story: if the news channels aren’t covering this, it must be true.

India is a country where minorities are in constant peril, regardless of who is at the center. Anyone, of any religion, can be a minority, and whether you belong to a minority is a function of where you are located, who are around you and in what number, how organized they are, and who the local government is aligned with. So, yes, even in an India ruled by a Hindu nationalist party, there are significant sections where Hindus are minorities. By refusing to give coverage to violence perpetrated on them and worse by casting doubts on its truth, in one fell swoop, the media strengthens both extremes of the political spectrum and ossifies the culture of violence and intimidation of minorities, which we inherited during Partition, a culture which no party in India has the slightest interest in dismantling.

Not that our media superstars don’t know this. They are not that dumb. It’s just that their “anti-establishment” is basically anti-one-establishment, their anger deepened by the fact that the “wrong person” won in 2014. Which is why they have no compunction in echoing the TMC talking points, because they believe that TMC is also anti-that-one-establishment, even though in the context of the Bengal riots, TMC is the establishment. Which is why their moral compass keeps steady while refusing to cover or to resign to the back of the paper, anything that does not conform to their political narrative, of the fascism of the Hindu majoritarian rule in Delhi, no matter the human cost of what they choose to ignore.

Tragic.

 

Dangal—The Review

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The genre of sports movies is more trope-laden than most. The come-back-from-behind victory at the end. Adversity. Perseverance.  The overcoming of personal demons. The obtaining of redemption either through one’s victory or through one’s wards. A training montage to robust background music. Dangal, inspired by wrestler Mahavir Singh Phogat and his Commonwealth-medal-winning daughters, ticks almost all those boxes, with excellent performances from the ever-reliable Aamir Khan and the actresses who play Geeta Phogat and Babita Phogat as adults, Fatima Sana Seikh and Sanya Malhotra, and those that play them as children, Zaira Wasim and Suhani Bhatnagar, suitably rousing music, some excellently choreographed wrestling sequences, and the cinematic scaffolding needed to hold it all together, taut and flabless, for two and a half hours.

And yet, Dangal, is at its weakest when it is just a sports film.

Because wrapped inside Dangal’s sports-movie tropes is a narrative that transcends the limitations of the genre, to touch one of the fundamental conflicts of the human condition.

That between the parent and the child, of what the parent wants the child to be and what the child is.

When that conflict comes to the fore pushing the sports movie to the back, Dangal soars.

Mahavir Singh Phogat is the typical Indian parent, trying to vicariously attain his own failed dream through his children. The only thing not typical about him are his methods, extreme, even by the tiger standards of pre-2000s parenthood (according to Geeta and Babita, the real people, the film shows barely half of what they endured growing up).  Forced to cut her hair short as a schoolgirl, not eat junk food or watch movies, or dance at weddings, Geeta Phogat discovers, at the National Sports Academy, not just liberation from her father’s curfew hours, but a new life, one that allows her to be a sportsperson as well as a normal young girl.

This leads to rebellion.

The best part of Dangal for me is not the climactic fights, which were very sports-movie, but the fight Geeta Phogat has with her old man, half-way through the film, a battle between the new techniques taught at the National Sports Academy and those her father stands by. It is bare-knuckles, fierce, and dramatic, where rebellious daughter is not only asserting her individuality but also trying to establish her superiority over someone who to her is larger-than-life, and for anyone who has ever felt the need to prove to their parents that he is better than they are, I know I have, this is about as much an intense dramatization of that struggle that one can hope to see, and as a father who also wants his daughter to achieve what he could not, this is about as much an intense dramatization of the struggle that I shall see in the future.

And this is precisely where Dangal not just hits the spot, but vaults you over its shoulder onto the mat.

Which brings me to my main gripe. Instead of showing the NSA coach as a cardboard villain, slimy and toady, Dangal’s core conflict could added a texture if it had showed the coach as someone whose methods and techniques are merely different from that of Mahavir Phogat’s,  but not inherently wrong. However if Dangal misses a trick here, it gets most everything else right, making it arguably the best Hindi movie this year.

A point to be made, not so much about Dangal as a movie, but Dangal as a message. Which as we know in any Aamir Khan movie is a big thing. Many have pointed out that how Dangal’s glorification of obsessive parenthood runs counter to Aamir Khan’s messaging of 3 Idiots. Without getting into a deep discussion of whether Aamir Khan, as an artist, is even obliged to be consistent in his messaging across movies, the point is given the regressive mores of the society to which Mahavir Phogat belongs, where girls are born to cook, clean, marry and bear babies, it would take only this kind of parental extremism, this kind of autocratic obsession, to steamroll over all obstacles, and so while it maybe justified to cringe at his methods, there is no way Mahavir Phogat could have been a sensitive Facebook parent, given where he was born, and break the barriers that he did. The larger legacy of Phogat trumps his methods of how he achieved that and it is that legacy which is the message of Dangal, not so much the parenting.

And while cynics like me may scoff at the Aesop-fablization of cinema, messaging through popular entertainment is, undeniably, a powerful tool in changing societal attitudes, and Dangal, even if we forget everything else, works spectacularly in this respect, in addition to strengthening, after a controversial last year, the Aamir Khan brand of “meaningful entertainment”.

Oh sir, we promise to be tolerant, if you keep helming projects like this.

Total victory.

 

 

 

 

 

The Echo Chambers: Demonetization

When Modi said that he was going to announce something important to the nation at eight, I thought, it could be only one of two things. That he wanted to do a review of Sultan of Delhi. Or that he was going to enter the Big Boss House. Instead he demonetized 500 and 1000 rupee notes, and it seemed that his election promise of depositing 15 lacs of black money in every bank account was coming true, except that it was not someone else’s black money in your account, which is what people thought, but your own black money in your own account, and this is what happens when you don’t go over the fine print.

Over the next few days, I have sought to write my two five hundred rupee notes about demonetization, but I have been told I should not, because I am a NRI, and what would I know. I was told this by the very same people who in India have strong opinions on Donald Trump and white privilege, and who refuse to accept Donald Trump as their president, perhaps because their president is Pranab Mukherjee. So I have decided to shut up, and also because I am not really an economist, and this, seems something that only specialists can be seriously expected to evaluate.

But what I find truly worth commenting on, is media—both mainstream and social. Depending on which channel you are watching or which friend’s status update shows up in your News Feed, you get diametrically opposite truths. So if you are watching Zee, Ram Rajya has been established and people are singing and dancing on the streets like extras in “Awwal Number”, and if you are watching NDTV, it’s the opening episode of Walking Dead. Of course some media figures do it better than the other. Sardesai for one goes to his own bank, tries to rile up the employees, even calling them kaamchor to their face, and also the customers, but fails spectacularly, as each and every person seems happy and supportive of the measure. Ravish, the second single-name journalist of the AAP (the first being Ashutosh) does a much more competent job of bringing out the apocalypse that he wants demonetization to be, by travelling outside his own bank, which makes him

The last sentence was not incomplete by the way, I just mimed the last few words.

But the media. We always knew they were like this. But people? On my time-line, there is a group, who call doomsday every day in order to validate their anger at their person not winning in 2014, for whom  that no matter what the Prime Minister does, it’s genocide. And there is another group that no matter what the Prime Minister does, it is like Raveena Tandon dancing in the rain.

There is no middle ground.

And both sides have their rhetorical devices.

If you are complaining that the queues are large, well didn’t you stand in line for two hours to buy tickets for Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and don’t even talk of free choice. And then there is the “imagine the hardship the army is going through” argument, which is what I have been telling my wife all these years of marriage, every time I have farted in bed, post an intense shorshe-maach dinner.

Powerful stuff.

For the other side, the safe word is “privilege”. Show them opinion, show them facts, show them whatever you can, but nothing you say will be accepted, because you have upper-class privilege. They obviously don’t, despite being on Facebook posting 100 sari challenge and checking into first class airport lounges, which is why they are receptive to the pains of the common man. They may not let their hired help sit on their sofa or not turn on the fan for them, (not that you would know from their social media feed) and they may deduct wages for an absent day, but come a firmaan from Modi, and they cannot sleep because they are concerned for the cash situation of the people that work for them. And villages, we must not forget villages, and these people are immensely aware of villages, because they go out to Hauz Khas village every now and then, and wear ethnic jewelry from Delhi Haat. However when shown a video of the aforementioned common man not complaining, but instead saying they are prepared to do this for the nation and they realize the larger importance of demonetization, watch the very same people sneer at “stupid nationalism” of the simple-minded unwashed, unaware to accept the humanity of those not cynical like them. Either that or wave them away as a Bhakt.

Because when all fails, it is “Bhakt”, the liberal version of “Congi presstitute”. That and NRI, and preferably both together.

The way, this privileged NRI sees it (you didn’t think I wasn’t going to talk about it now, did you?), is that demonetization is a bold move. Yes. Significant amounts of unaccounted for money is kept in cash, because unlike buying gold or property, it does not involve another party, and so introduce a weak link in your chain of secrecy. That is why Pablo Escobar kept notes in rubberbands underground. That is why any illegal transaction, be it for your second hand car or your apartment, has a significant “off the books” cash part. That is why crores are being deposited in the border areas of Bengal (link) and that is perhaps why Mamata Banerjee so hates demonetization that she is ready to join hands with the CPM, in a Saruman-Sauron-type alliance for the One Ring.

Demonetization is also a grossly mismanaged move, and it is one where the higher you are in the social scheme of things, the less inconvenienced you are, and it disproportionately, by it’s very nature, affects marginalized sections (daily laborers, prostitutes, small merchants like fish-vendors) more than others. That also is undeniable. There are also more esoteric objections, namely on the limitations on the power of the government, and these are good conversations and debates to have, but then, that’s not we see on social and rarely on mainstream media.

Instead, depending on whose status has shown up top of your feed, we see only one side. Not only that, it is not even true. Factually. So it is said that Vijay Mallaya is being spared, that the government has given up on getting money back from him, which is absolutely not correct, but it doesn’t matter any more, no matter what facts are presented to counter it, because it’s on my News Feed and shared and commented on. It is said that more than fifty people died due to demonetization, and when a journalist from BBC points that out, yes the effing BBC, he is effectively accused of being a shill of the BJP, no not by your friend with the “Free Binayak Sen” banner from 2011, but a Chief Minister of a state. As the leaders do, the followers follow, and you can see the cascade effect on people of a particular persuasion, many publicly AAP and many not,  still wanting to believe they are living under the Third Reich, and warping the world to suit that narrative. On the other side, are those that believe Modi is the greatest thing since dhokla, who will consistently, and with an equally closed mind, present their alternate reality as the truth, and if the facts are not enough, there are pictures, and as the ancient Chinese proverb goes “A photoshopped picture is worth a thousand words.”

This echo-chambering of media, mainstream and social, has gotten worse over the past two years. This of course reflects a global trend. The current US election is being called as the one settled by “fake news sites” shared on Facebook. and as more and more people get their news primarily from Facebook and social media. One can see the same malaise reflected in Indian media spaces, as both mainstream and social media become more shrill, partisan and absolutely one-sided.

And truth is, to paraphrase a line from Sultan of Delhi, no longer what happened, but what sufficient number of people would like to believe happened.

Truly bad news.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betting Against Trump

I am not a betting kind of person. The first time I bet on something was so that I could reverse-jinx, a one-rupee rosogolla againt India winning against England in the World Cup 83 semi-finals. When I lost the bet, I refused to pay up. Years later, this time because I was actually confident I would win, I bet a coffee on Hillary Clinton with a colleague, confident that I would get a free Starbucks coffee.

This time, being older, I could not cry and get out of my commitment. So I bought the coffee.

Because all through these months, I was absolutely sure that Hillary Rodham Clinton was going to win. Absolutely sure. Blame Nate Silver. Blame the different polls. Blame my faith in data delivered from a pulpit of authority. Most importantly, I had based my belief, and I acknowledge I was wrong, that the cosmic order would give Clinton the presidency, that somehow, to quote Paulo Coelho, when you want something the whole universe conspires to give you it, and boy has Ms. Clinton wanted this. My middle-class upbringing tells me that the studious girl always gets A, the one who has prepared for the test, again and again and again, for the past forty years, and not the  hungover bully, smelling of shots and lipstick, who staggers into the exam hall, and scribbles something on his sheet.

And then this happens.

Miley Cyrus is twerking with tears. There are protests everywhere. Racist bullying spikes all over the country. A host on liberal talk radio spends ten minutes conjuring Nazi imagery, before helpfully adding ‘not that I am implying Trump is Hitler and gas chambers will spring up’ (too late sir, too late sir). Stephen Colbert is shellshocked. Trump is not my president. I am ashamed to be American. From op-eds in the major newspapers to Trevor Noah on Comedy Central, the message is the same—the US is at the core a country of racists and misogynists, though I fail to catch the part when it went from the place that elected Obama to this, the underarm of Darth Vader, maybe because no one quite tells me.

I have to react too, because everyone else is. As a brown immigrant US permanent resident, standing at the doorstep of a possible future where supposedly “The Man In the High Castle” is no longer alternate history, but reality, who will be dragged out any time now to be put deported, despite my very legal green card, this is perhaps my last chance to speak.

Oh my dear liberals, of my dear Democrats. If you cared so much about me, about your beloved country becoming the Third Reich, perhaps, well perhaps, you should not have put Hillary Rodham Clinton on the ticket. When your must-win states passes right through the rust belt, historically the portion of your country most ravaged by globalization and the flight of manufacturing jobs to other places, surely, you do not put on the ballot a person who is the anthropomorphism of that very political culture, of free-trade and no import tariffs and of NAFTA, the candidate of Wall Street and high-paid corporate gigs and the ultimate Washington insider, so much an insider that she has actually already been inside the White House. You do not put her on the ticket, when the opponent can legitimately claim not to have been part of the establishment that was responsible for the flight of jobs overseas, neither Democrat nor Republican, and whose principal political message is “I will get those jobs back, I will rip up the treaties, and I will launch a trade war on the countries that took your jobs” (it’s another thing if he will ever do all this, but between him and Clinton, he is the more likely to even try).

And if you do, well, this is what happens.

The numbers are in, dear Democrats, and your own people, did not vote for her. Here is the data. The same people who voted for a Black American did not vote for a White Woman, and if there is one thing I have learned in my years in this country, is that no single group as mistrusted in the country than the black American male. So apparently, the same people who were enlightened enough to vote for a black American male with a Muslim middle-name turned racist bigot misogynist in four years when it came to Hillary, who, lest you forget, ran on promising a third term of Obama’s policies.

Whose fault do you think was that?

Oh I get it. It was the racists. It was the basket of deplorables. It was the homophobes and the rape culture-enablers and the mansplainers and the culture appropriators and the women who would not support women.. See there you see is your problem. While you argue, and rightly so, that the activities of a few Muslims should not make all Muslims terrorists, you forget that very same principle when you generalize the traits of a few Trump supporters to taint all Trump-supporters, denying them their individuality, and the genuineness of own respective circumstances. You, kale-eater and Whole Foods shopper, may think, from the point of view of your “privilege” (it’s a word that cuts both ways, you see) that “pussy grabbing” disqualifies Trump from being a President, but there are others, who surprise of surprises, prioritize the promise of getting their job back over the personal failings of their candidate. There are women, the overwhelming majority of white women as the numbers show, who do not feel that Hillary, the entitled and privileged woman she is,  represents their own personal struggles, that her breaking the glass ceiling is just her breaking the glass ceiling and nothing else. Feel free to say they deserve a special place in hell for not supporting a fellow woman, as Madeline Albright had said. Feel free to be creative but remember they get one vote each. Just like you.

So pile on. Call them what you want, use the word “misogynist” or “mansplainer” or whatever-is-the-pejorative-of-the-day as per Slate and Jezebel to tar and feather. But remember this. If someone who wears a costume during Halloween you do not approve of becomes a “racist”, and a supervilliain in an XMen film holding the neck of a female XMen becomes misogyny, what happens is that when the real misogynist and homophobe comes along, like Trump, your labels have lost their edge. Now all it does is it makes people shrug their shoulders and say “Oh well who cares, they say that about everybody nowadays, the PC police”. Worse, being named and shamed drives people underground, makes them reluctant to say what they feel, declaring they are voting Hillary and then voting Trump. Which means you have bad data to go on, and decisions based on bad data…well…we see now what happens.

So keep at it. Refuse to accept him as your President, just like the President refuses to accept climate change. Because, the truth, as you know, bends to your will. Blame the FBI director, as if that was the reason that Hillary lost her own Democratic vote. Keep discussing, on TV, the changing demographics of the US, that makes white voters increasingly redundant. Of course, that won’t lead to a backlash from white voters, and of course, no political operative, would be smart enough to play on that. Keep on foisting uninspiring candidates, on the wrong side of history, on the American public, and try to shame them into voting for that person. Keep doing so.

And it’s not Trump that would have brought the apocalypse.

It’s you.

And I can bet on that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goodbye Arnab Goswami (For Now)

“A dangerous game is about to begin”. And with that Amitabh Bachchan, in Aankhein, launched a daring scheme to rob a bank with two men who could not see (Akshay Kumar and Paresh Rawal) and one man who could not see or act (Arjun Rampal).

It is not a coincidence that “A game is about to begin” was what Arnab Goswami chose to ominously utter to his staffers in Times Now before making his final exit. Whether he intends to start an international channel to take on the BBC and Al Jazeera or whether he merely intends to get his hands on  Pirzada’s jewels we know not, but something tells me he will , like a Cyborg sent from the future, be back. Whether the magic he created at Times Now will ever be recreated, like the Anil Kapoor-Madhuri chemistry of Batata Wada, I do not know, but Arnabs of the world, at least the ones I have known, never fade quietly into the night.

It is just not in their nature.

Arnab Goswami is, and I hesitate to use the past tense for him, many things. An arrogant, self-important demagogue who broke news into a million pieces. A human mute button. A paper tiger. A showman in love with the amplitude of his own voice. A TRP-hungry wild boar. A narcissist who would shame Narcissus himself. Mother-in-law to the nation, in that he was always right, and he never let anyone else speak.

Whatever you may choose to call him, and we can get as imaginative as we want, Arnab Goswami was the closest we ever got to an independent pundit. When people call him a BJP stooge, they reveal their own bias, if not their unbridled jealousy at his success, for he has been an equal opportunities offender throughout these years, and it is, if you remember, Subramanium Swamy who called him a dumbo and an ignoramus, and the spokesperson of the BJP who accused him of “taking money from the lobby” and he has been subject to choice abuse by “Internet Hindus” and I know because I get mistaken on Twitter for him. When people call him a Bill O’Reilly wannabe, they forget (perhaps because they don’t know and they are using a name that makes them sound knowledgeable) that Bill O’Reilly’s main plank is social conservatism, and his bread and butter is “attack on Judeo-Christian values” and he rails and rants against the secular progressives who are ruining America’s “Christian” culture, whereas Arnab Goswami has consistently been progressive on religious Hindu issues—be it temple entry for women or being anti-377.

This independence I believe stemmed purely from Arnab Goswami’s core beliefs—that there is only King and only one God.

Himself.

How do I know? Because I am an Arnab too, and that’s how we roll.

Pompous jackass he might have been, but here is one thing I can say. He talked to no lobbyist and he roughed up no critic and he sent no abuse on social media. And he went where no man has gone before. He took on the NGOs, and laid bare their agendas and their funding, and at least raised awareness as to the insidious ways they influence policy and opinion. No major media personality has done that before, maybe because they are all part of the same system. Arnab took on that system, the ones he called “Lutyens media”, and in a world where the media operates on an Omerta, it was refreshing to see someone major calling out his peers, all without taking their names, peers who would compare a terrorist with a freedom fighter or try to spin a extremist religious agenda into a resistance against the fascist Indian state.

Did he lack nuance? Of course he did. Did he simplify and stereotype? Guilty as charged.

But he brought balance to the force, and if his hypernationalism seemed  overwrought, it was more than countered by the programming on the other side, of the “And they hanged Yaqub” and the secularization of an Islamic fundamentalist agitation, and the equating of a Burhan with a Bhagat Singh. And if his self-importing appropriation of national interest was cynical and transparently hollow, he displayed no less chutzpah than those who similarly appropriated  the word  “anti-establishment” as semantic cover for being “anti-a-certain-establishment”.

He took a lot of flak, from every side, and because he went after the media, from some of his media colleagues too. But instead of getting into Twitter wars and sending legal notices or shaking them by the collar, he just looked into the camera, and refused to even address them by name. It was a confidence that came from not just an undoubted ability to get high on own’s own supply, but also from a sincere belief that his show was the one that got the most conversation. He knew it, because even though he let no one speak on the show, and the guests would subsequently write angry articles on how Arnab Goswami bullied and cut off their mic, they would be back, each and every time as repeat guests, hoping to get 2 seconds of talk time on his multi-ring daily circus, all just to feed off Arnab’s popularity.

The lightening rod, the totem pole, the horn in the fog.

That was Arnab Goswami.

The only show in town.