After Mohandas Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he undertook a tour of India to understand the layers of complexity that lay beneath her diversity. Today, another Gandhi undertakes a tour of India grandly named Bharat Jodo Yatra, but that is where the comparison ends. The three words, Bharat, Jodo, and Yatra, are ironical in themselves, just as the words in the name of the party, Indian National Congress. 

Most movies coming out of Bollywood now are either boycotted or so bad that they are not even boycotted. While there are veritable issues such as lack of quality content, rampant nepotism, and complete disrespect for culture that has existed for millennia, Bollywood continues to ignore them. Instead, apologists of the industry cry hoarse on intolerance, bigotry, patriarchy, and the rest of the rot that we are now quite familiar with. Will the unsanatani industry change because of a string of setbacks and introspect to create better content that respects the cultural sensibilities of its audience, or will it remain arrogant and continue to extend its cultural and dynastic hegemony as long as the money flows from secret lands? 

Last week, Mahua Moitra, who belongs to TMC, a political party ruled by an absolutist, went, well, all Moitra because her flow of glib English was interrupted by the Chair of Lok Sabha in Hindi, no less. Moitra is no stranger to throwing her weight around but when it comes to using the gaumutra scorn frequently one wonders what her intent is. The distinction, then, between the position and the people in that position gets diluted, and what happens is that the identification with the nation becomes contingent upon fealty to the Constitution. Further, there is the political equivalent of psychological project, what I call as constitutional projection, that left-inclined parties use to project their vileness onto the current government. The whole argument of looking at anything political, social, and cultural, through the lens of the Constitution is the reason why I am reluctant to support anyone who considers the 70+ year-old document as some kind of a dharmaśãstra.

My visit to the Surya Mandir at Mōḍhērā makes me wonder, at first, at the awe of what has been stripped away by time, weather, and invaders, and later, at thousands of monuments which are left at the mercy of the godless constitutional state. Around the time came the controversy over Surya Namaskar with the usual weaselish argument that Yoga is not Hindu. What exactly does that argument achieve? If that were not enough, there is the other argument that Yoga is just a system of bodily exercises, a dumbing down of an ancient system of healthy living that also introduces weird English names for asanas. Down south is the celebration of Pongal, the harvest festival that has nothing to do with the God of Sun but everything to do with the Son of God.

I then talk about Godwin's law in the context of some tweet by a typical uncreative label-maker mind of a left-liberal, and then, pass on to my comments on why Netflix is frustrated with their lack of success in India. 

Night curfews are the flavor of the day with governments trying to tell us that they are doing something about the pandemic while, at the same time, politicians are busy doing what they want to do anyway. The other side of the pandemic story is the panic spread by fake news which forced the PM himself to confuse us further with "precautionary dose". Given that there is no real repercussion for spreading fake news, even top politicians are doing so with relish, such as the tweet from Mamata Bannerjee on freezing the accounts of Mother Teresa's missionary in India.

Conversions are the focus once more given Karnataka's recent anti-conversion law which has predictably triggered the global ecosystem even as the local one cries hoarse on the law being unconstitutional. Article 25, if that is the argument, is not going to come to the rescue, but it does seem that the Constitution maybe like the one-way traffic arrangements of Bengaluru.

Tejasvi Surya urged Hindu institutions to set annual targets for reconversion (gharvāpsī) and then pusillanimously backtracked, perhaps after a rap on the knuckles from his seniors. On the other hand, Naseeruddin Shah went full Rahul by calling Moghuls as refugees. Babar, perhaps, sought refuge in India to escape from the diseases that the Europeans were spreading in South America at that time.

Shashi Tharoor, the Mahua Moitra of Congress, tweeted a cartoon showing Aurangzeb surprised to find that he is not in history but in current affairs. The irony notwithstanding, the sheer hypocrisy of apologists like Tharoor simply shows a blindness they have for ground realities. 

Is constitutional morality just a veil, a cooked up label, to endure minoritarian violence in the name of desecration and insult, such as what happened last week in the Sikh-dominated Punjab? The answer is, of course, yes, because constitutional morality applies only to Hindus, as amply evidenced by the recent verdict by the Supreme Court on allowing non-Hindus to participating in the process of shops to be leased around a Hindu temple. What, by the way, constitutes the bounds of a constitutional Hindu temple? The outer walls? The sanctum? The idol?

Amidst all these is the government mandate on linking Aadhaar with the voter card, an exercise fraught with untold miseries. Incidentally, this is being opposed in the name of political profiling, a most dunderheaded reason, which only proves that the opposition still has a long way to go.

When Narendra Modi inaugurated the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor recently, there was an expected bout of indigestion within the taliberal clique, so much that Aurangzeb's personal historian had to come out of her reverie and concoct more caste-based idiocy. 

The Chinese have been beating their little drums about democracy, and back home, the so-called farmer unions have gone back home leaving us with uncomfortable questions. The government, in repealing the farm laws, has set a precedent that street power trumps everything else. If this was from the Center, the Haryana government did the unthinkable by first allocating "designated spaces" for offering daily prayers and then revoking the order. Good luck with that.

Last week, also, was the incident of the Haryana Pollution Control Board ordering the shutdown of Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices (HMD). Of course, HMD was magnanimously allowed to resume its operations but only after its MD had to plead with everyone in power. 

In the first of a series on the Wuhan scourge, I reminisce the first wave which now seems to belong to a surreal age of lockdowns, clarifications, designer masks, online apps, doomsday models, and a not-so-long beard. By the end of last year, there was a positivity in the air, and the new year was supposed to herald new hopes. In the first three months, just when everyone thought that we would get back to normalcy, the second wave hit us hard.

As the cases skyrocketed and governments seemed helpless and incompetent, the time was ripe for whacky narratives. It all started with the Kumbh, by which I mean the narrative, not the second wave. If the Kumbh had started the second wave we would have to do some nifty time loops through Delhi where the farmers are protesting peacefully even now. After that came the lucrative photos of funeral pyres, shorn of any journalistic ethics and disrespectful of the dead. The photos served no actual journalistic purpose anyway, but just continued the age-old trope of an anti-Hindu narrative.

The Left and the Right emerged from the French Revolution, and since then, have defined the political spectrum. While the Left has solidified to represent anything from revolutions and rebellions to strikes and bearded men, the Right has been a mass of diverse opinions. In today's times when monopolies of publishing houses, news media groups, and even academic coteries define the establishment, the question is not about labels, the Left or the Right, but about power structures. The Left, by presiding over such a monopoly, simply becomes what it was once fighting against. 

What is the relevance of the Left and the Right, as labels, in India with its political, social, and cultural diversity? What do the fence-sitting Center labels achieve? Does differentiating by Indian Right Wing or Hindu Right Wing even make any difference? I argue that it does not, because the labels, Left and Right, come with a burden of their own history and religion, and worse, lead to false equivalences and denial of our history.

The recent decision of making Math and Physics as optional subjects to apply for an engineering course has created a controversy over the NEP recommendations. I delve deeper into this outrage and offer my opinion, perhaps unpopular, on the episode. 

Also, as a continuation of the series on the NEP, I cover the recommendations on higher educational institutions, the state of research and innovation in India, the objectives of the National Research Fund, and the restructuring of regulatory bodies which would potentially clip their wings.