Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

by Manu Joseph

Echoes are rare in Mumbai.

Witty way of saying it's crowded.

Something about majestic cable-stayed bridges across shallow seas remind Marxists that they have lost to capitalism and human nature.

To be infuriated by a young woman is to accept that the world is an unfamiliar place.

Beyond that many people, anywhere in the nation, there would be at least two nationalists who would be seriously enraged and one of them would be rich enough to afford to fling a shoe at her.

Activism at low risk.

‘Just look at him. How tragic for women that he has chosen to be celibate. He says he has always been celibate. How weird, between the Pope and Damodarbhai, two virgins rule half the world.

In sarcasm one says the exact opposite of what one means. It is the second-lowest form of humour, it is too easy. Through such low devices, though, she rebukes a nation that has fallen in love with Damodarbhai. Is she then one of them? Yet another young woman who, like the State, is the actuality of an ethical idea?

Nevertheless, he uses it generously.

It is astonishing how fast Indian men can run when they are inspired.

Maybe people do not wish anyone dead, but want the number of the dead in a calamity to be high. A remarkable number but a believable number that is not divisible by five or ten.

‘The fact, Mr Rajan, that he can identify the author of a work as a woman also means, by default, he can tell if the author is a man. Why aren’t men pissed?’

Burn all woke people!

Taken together, her many pranks reveal a pattern. Her victims are rich Marxists, socialists, environmentalists, actually anyone in this country who eats salad; also agitators against large dams; foes of genetically modified organisms; summer interns from Columbia School of Journalism who wish to liberate Tibet. They are the foes of Damodarbhai. Philosophical Thugs, that is what they are, like the patriarchs of the Sangh on the other side of the fence. And that is the name of her website. PhilosophicalThugs.com.

‘They can’t hear you,’ the soldier says. ‘This is not a phone.’

Imprudently funny.

What Mukesh Ambani’s home is to Arundhati Roy, Roy’s home is to a malnourished woman. So? The accusation of hypocrisy in an Indian socialist and Marxist is not exactly a high intellectual grouse. Miss Iyer is surely not taking all this trouble to laugh at a minor human flaw that should ideally be declared a fundamental human right.

Mumbra, it turns out, is an enchanted place where fragrant streams flow, divine food lines the alleys and wild lovers romp on fruits. But this is from a pig’s point of view.

Romaticizing idiots.

One reason why the Muslim population is growing faster than the Hindu, Damodarbhai would never say it aloud, is that Muslims don’t kill their girls in the womb. So many girls have been killed it is now evident in plain sight – not only as streets and villages and railways stations filled only with men, but as eerie stares.

Two birds with one shot.

People look reasonable in photographs, but they are usually misshapen in the flesh. They don’t mean to disappoint, obviously, or to trick. It is just the way things are.

In the act of waiting you watch events unfold. Events are usually the creation of people in haste. In waiting you watch them win, until an opportunity arises to intervene decisively.

And some unobserved facts here and there.

In the first five minutes she is excited. He is dead. Mother’s boss has been long dead. She runs to Father and says, ‘Does Ma know?’ Mother knows. The girl is confused, dejected. She had thought that if the news of Mr Mao’s death is broken to Ma, she might shut shop and return. But Ma knows. She works for a dead Chinese man. Right. The girl reads more about Mr Mao. She is even more confused. She figures that Mr Mao actually wanted farmers, at least most of them, to become factory workers. And he took away so much grain from farmers in China that millions of them starved to death. He seemed to have been a very cruel man. She runs to Pa. ‘Mao was not a Maoist,’ she says. ‘Does Ma know?’ Mother knows. Kind of. ‘Mao’s ideas were right,’ Pa says. They just didn’t turn out the way he wanted them to. Right.

Very funny.

Mukundan can see why the presence of the girl is a problem. The Bureau wishes to take Jamal to a safe house, get all the juice out of him, or flip him into an informer. What use are terrorists in prison? The Bureau can abduct shady men and keep them in illegal detention for months until they are of no use. Then they are handed over to formal custody. Sometimes they die. The Bureau is allowed to get away with that because there are things a nation must do. But it would be messy to abduct a young woman who is probably just another girl in the company of the wrong man in the wrong place. If she is left in the car, she would be a witness to the abduction. If she is abducted, she would have to be seriously implicated in terror or eliminated because illegal confinement of a woman is not the same as that of a man. There would be hell. And if the abduction does not go smoothly and there is a gun battle, a dead young Muslim girl would draw too much attention.

Absurdity and complications in national defence.

Activism is always a feudal system in which nobodies are in the care of somebodies. It begins in a special moment when the elite of a system become the underclass in another system.

Indeed.

‘Films nowadays are becoming realistic.’ ‘What do you mean realistic?’ ‘No song-and-dance. No dream sequence. Grim stuff.’

He recognises the class who are often ignored, unobserved or considered not important even though they are poor and victims of inequality. Because they don't belong too close or too far in the oppressed scale or are not too scathed.

The village romantics, who usually live in the cities, cannot bear the thought. The romantics wish everything to remain the same because it is aesthetic that way.

What he wishes to destroy is left activism, but he is not going to make it look that obvious. He would have a go at everyone who receives alms from white people.

In fact, some cops look like cops only when they are in civilian clothes.

Facts that most of us miss.

When a man feels he is nothing, he loses his ideology and convictions. Then he is filled only with

Everything that they would do from this point would be a waste of time. Some middle-aged men may receive general appreciation for exhibiting their low-stakes goodness, but the mother will continue to travel in great misery. The story of the nation.

The problem finds not solution but the spectators gain from it.

A patriarch and a modern young woman are natural foes, yet Miss Iyer and he see something in the goodness syndicate that most people cannot. They can see a feudal system where the strong use the weak to attack the stronger.

Everything about the nation in a nutshell.

The true hero would be disgraced, but he would have achieved his end. Bureaucrats and cops do exactly this every day in the great republic. The most effective activists are people who are never known as activists, just as the deadliest anarchists are never known as anarchists.

Well said.

The Beards had never been under pressure to be competent. It was not surprising that they got even the Pakistani passport wrong. They didn’t have to fabricate any such evidence but they did because that was their habit.

Redicules every minute idiocy of the nation.