The headline speaks of my frustration and anger over the over-placid Indian masses. We have learnt to lament the demise of TV Bahus, and get angry over the dismal defeat of the Dare Devils. We have learnt to live in blips, in Jameson’s “Perpetual Present”. We have learnt, and yet we have to master the art.

Now that the dust of the pitched verbal battle that ensued from the ministerial words of wisdom over the lack of ‘world-class’ faculty of the IITs and IIMs has somewhat settled, it is pertinent for us to dig a little deeper and weigh Jairam Ramesh’s observations in their appropriate contextual measures.

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

“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.”

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.