“Never argue with someone who believes their own lies”
Long ago, I dreamt of studying in Cambridge. Given its venerable age, it ranked right up there with the rest of the best universities in the world. I wanted nothing more than to don long gowns and tiptoe down hallowed halls, discussing the essence of life and death and how to save all life forms inhabiting the good earth, while colonizing (read illegally occupying) a couple of other planets or their moons at least should humankind ever run out of space to spread themselves. I wanted to hobnob with the brilliantly illustrious, who would initially guide me and whom I would guide after the passage of a respectable amount of time.
Of course, life had different ideas. Forget Cambridge, I did not even make it as far as Colaba. Years passed and I had all but forgotten about it. Until recently. After my disastrous run in with the muffler and nearly being coopted into the joining Juggernaut, I had decided to lie low for a while, and take things easy. And that is precisely what I was doing. Minding my own business. Until blaring speeches and glaring headlines proclaimed the fall of an old bastion to the charms of venerable, middle-aged youth. Cambridge (or its management school, at least) had been conquered by an intelligent, impressive, inclusive, insightful, intuitive, and inspiring Indian! Reading all the adjectives used to describe him made me slightly irascible, but that is another story.
To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. I had always imagined Cambridge to be the serene and halcyon haunt of the great and the good. Surely conquering such a hallowed place would take exceptional ability? Yes, my friendly conqueror did have one such exceptional ability. He could always be called upon to provide comic relief. All that it had taken to conquer Cambridge was a clown! And one with marked Chinese leanings at that. And of course, the less said about his confusing statements, guaranteed to confound the cleverest, the better!
After an exceptionally somber and busy week dealing with patients in the throes of some dreaded ailment or other, I decided to have a good laugh and set about downloading his speeches with gusto. If I was looking for something along the lines of ‘vision which is global, but China has it’ or ‘a machine which churns out gold if fed with potatoes,’ I was not so much in for a surprise as a nasty shock. The man, while on the run (sorry, I meant walk) had with his suave well-bearded look, also acquired a new clarity of thought and was giving clarion calls for help. Now on whose behalf said calls exactly were for, remained a serious matter of contention. Some claimed they were on behalf of the motherland. Others just as vehemently claimed that they were for the invasion of the motherland. The conqueror was using confusion to claim all for himself.
Repeat a lie often enough, they say and it can be mistaken to be the truth. And thus the ‘Democracy in Danger’ refrain, which went on and on, like a broken record. When the simplest of minds can understand that you get either heads or tails on tossing a coin, one failed to understand how he believed himself when he was allowed not just permission, but also protection while on the run, sorry walk. And how in the wide world was he allowed to fly the nest when he was supposedly put behind bars not once, but several times thanks to his self-righteous and obdurate stance against the fascist regime now holding the common population in its snake- like hypnotic stare? If the mind of the common man boggles, that of the Cambridge dons must have reeled into the realms of insanity.
If it was a word-perfect actor playing to the galleries on a world stage, to a script which would have even given Shakespeare a run for his money, our conqueror was certainly worth the full houses and headlines proclaiming his ‘coming of age’ at last! Closer home, a much younger, saffron-clad monk went about his daily tasks with a sad shake of his venerable head, knowing that he could never win this battle of the elixir of youth. Another person who had joined the regret band was the father of all things Indian. MKG. I am sure MKG was by now regretting his shared surname what with his Dandi March being blatantly compared to the great joining juggernaut. At least one can safely say that the British who saw MKG on his march did not mean to simply stand and stare and did cause some grievous bodily harm to his followers if not MKG himself. But it is totally believable that the few terrorists in Kashmir who saw the clown were either busy ROFLing or were too scared to approach him by the thought of being infected by some new form of virus thanks to his Chinese connections not to mention the copious amount of beard! Perhaps we had discovered a simple new peaceful missile to solve militancy in Kashmir once and for all!
Again, the worst was saved for the last. There were repeated mentions of all the ‘institutions, constitution and pillars’ which supported the largest democracy in the world were being constantly bombarded. You wanted real bombardment? Then forget Ukraine. India was THE place to visit. And this is how a blatant invitation was issued to several Western powers to ‘ensure’ that democracy was restored. It was the new post-colonial school of thought. Conquer in order to free! The ‘Learning to Listen’ lecture which was the key to Cambridge had sinister undertones of ‘Sustaining Slavery in the Subcontinent.’
It has many times been seen that people prefer to don masks to hide the unsavory. And our conquering clown is no exception. Under the mask of a simpleton lies an extremely devious mind which will stop at nothing in an undisguised bid for power. A scion of a freedom fighter family making unapologetic appeals to foreign powers is the height of hypocrisy and the depth of depravity. For a would-be ruler, to be so unsure about the trust of the people whom he seeks to rule means that something is fishy and it is so much more than a basket of fish.
If, in a democracy, it is people who truly rule, it is time to unmask all the masqueraders and to vote for what lies beneath. It is time to read not just the writing on the wall, but in between the lines as well. It is time to see through the freebies and know that there is nothing like a free lunch and when the time comes, the price extracted will far outstrip not just the cost of lunch but that of an entire lifetime of full-board. It is time to no longer jest, but be just in choosing who we vote to power.
And to prove to the world that clowns may well conquer Cambridge but not the common man!