Of Politicians and Puppies

“The analogy of the car and the dog makes the riot sound like an accident when it was as much a designer event as Modi’s career …….”

This sentence made its way into the consciousness like few others have in recent times, for a simple reason --  the realization  that kudos is due to a professional for actually facing reality, when seasoned writers seem to have been taken in by rhetoric not backed by reality. Or perhaps ……. ?

Recent weeks have seen a … call it, trumpeted campaign, media overhype, infotainment,  adverpleading  or whatever new name may be coined for what passes for the long playing comments seen on news and edit pages.

Is India doomed to be drowned in media hype?  Or are, hopefully, our masses wide awake and able to read between the lines?  Especially our newly minted young voters?   Is history all that old a lesson to be so easily forgotten?

Since Time Immemorial, writers, poets, bards have been paid to sing paeans to the ruling deity or king, attributing to them virtues they often had no clue of.  In India, prime examples are the Rajputs’ and Sikhs and their fighting honor, which allowed them to allow India to be invaded again and again because they were busy squabbling with each other instead of fending off the foreigners.  

Abroad perhaps the most noted example that comes to mind is the poets and bards who sang vociferously of the vaunted ‘values’ of the British when they were nothing but  famously “a nation of shopkeepers”, whose last great monarch, Queen Victoria left behind a set of morals that continue to riddle even our society more than a century after her death.

Coming back to India, what are the bards going to sing next of?  Pink chaddis or khakhi ones?