A Tryst with the Soul of Paris (1)

As I promised, I am going to write about the movie ‘La Môme’, also known as ‘La Vie en Rose’ (’The Life in the Pink’). The movie is about the legendary French popular singer Édith Piaf, real name Édith Giovanna Gassion, but earlier known as La Môme Piaf (The Little Sparrow).

For the last many weeks, I have been soaking myself in her songs. Not her alone, because I am never ever an exclusivist, but my playlist during this period has been almost half full of her songs. Or songs related to her, i.e., songs sung by her which were later also sung by others. As far as music is concerned, this has been one of the major obsessions so far. And it doesn’t look like I am going to get over it soon. I don’t mind it, of course.

I even found some notes and tunes familiar from Hindi film songs, which are the true melting pot of music like nothing else.

Did I say I will talk about it later?

Let it be said that I have listened to a very wide variety of music from around the world and claim to have a very good musical sense. So, now that you know about my qualifications for writing about her and the movie based on her (I guess you already know that I also claim to have a very good cinematic sense), I can get on and you better take me seriously.

Heh! Heh! Where is your degree?

First, I will say what has already been said by all. Marion Cotillard has given a great performance in this movie as the legendary singer. It’s hard for me to forget that she is not really Édith Piaf.

By the way, she became the first actor (or actress) to “ever win an Academy Award for Best Actress (”Oscar”) for a performance entirely in French”. Given that winning an Academy Award is considered the height of achievement for people working in the movies, doesn’t it sound a bit strange? I mean French directors (along with directors from other countries from Europe and Asia) have been making movies and setting the standards for others for a long time now and French actors have been acting in them. Well enough to deserve world class awards.

How easy it is to forget that the Oscars, the Academy Awards, are mainly meant for English movies. There is just one magnanimous (or guest, if you like) category for ‘Foreign language movies’. But everyone behaves as if the Academy Awards are equally for all movies of the world.

Can we expect globalization of the Academy Awards? I won’t bet on it.

Except that I have never bet.

The spell checker has identified ‘globalization’ as an invalid word. I am adding it to the dictionary. The spell checker also doesn’t recognize ‘exclusivist’ as a valid word. I am adding this word too.

I have heard the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ somewhere. I also heard a rumor (rumour for the non-dominant party) that computers now have some of it. Why do I feel a bit relieved that it is just a rumor?

Coming back to the movie, it is about a singer who, as someone said, “belts them out, doesn’t she?”. She does indeed. And she does just great. I have become her lifetime admirer. For whatever is left.

She was a born singer. She started on the street. She was the daughter of an acrobat and a street singer. For some time she lived in a brothel managed by her grandmother, where she was treated very well. One of the prostitutes became so fond of her that she was heartbroken and hysterical when the father came back for his daughter. With her father, she (the singer to be) lived in a circus. Later she accompanied her father on his acrobatic (contortionist) street shows and started singing. Then she sang on the streets with her half-sister, who remained close to her till her death, except for some time when she felt ignored and abandoned by the star singer.

She was discovered by a nightclub owner. She was suspected of involvement in his murder, but was cleared. She denied that she had anything to do with that and I would prefer to believe that. I would rather give her the benefit of doubt than to Henry Kissinger. Or so many like him, even if not his equal in douchehood.

She sang under the protection of local mafia men, who took their share, obviously. She met a composer, Marguerite Monnot, who also became her ‘most loyal friend’ for the rest of her life. Then she was mentored by a composer who was also a poet and a businessman. She became popular on the radio as well as on the stage. She became a star. Actually, in France, she became a super star. She mentored many people and helped them launch their career. And ‘dropped’ them when they became successful and no longer needed her mentoring. She helped launch many careers, including that of another legendary singer Yves Montand. Jean Cocteau wrote a successful one-act play ‘Le Bel Indifférent’ specially for her and she acted in it.

She was severely injured in a major car accident. Then she suffered more car accidents. Partly because of injuries from the car crashes, she got into addiction and suffered more. She fell in love with a married French boxer (who was a star in his own right in France) …

Well, according to the ethics of movie reviewing, I shouldn’t divulge too much. Suffice it, as the phrase goes, to say that if there was anyone whose life was the stuff of legend, she was the one.

I would say even more than Howard Hughes.

So much about her, what about the movie? It is one of best biopics I have ever seen. It is better than ‘The Aviator’. It is better than ‘Capote’, even though I have more than a soft spot for movies made about writers or about literature. It is better even than ‘Gandhi’. More about that last movie later.

Now the reasons why it is better. First is simply that I like it more. But more specifically, everything is almost perfect in this biopic. Direction (Olivier Dahan) is really good without being pretentious or stiff. Screenplay (Isabelle Sobelman and Olivier Dahan) is as it should be for a biopic. Realistic but still interesting. Not over the top. Neither starry eyed, nor of the kind which seems to be declaring ‘I will (academically) judge this person’s personal life and cut him or her to size’.

Marion Cotillard actually became The Little Sparrow. I don’t know whether it was with or without Method Acting. The rest of the cast also gave very convincing performances, including the actress who played Marlene Dietrich. I should make special mention of Sylvie Testud who played the role of Mômone (Simone Berteaut), Édith’s half-sister and her lifelong friend. Her lifelong partner in mischief.

For now, I will stop talking about the movie here as I intend to write a second installment of this post.

I would be proud to have lived a life like the one she lived. With warts and all.

Even now, as I write, she is singing in the background. Literally.

In the words of the movie’s Marlene Dietrich, she is taking me on a voyage to Paris. Where (unlike Marlene Dietrich) I have never been, except for half an hour at the airport when I had to keep sitting in the plane as there was a strike at the airport. So I have yet to set my feet on the soil of Paris, but The Little Sparrow, who really belts them out and who embodies the soul of Paris, has flown me around there plenty of times now.

P.S.: The strike in the above paragraph doesn’t mean terrorist strike. It means labour strike. Just in case.

And yes, labor for the dominant party.

At Around is Absolutely Alright

I sometimes read the ‘Corrections and clarifications’ column of The Hindu. I don’t know why. I don’t really believe in prescriptivism, nor do I want complete linguistic anarchy. Probably just to find out the current state of linguistic legality and linguistic morality, from the point of the view of the editors as well as the grammatically sensitive readers (this adjective I didn’t want to use, but I couldn’t find better).

A couple of days ago I again read this column. It is written by the Readers’ Editor (RE) of the paper. In this particular edition (is that the right word?) of the column, a list of different kinds of errors made by journalists is given.

At one point the, the RE says:

There are some favourite expressions of journalists that keep recurring despite their absurdity.

And one of the examples given is ‘at around 4 p.m.’, which the RE says is:

a contradiction — at is specific, around is approximate

As it happens, I use this expression quite often.

So, according to the LAPD (Linguistic Abuse Police Department), I am guilty of Using Favourite Expressions Despite their Absurdity.

But I don’t think it’s a contradiction. I don’t really know what the real Linguists have to say about this, but here is my case:

1. When you want to mention a time (say, 4 p.m.) for some purpose (such as making an appointment), you can mean either 4 p.m. sharp or you can mean approximately 4 p.m., give or take 5 (or 10 or 15) minutes.
2. In the first (sharp) case, you would say ‘at 4 p.m.’, with ’sharp’ added optionally, depending on various things such as your and the other person’s habits and the equation between the two etc.
3. The question is, what will you say in the second (approximate) case? Would you say ‘meet me around 4 p.m.’? To me, it sounds very awkward.
4. Even when you do say ‘at 4 p.m.’, you cannot really mean exactly 4 p.m. because it is just not possible physically. This is actually mentioned in some Linguistics literature, though I don’t remember where.
5. Quite often when you say ‘at 4 p.m.’, you actually mean approximately at 4 p.m. Then what is the need of using ‘at around 4 p.m.’ if ‘at 4 p.m.’ can mean approximately at 4 p.m.? To make the approximate nature explicit.
6. In that case, why not use ‘approximately at 4 p.m.’ instead of ‘at around 4 p.m.’? Because the latter sounds better (and shorter and more informal) than the former.
7. My question: Is ‘around’ used at all for specifying time, excluding the cases where it starts a sentence or a clause? Since I am not a ‘native speaker’ of English, however many tons of pages of good English I may have read and however many thousands of publishable and published pages of English I may have written, my linguistic intuition about the Global Language may be questionable.
8. Therefore, I can only resort to empirical evidence. So I searched for the term ‘around 4 p.m.’ on the Web. What I find is that ‘around 4 p.m.’ is used quite often. However, almost all of this usage is in fragments, not in complete sentences (again excluding the cases where it starts a sentence or a clause).
9. In almost all complete sentences, the usage is ‘at around 4 p.m.’.
10. So, it seems that hardly anyone uses ‘around 4 p.m.’ to specify an approximate time. Most people use ‘at around 4 p.m.’.
11. Which makes perfect sense to me, because it doesn’t sound awkward to me and everyone understands perfectly what I mean. In fact, it even sounds more musical to me than just saying ‘around 4 p.m.’. Excluding the cases mentioned earlier.
12. In linguistic terms, it can be explained by saying that ‘at’ in this case is the preposition, whereas ‘around’ is not a preposition. They are serving different syntactic and semantic purposes. ‘Around’ is modifying ‘4 p.m.’ to convert it, so to say, from an instant to an interval. ‘At’, on the other hand is doing what prepositions do. Connecting constituents and specifying the relationships among them.
13. It might be said that ‘at’ can only occur with an instant, not with an interval. In that case, it can also be argued that in reality there is no such thing as an instant (a point on the time scale with zero ‘width’). There are only intervals (points do have some non-zero ‘width’) and ‘around’ is just increasing the size of this interval.
14. If you do insist that there are instants and ‘at’ can come only with instants, then it can be explained thus. ‘At’ is indeed coming with an instant but that instant is not exactly at ‘4 p.m.’ but somewhere near ‘4 p.m.’ (3:55 p.m. or 4:05 p.m.). ‘Around’ is being used to express this uncertainty.

Thus, as far as I can see, ‘at around 4 p.m.’ is absolutely alright. There is nothing absurd about it. Perhaps the law to which the LAPD is referring is absurd. That seems very likely. After all, every law book has more than enough absurd laws.

By the way, I also searched in the BNC corpus and the only sentence returned for ‘around 4 p.m.’ was this:

George Mayo was last seen at around 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon.

I think it is not surprising at all, I mean the fact that there are so many absurd laws and rules. If you are the law maker or the law enforcer (or both) and you only make reasonable laws and/or enforce only reasonable laws, you are, in the South Park language, a pussy. Because if you are not, you would be able to make absurd laws and rules and get them enforced.

That’s what having power means. Doesn’t it?

Any, well, pussy, can make and enforce reasonable laws and rules.

Chomsky at His Best

I have read quite a lot of Chomsky. And here I mean his non-Linguistic writings. But today I found the transcript of an answer that he gave after a lecture on 5th November 2001 in Delhi. It’s Chomsky at his best.

Within one answer to a question about the idea of Clash of Civilizations, he has compressed almost everything that one needs to know to understand how the world works. Even though I am very much familiar with his ideas, it was a treat to read this transcript.

I can’t resist the temptation to just quote him wholesale in this post. It’s not a very long article, so it can be read quite quickly. If you think something that he is saying is wrong, you can go ahead and verify it. He has written about the details elsewhere.

As there is no need for me to add or explain, I will just quote. I hope I am not infringing on anyone’s IPR. If I am, I will withdraw the quote. But I would hate to do that.

Here he is:

Remember the context of Huntington’s thesis, the context in which it was put forth. This was after the end of the Cold War. For fifty years, both the US and the Soviet Union had used the pretext of the Cold War as a justification for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out. So if the Russians wanted to send tanks to East Berlin, that was because of the Cold War. And if the US wanted to invade South Vietnam and wipe out Indo-China, that was because of the Cold War. If you look over the history of this period, the pretext had nothing to do with the reasons. The reasons for the atrocities were based in domestic power interests, but the Cold War gave an excuse. Whatever the atrocity carried out, you could say it’s defence against the other side.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pretext is gone. The policies remain the same, with slight changes in tactics, but you need a new pretext. And in fact there’s been a search for pretexts for quite a long time. Actually, it started twenty years ago. When the Reagan Administration came in, it was already pretty clear that appeal to the pretext of the Russian threat was not going to work for very long. So they came into office saying that the focus of their foreign policy would be to combat the plague of international terrorism.

That was twenty years ago. There’s nothing new about this. We have to defend ourselves from other terrorists. And they proceeded to react to that plague by creating the most extraordinary international terrorist network in the world, which carried out massive terror in Central America and Southern Africa and all over the place. In fact, it was so extreme that its actions were even condemned by the World Court and Security Council. With 1989 coming, you needed some new pretexts. This was very explicit. Remember, one of the tasks of intellectuals, the solemn task, is to prevent people from understanding what’s going on. And in order to fulfil that task, you have to ignore the government documentation, for example, which tells you exactly what’s going on. This is a case in point.

Just to give you one illustration. Every year the White House presents to Congress a statement of why we need a huge military budget. Every year it used to be the same: the Russians are coming. The Russians are coming, so we need this monstrous military budget. The question that anyone who is interested in international affairs should have been asking himself or herself is, what are they going to say in March 1990? That was the first presentation to Congress after the Russians clearly weren’t coming – they were not around any more. So that was a very important and extremely interesting document. And of course, it is not mentioned anywhere, because it’s much too interesting. That was March 1990, the first Bush Administration giving its presentation to Congress.

It was exactly the same as every year. We need a huge military budget. We need massive intervention forces, mostly poised at the Middle East. We have to protect what’s called the ‘defence industrial base’ – that’s a euphemism that means high-tech industry. We have to ensure that the public pays the costs of high-tech industry by funnelling it through the military system under the pretext of defence.

So it was exactly the same as before. The only difference was the reasons. It turned out that the reasons we needed all this was not because the Russians were coming, but – I’m quoting – because of the ‘technological sophistication of Third World powers.’ That’s why we need the huge military budget. The massive military forces aimed at the Middle East still have to be aimed there, and here comes an interesting phrase. It says, they have to be aimed at the Middle East where ‘the threat to our interests could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.’ In other words, sorry, I’ve been lying to you for fifty years, but now the Kremlin isn’t around any more so I’ve got to tell you the truth: ‘The threat to our interests could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.’

Remember, it couldn’t be laid at Iraq’s door either, because at that time Saddam Hussein was a great friend and ally of the United States. He had already carried out his worst atrocities, like gassing Kurds and everything else, but he remained a fine guy, who hadn’t disobeyed orders yet – the one crime that matters. So nothing could be laid at Iraq’s door, or at the Kremlin’s door.

The real threat, as always, was that the region might take control of its own destiny, including its own resources. And that can’t be tolerated, obviously. So we have to support oppressive states, like Saudi Arabia and others, to make sure that they guarantee that the profits from oil (it’s not so much the oil as the profits from oil) flow to the people who deserve it: rich western energy corporations or the US Treasury Department or Bechtel Construction, and so on. So that’s why we need a huge military budget. Other than that, the story is the same.

What does this have to do with Huntington? Well, he’s a respected intellectual. He can’t say this. He can’t say, look, the method by which the rich run the world is exactly the same as before, and the major confrontation remains what it has always been: small concentrated sectors of wealth and power versus everybody else. You can’t say that. And in fact if you look at those passages on the clash of civilizations, he says that in the future the conflict will not be on economic grounds. So let’s put that out of our minds. You can’t think about rich powers and corporations exploiting people, that can’t be the conflict. It’s got to be something else. So it will be the ‘clash of civilizations’ – the western civilization and Islam and Confucianism.

Well, you can test that. It’s a strange idea, but you can test it. For example, you can test it by asking how the United States, the leader of the western civilization, has reacted to Islamic fundamentalists. Well, the answer is, it’s been their leading supporter. For instance, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world at that time was Saudi Arabia. Maybe it has been succeeded by the Taliban, but that’s an offshoot of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism.

Saudi Arabia has been a client of the United States since its origins. And the reason is that it plays the right role. It ensures that the wealth of the region goes to the right people: not people in the slums of Cairo, but people in executive suites in New York. And as long as they do that, Saudi Arabian leaders can treat women as awfully as they want, they can be the most extreme fundamentalists in existence, and they’re just fine. That’s the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world.

What is the biggest Muslim state in the world? Indonesia. And what’s the relation between the United States and Indonesia? Well, actually the United States was hostile to Indonesia until 1965. That’s because Indonesia was part of the nonaligned movement. The United States hated Nehru, despised him in fact, for exactly the same reason. So they despised Indonesia. It was independent. Furthermore, it was a dangerous country because it had one mass-based political party, the PKI, which was a party of the poor, a party of peasants, basically. And it was gaining power through the open democratic system, therefore it had to be stopped.

The US tried to stop it in 1958 by supporting a rebellion. That failed. They then started supporting the Indonesian Army, and in 1965 the army carried out a coup, led by General Suharto. They carried out a huge massacre of hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people (mostly landless peasants), and wiped out the only mass-based party. This led to unrestrained euphoria in the West. The United States, Britain, Australia – it was such a glorious event that they couldn’t control themselves.

The headlines were, ‘A gleam of light in Asia’, ‘A hope where there once was none’, ‘The Indonesian moderates have carried out a boiling bloodbath’. I mean, they didn’t conceal what happened – ‘Staggering mass slaughter’, ‘The greatest event in history’. The CIA compared it to the massacres of Stalin and Hitler, and that was wonderful. And ever since that time, Indonesia became a favoured ally of the United States.

It continued to have one of the bloodiest records in the late twentieth century (mass murder in East Timor, hideous tortures of dissidents, and so on), but it was fine. It was the biggest Islamic state in the world, but it was just fine. Suharto was ‘our kind of guy’, the way Clinton described him when he visited in the mid-nineties. And he stayed a friend of the United States until he made a mistake. He made a mistake by dragging his feet over IMF orders.

After the Asian crash, the IMF imposed very harsh orders, and Suharto didn’t go along the way he was supposed to. And he also lost control of the society. That’s also a mistake. So at that point the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, gave him a telephone call, and said literally, ‘We think it’s time for a democratic transition.’ Merely by accident, four hours later he abdicated, but Indonesia remained a US favourite.

These are two of the main Islamic states. What about the extreme Islamic fundamentalist non-state actors, let’s say the Al Qaeda network. Who formed them? They’re the creation of the CIA, British intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding, Egypt and so on. They brought the most extreme radical fundamentalists they could find anywhere, in North Africa or the Middle East, and trained them, armed them, nurtured them to harass the Russians – not to help the Afghans. These guys were carrying out terrorism from the beginning. They assassinated President Saddat twenty years ago. But they were the main groups supported by the US. So, where is the clash of civilizations?

Let’s move a little further. During the 1980s, the United States carried out a major war in Central America. A couple of hundred thousand people were killed, four countries almost destroyed, I mean it was a vast war. Who was the target of that war? Well, one of the main targets was the Catholic Church. The decade of the 1980s began with the assassination of an archbishop. It ended with the assassination of six leading Jesuit intellectuals, including the rector of the main university. They were killed by basically the same people – terrorist forces, organized and armed and trained by the United States.

During that period, plenty of church people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of peasants and poor people also died, as usual, but one of the main targets was the Catholic Church. Why? Well, the Catholic Church had committed a grievous sin in Latin America. For hundreds of years, it had been the church of the rich. That was fine. But in the 1960s, the Latin American bishops adopted what they called a ‘preferential option for the poor.’ At that point they became like this mass-based political party in Indonesia, which was a party of the poor and the peasants and naturally it had to be wiped out. So the Catholic Church had to be smashed.

Coming back to the beginning, just where is the clash of civilizations? I mean, there is a clash alright. There is a clash with those who are adopting the preferential option for the poor no matter who they are. They can be Catholics, they can be Communists, they can be anything else. They can be white, black, green, anything. Western terror is totally ecumenical. It’s not really racist – they’ll kill anybody who takes the wrong stand on the major issues.

But if you’re an intellectual, you can’t say that. Because it’s too obviously true. And you can’t let people understand what is obviously true. You have to create deep theories, that can be understood only if you have a PhD from Harvard or something. So we have a clash of civilizations, and we’re supposed to worship that. But it makes absolutely no sense.

Reminder: This is the the transcript of an answer that Chomsky gave after a lecture on 5th November 2001 in Delhi.

Anciently Civilized But Not Yet K-Mature

We are an ancient civilization. A five thousand year old civilization. As a child, this used to fill me with a fair amount of pride, and even more so after reading Nehru’s Discovery of India, which was my first detailed non-academic introduction to history.

At least technically this might be true, though I am not very sure what civilization in real life means. So ours is actually an ancient civilization going by the historiographical terminology. However, we are not yet mature enough to allow public kissing between a man and a woman.

And we also have a lot of free time. Lots and lots. One of the ways it is killed is by filing cases against people for things like kissing in public.

So much so that now no less than the Supreme Court is going to hear an urgent plea by Richard Gere (an actor I don’t particularly like) ’seeking stay of his arrest warrant in connection with the kissing row involving actress Shilpa Shetty’ (an actress I don’t particularly like).

Did someone mention that we are a super power of legality and chastity? Have been for a long time.

Never mind the ancient K-treatise or the medieval K-temple. Let’s wait and see where the modern K-case goes. The future of the country hangs in balance.

And all those irresponsible people are wasting time talking about the mass-K-cases in the G-state. What’s the insignificant K’ing of a few thousand people as compared to this monumental Katastrophe threatening the very moral fabric of our ancient civilization?

What does it matter? But the linguistic nature of ‘very’ in that preceding sentence seems very interesting.

The Biggest Douche in the Universe

Yes, the title is borrowed from the South Park^[1] episode 615. But the award doesn’t go to John Edwards. No, it doesn’t go to Bush either. I have no doubt about who it should go to. I will give you some clues.

He was, for a long time, one of the most powerful men in the world. Even today, when, if the world had any sense, he would be on trial as a war criminal and much more, he is often quoted about important affairs of the world. The International Affairs. He is quoted even in the Indian media even though in those days of power he showed nothing but contempt for India and actively worked against the Indian national interests: To the extent he cared for India. Now he has become a kind of Indophile. In the national interests of his own nation. He wasn’t bothered about how many men were killed, mutilated, burnt alive, gassed etc. due to his actions, even though he was (presumably) from a community which was the target of the Holocaust. He could say things which would make even Hitler and Stalin look mild, without, as they say, batting an eyelid.

Or bowling an eyelid, for that matter.

Need more? Joseph Heller is one of the greatest American writers. At least two of his books, ‘Catch-22′ and ‘Something Happened’, are definitely masterpieces. He also wrote one book called ‘Good as Gold’ which didn’t come out that well. But this book is remarkable for one thing. For the characterization of its second (invisible, in a way) protagonist. That second protagonist of ‘Good as Gold’ is the person I am talking about.

If you have still not guessed, then, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Biggest Douche in the Universe award goes to…

Who else?

Yes, it is none but the great statesman, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the former Secretary of State of the US of A, the former National Security Adviser (of the US of A), the defender of democracy, the crusader against the commies, the mass murdering member of the community which was mass murdered only some years earlier, a giant hypocrite even the likes of L.K. Advani can’t come anywhere near. In fact, using the word hypocrite is an insult to him. It’s too light for him.

Security. Peace. Nobel Prize. Mass murder. Security.

Great sounding designation that: National Security Adviser.

Alias: International Mass Murderer.

Alias: Super-Duper Official Terrorist.

I can go on. But I don’t have to. I will just make the announcement and you can find out all the details about him. They are all over the place. Online and off. That book I mentioned earlier. The only really good thing about that book is that it gives a fairly good account of our winner.

The Biggest Douche in the Universe (BDU) is no other than Henry K. That is, H. Kissinger. H for Henry. K for Kissinger.

Note that this award is not for the BDU of the year. It is the BDU of all history.

There simply is no match.

[1]: I don’t really approve of the South Park politics, whether it’s called South Park Republicanism or something else. More on that later.

Are You a Pervert?

You might have been a pervert all this time and have not known it. I have just discovered that a very large portion of the population is perverted. Thanks to India’s Fascist Hero, we now have a very quick test to determine who is a pervert and who isn’t. Here goes:

A pervert is a person in whose mind a thought can come that Narendra Modi is growing bigger than his party.

Yes. It’s that simple. And you never knew it. I guess if you have been following the elections in Gujarat, the chances are that you are a pervert. But don’t worry, you are not alone. Almost everyone who has been following the elections must have had that decisive thought.

It definitely came to my mind.

I think I can live with it.

Of course, we have had other such simple tests provided to us by the institutional family to which the Fascist Hero belongs. This particular test is actually a special case of a more general test, which is even more simple and goes like this:

If you don’t agree with the above mentioned institutional family (that would be the Sangh Parivar) or with any member thereof, then you are a pervert. Some other terms may also be used for those who fall under this category, e.g. impotent, hij***, ran***, chh***** etc.

It is according to this philosophy that the Fascist Hero’s close mate Praveen Togadia had called the ’secularists’ impotent after 2002 Gujarat elections (Hindustan Times). And Sadhavi Rithambara had called Muslims hij***s (Father, Son and Holy War). Now, as the family has moved up the political ladder, the preferred term is ‘pervert’. Comes with sophistication.

Ours being a truly secular country, these simple tests of perversion are also used by the could be Fascist Heros of other communities, including Muslims.

Say Bravo! to the great psychological insights of these could be or would be or just be Fascist Heros.

V for Victory!

There is another good news: The Gujarat Model is now going to be implemented in other states too. A Brave Mussolinized India is not far. Brave massacres of defenceless people. Brave fake encounter killings. Brave pulling outs of foetuses. Brave burning alives of children. Brave public rapes and then killings of teenage girls. And more.

And we were all just sitting there being perverts, not taking part in any of this.

Let’s have some shame.

Communal is Secular is Communal

In the last post I somehow missed including this gem of a quote:

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) congratulated its alliance partner BJP for its performance in the Gujarat, with party working President Sukhbir Singh Badal saying: “This is people’s rebuff to Congress’s attempts to communalise polity.”

No comments.

No, I won’t comment.

No, no, I won’t comment.

So the Il Duce Goes On

Gujarat can be called a peninsula, just like Italy. And Gujarat is going to retain it’s Il Duce for another five years (at least). We know that India is more than half a century behind Europe in many things, so it quite fits in.

Well, I for one don’t think much of this latest news. The simple reason being that irrespective of the results of these elections in Gujarat, India’s Mussolini is definitely not going down for some time to come. It doesn’t matter that India is a secular socialist democratic republic. It doesn’t matter that the Narendra Modi Party (NMP) is unabashedly fascist. It doesn’t matter that the Indian People’s Party (of course that means the Bharatiya Janata Party) is only abashedly fascist till now: Till it gets completely taken over by the NMP. It doesn’t matter that India is currently ruled by the secular grand old party of the Independence Movement fame. It also doesn’t matter that India is what is being called ‘an emerging economy’.

Neither does the fact that India is an IT super power (whatever that means). Nor does the fact that India is supposedly going to become a developed country by 2020.

And, of course, it doesn’t matter that the NMP (along with the BJP) had presided over the state sponsored killings of more than two thousand people and much else.

It does matter though, in a very post-modern absurdist way, that the gory details of the killings et al. were very recently ‘exposed‘ (the very fact that an expose was still needed tells you a lot about our country and about the world in general). Many are saying (not incorrectly) that part of the credit for the Indian Il Duce’s victory goes to this ‘expose’. Don’t get me wrong: I believe the expose may be a positive thing in the long run. And, no, I don’t really think the expose was meant to benefit the Gandhi quoting Fascist Hero.

Since I don’t think the current results matter much, as the NMP would have continued on its path of glory regardless of victory or defeat in these elections, I don’t have much to say about the results. I do, however, have a lot to say about the rise of fascism in India.

I won’t say all that right now. I will just keep saying something regularly (as before), as should be done I think.

Still, there are some interesting things which one can note:

• More people are now acknowledging that Modi has national ambitions and those ambitions are not quite misplaced.
• The BJP lawyer leader Arun Jaitley made this interesting comment:
  

  The Gujarat results have given a fresh breath of life for UPA government as Left parties will now think twice before withdrawing support fearing the resurgence of BJP.

• The most well known Indian left-leaning (formerly leftist) newspaper The Hindu reported that “Modi’s stunning victory wins him accolades from one and all“.
• ‘Having failed to oust Modi, a stunned Congress congratulated him for a “great, remarkable victory”… BJP leader L K Advani described the Gujarat election results a “turning point” for national politics with his party signalling a “comeback”. The party talked about the possibility of a bigger role for Modi at the national level.’
• ‘As soon as it was clear that the 57-year-old leader would retain chief ministership, Modi received congratulations from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who called him.’

  The gentle Manmohan Singh. The acclaimed economist Manmohan Singh. The neat and clean Manmohan Singh. The liberal Manmohan Singh. The apolitical Manmohan Singh.

  He won’t offend a fascist on the rise.

• ‘AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa on Sunday said Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s victory in the Assembly elections had brought hope to people that “India could still be saved from the clutches of unscrupulous power mongers.” … “Your spectacular victory has brought hope and cheer to the vast majority of people in this nation who now believe that all is not lost and that India can still be saved from the clutches of unscrupulous power mongers,” she added.’^[1]
• ‘Modi referred to the huge electoral success as a victory for the 5.5 crore people of Gujarat and a “positive mandate” that defeated the campaign of negativism.’^[2]

  That should clear your doubts about what is positive and what is negative.

• Arun Jaitley also had this to say:
  

  The BJP’s victory in Gujarat, I believe, is based on three things. First is the organization and ideology of the BJP which continues to be vibrant and relevant in the state, secondly, the leadership which is there in the state, gave confidence to the people that it was honest and development oriented and thirdly a good government which delivered on its promises.^[3]

• BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad made these comments^[4]:
  

  its resounding victory in Gujarat was a reply to “pseudo-secular forces”, who it alleged kept attacking Chief Minister Narendra Modi at the drop of the hat.

  … the combination of BJP’s ideology, cadre support, Modi’s image as a strong leader who can deliver and his all-inclusive development agenda were the reasons for the party’s good showing in the polls.

Note the modifier ‘all-inclusive’ (emphasis added). I wonder what ‘all’ means.

• Some of India’s IT savvy public had these comments to make.
• There is seemingly a widely held opinion that ‘For the Congress it seems, the ‘Maut Ke Sauadagar’ comment clearly backfired’^[5]. So now you know that if you call the person who supervised the killing of thousands of people and is proud of the fact (not counting the fake encounter killings of criminals) a merchant of death, you are going to be backfired upon.

Just remembered this: India is also peninsular. And an ancient civilization. With an ancient city for the capital. Is the originator of multiple religions and philosophies and arts and movements.

Quite like Italy.

Secularism sucks.
Communalism rocks.
Liberalism is gay.
Right wing nationalism is cool.
Leftism is super gay.
Fascism kicks a**.

It’s a Desi Cartman’s day.

What’s it to be Lord: Hail Another Mussolini?

The first phase of voting in Gujarat is over. The second phase of voting will take place on Sunday. Exit polls are predicting a swing away from the BJP ([1], [2], [3]). But this may be misleading because this round was in areas where the BJP, or to be more accurate, the NMP, i.e., the Narendra Modi Party was expected to perform less well.

What if the final results are in favor of the BJP? Or the NMP? That would mean five more years of fascism ([1], [2]) in the state of, well, you know whom. I don’t want to be the millionth (or the 100 millionth) person to say this. The last five years have seen the release of many more books etc. and even movies about the former icon of Gujarat, including Lage Raho Munna Bhai. So movies, even the mainstream super hit movies, don’t really have that much influence.

And the mainstream vibrant-and-free media of our unified diverse-and-the-largest democracy are in their favorite mode of semi-denial. They are pretending that it is just Gujarat where fascism has become the most popular political system. They have accepted that this has happened in Gujarat because fascism in that state is now so blatantly visible that there is no way of denying it. They won’t stop to consider whether what has flooded Gujarat is already creeping into the neighboring Rajasthan or not. If not other states. They don’t really (want to) think that India can ever become Mussolini’s Italy.

Yes, the same Italy. Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink.

But there are some who realize that what has happened in Gujarat under our very democratic system can also happen all over the country. Though even they are pretty sure that once it happens, it can be reversed easily. In time.

As for most of the electorate of our socialist republic, the only relevant question is: Does it really matter? And the answer is: Not really. Because nothing bad is happening to us right now. That’s all that matters. The future will be taken care of by The One up there. Or The Many up there: most of us are not monotheistic, remember? We don’t need to worry. Just try to make more money and get more power for the great civilized institution of family. Family in the literal sense, not the metaphorical. The (Italian) Mafiosi sense. Our own immediate family. Once that is done, we will think of the relatives. After that, if we can spare some time, we might think of friends. Once in a while we might think of our caste. Then may be of religion. (The last two may be swapped, depending on the fashion or the season). On 15th August and 26th January we might even think of the nation. Country? Humanity? Earth? Oh yes, the words that you use in an interview to the media or in a public talk or in a school essay. Are they really supposed to mean something?

Myain oh myain!
Exclaims Eric Cartmyain.
These things really suck!
Yeah, these things are so gay!
Say Kenny, Kyle and Styain.

I can visualize the collective persona of that part of the society which would like to just continue the routine and get on with the Business, driving in a car in search of the next bounty, turning his (or her) head skywards and asking, ‘What’s it to be Lord…?’