The Weekly Whine by Nonsensical Nemo: IAC and Foreign Press Watch
To celebrate this unique human trait, Nonsensical Nemo presents the perfect Monday newsletter – the Weekly Whine.
We whine; therefore, we are. If there’s one trait that differentiates man from every other species on this planet, it’s our ability to grumble about things. It’s the single trait that defines our species.
Has one ever seen a baby orangutan ask his father for the latest Manchester United t-shirt? No, the baby orangutan is just hoping his dad doesn’t eat him (don’t fact-check that).
The more we have, the more we tend to grumble. And more one whines, the more one tends to get.
To celebrate this unique human trait, Nonsensical Nemo presents a new newsletter – the Weekly Whine.
PS - The whine was destined for your inboxes for Monday but one’s laptop crashed in protest at the rubbish masquerading as writing in this newsletter.
The season premier includes a whine against IAC, foreign coverage of India and Clubhouse.
The Main Whine: India Against Corruption and Odd-Even
"India Against Corruption" might not have achieved its desired goal (to remove corruption), but it did manage to remove any lingering vestige of hope that Indians had for a total revolution. Known apparatchiks – whose behaviour can be predicted – are certainly better than all-knowing self-appointed revolutionaries.
Just look at the IAC team.
We have the BDSM teetotaller who threatens to go on some asinine intermittent fast every other week and then backtracks.
We have the PIL master, who is now a full-time anti-vaxx mask denier.
We have the yoga guru, who is warring against allopathy amid a pandemic, pushing anti-vaxx statements and whose utterances have even forced Dr Harsh Vardhan to stop going after hospitals and doing his job to write a critical reply couched as a love letter.
We have the psephologist whose serene beard ends up at every other protest the current dispensation without reason or rhyme but looking sufficiently morose all the time.
And finally, we have the Chief Minister.
His backers had hoped that Arvind Kejriwal would change Indian politics, but what he did was destroy the middle-class wet dream – powered by watching RDB too many times – that one of their own could ‘fix’ the system.
Mr K has evolved into the quintessential Indian politician through a laundry list of actions such as promises of free rations (yet to be delivered even a month later), attempts to boost overall board scores by stopping IX students from advancing to Class X (leaving nearly one lakh students behind), kicking journalists critical of the regime out of WhatsApp groups, and chanting Hanuman Chalisa on live TV.
Of course, some might point out that having a snollygoster who is being economic with the truth about his govt’s education claims is a step-up from politicians who didn’t care about education in the first place.
However, the defining political leitmotif of his term has been Odd-Even, which appears to be a smashing hit for an audience that largely falls for a version of the false dilemma or dichotomy fallacy. Or a smart Twitter user pointed out, his version of Maslow’s Hammer.
Comments like “How can you build Central Vista when there’s a pandemic?” or “How can you have CAA-NRC when minorities are under threat in India?” or “How can Cosplay Tagore grow a beard while migrants are walking home?” often find their way into our discourse.
Odd-Even is to Kejriwal what the Mona Lisa is to Da Vinci or relativity to Einstein. It’s his magnum opus, his most magnificent creation which captures the very pathos of his political life.
What is odd-even?
It is a bizarre Malthusian plan like Thanos’ finger snap, which operates on the belief that halving the number of people will instantly make things better. Or as a smart Twitter user pointed out, his version of Maslow’s Hammer.
What started as a plan to ostensibly reduce air pollution gradually became the leitmotif of all things related to AAP, even though its end goal vacillates as much as demonetization. But it’s not all sad. Mr K has announced that AAP will be launching a liquor app, fulfilling one of his older ‘Dawa-Daru promises.
Alas, based on the mendicants waiting for rations, the launch of the App might take a while. Or as is his wont, he will just blame Modi for not allowing him to deliver liquor as he’s currently doing for not delivering rations.
All in all, IAC will be a stinging reminder to every one of its supporters.
Nonsensical Nemo: Foreign Press Watch
Whenever I feel low, I got read an article or watch a video to see what the foreign press – particularly their op-ed pages – are writing about India. Like The Daily Show, most takes on India are full of conjectures which can never be described better than Shashi Tharoor’s immortal lines: “Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist (sic).”
And so, I read The New York Times or The Guardian or Washington Post.
The picture of India they paint is so bleak, so dystopian, and so bereft of hope, that I instantly feel better about my life.
Most foreign press coverage of India is like reading a badly-written Arundhati Roy essay. Roy (whatever her challenges with truth) has a god-like ability to churn out dystopian essays in highly literary language. Others don’t, which makes the singularly obsessed coverage of Modi and India unintentionally hilarious.
Like Rupi Kaur’s explanation of the farmer’s protest.
Today’s gems included this piece in The Nation, which claims to be ‘the place for debate on left’. The article titled: “Is Mahua Moitra India’s AOC?” follows the long-held AOC belief that it’s more important to be ‘morally right than to be factually and semantically incorrect’.
MM liberally takes a leaf from that AOC playbook, often accusing opponents of being ‘fascists’ while overlooking similar instances of authoritarianism in her own party. The op-ed, written by a doctoral candidate of history from Columbia University – an Ivy League – riffs on Mahua Moitra’s NYT piece on ‘knowing how to beat Modi’ manages to get the founding date of TMC wrong twice. It first claimed that the TMC was founded in 2011, before correcting it to write 2008, before finally realising it was 1998.
While factually-correct reports on India in foreign publications are conspicuous by their absence, to get the founding date wrong for a party that just won one of India’s biggest polls, makes one question both the desk at The Nation and the History PhD course at the Columbia University.
Issues that usually matter in Indian elections like caste, political muscle and local-level corruption weren’t even mentioned. Instead, the article focuses on MM’s Twitter following, adds the usual conjectures about India seen through a Western lens and ends with the highly undefined question: “Does her brand of unapologetic secularism represent the way forward for an embattled opposition?”
Based on the article, Nonsensical Nemo has decided to add Columbia University to the institutes he routinely trolls.
The second gem of the week was from Washington Post, which wondered why an ‘RW populist like Modi stressed his softer side’. Nonsensical Nemo had first proposed the idea of intersectional fascism a week ago and was glad to see that the idea had caught on.
The piece claimed Modi displayed 'feminine-identified traits such as selflessness and devotion' that he stood for 'Hindu trans rights, and some 'Muslim's women's rights'. It also strangely claimed that Modi didn’t brag, even though every electoral campaign consists of the current dispensation touting his achievements which was also the case with every single trip to address NRIs.
The piece completely failed to mention Modi's recent foray in Bengal, where, along with mispronouncing popular Bengali phrases, he managed to rile up a host of female voters with his ‘Didi o Didi’ chant. Many had compared the chant to the utterance of a street-side.
If this is what passes as Gender Studies, one should seriously follow Australia’s lead on not subsidising the arts courses.
And our final entry this week consisted of this masterpiece from Sir Anish Kapoor, part-time architect and a full-time fascist spotter. His latest piece in The Guardian railed against the Central Vista project calling it “the latest stage in a hateful, vanity-fuelled campaign to de-Islamify India” and labelled Modi the architect of ‘Hindu Taliban’. The comparison made total sense given the Taliban’s long-standing history of building great structures and not blowing them up.
Of course, his analogy calling ‘Modi the Aurangzeb of our times’ will ruffle a few feathers among white academicians who consider the Mughal ruler the best thing since sliced bread.
It’s a mystery particularly since Lutyens had no great love for either Mughal or Indian architecture and is believed to have said: “They want me to do Hindu. Hindon't, I say.”
In the piece, AK called Bimal Patel a ‘third-rate architect’, claiming that Patel would follow Modi’s ideas the way Albert Speer followed Hitler’s.
While Nonsensical Nemo has never understood architecture, it’s a bit rich of AK to call someone a ‘third-rate architect’ particularly when most of his sculptures look like the physical manifestation of The Emperor’s New Robes or the foetuses of the Leviathan being birthed. . Not that this is a defence of Patel’s work, with the Parliament building looking like a love child of the Millennium Falcon and a Kaju Barfi. Alas, one never went to Doon and lacks the faculties to perhaps appreciate these works of art.
AK’s work vs ‘third-rate’ Patel
The Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré (1865)
Mini Whine
Clubhouse
We are led to believe that every middle-class Indian wants to get into the IITs, IIMs or IAS, but based on Instagram Reels, one is fairly certain that they all want is to be pole dancers.
However, Clubhouse beats Reel by a country mile when it comes to a new medium for humanity to tell us how dumb it is. Somehow people who couldn’t stay awake for 10 minutes during a lecture in college can now listen to an RTI activist whine for 2 hours.
Indian clubhouses seem to come in three varieties –
1) Hindu khatre mein hain.
2) When will Modi pay for his sins?
3) Full bakchodi like “Stop poetry imposition. Most poems and poets suck.”
Only the third one is mildly tolerable. That’s all for now, folks. Subscribe if you’ve as much free time as Clubhouse users.
I follow your work on twitter. Your substack is fantastic. Keep them articles coming.