The vampire analogy fits the condition of Indian cricket well, which, in order to expand its reach and bank balance, embraced an experiment which turned it into something like a vampire – IPL. It is neither cricket nor entertainment, but a smudged outcome of the two, out of which an obscene face of in-your-face, soft-core pornography is visible, if you care to see – the hard-core ones are out with its commissioner Lalit Modi.

There was yet another instance of ‘Mann ki Baat’, there was yet another conclusion of a foreign trip, and there was yet another self-imposed onus of giving another Mantra on Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi, or PM Modi, as affectionately called by almost all media houses, not to talk of his fans and sycophants.
If it had been a lesser mortal, on the dais, he would have succumbed under the enormous pressure to perform at yet another event. However, after successfully taking euphoric middle-class from one event to another, PM Modi (It seems, I love this guy too!) did not let us down on Sunday, December 27

The journey of Indian mass has been significant. it has jumped straight away from being completely unconcerned about anything that happens to their surroundings to being hyper-reactive to each and everything that happens around them, and mostly it does so blindly, without even thinking what it is doing, or without ever stopping on sanity.

The massive seats that BJP (and BJP-led NDA) won, gave them a feeling of getting carte blanche to do whatever they want, say whatever they feel like, and restructure anything and everything imaginable. And restructuring they did, sometimes coarsely and at other times with great finesse. The victory was seen as a culmination of a long historic struggle, as the PM acknowledged. The government is trying to make the most of the opportunity. Out of this historic struggle, which has resulted in attempts to rewrite and appropriate history and change perception, many so-called anti-nationals have been born, anachronistically.

“While Hinduism – or call it what you will – is thousands of years old, the Hindu isn’t. The Hindu of our time – or the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, and the rest of it – is in large part a fairly recent being. He (the He-ness of it needs to be emphasized) is forcibly brought into existence by the myriad forces of modernity which unhinged him from the organic traditions of the past his forefathers had been living for centuries and left him anxious about his place in the world.”

It didn’t all begin on 9/11. But let’s say it did. Let’s shut off the critical parts of our brains and pretend to believe in the narrative of the mainstream media and powerful governments. Let’s forget that prior to 9/11, there was a decade long collaboration between the U.S. and the Jihadists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan which left the country in ruins and in the hands of the crazed knuckleheads. Let’s also forget those CIA sponsored coups against the popular, democratic governments and installations of puppet regimes in the Middle East which oppressed their own people but kept the oil supply running westward.