Circus around Gurmehar Kaur brought out all the clowns
I adored this Gurmehar Kaur girl for, like, three days. That’s more than I have cared for any private person suddenly becoming public.
No prior announcement. You suddenly have a face and name all over the place.
It’s often good and this girl has the balls. Bigger than what the ABVP goons have. But that’s that. She stayed put and fought against the mocking by celebrities, rape threats by the lowlifes and random abuses by the average nationalist nut, all by herself.
She was the raging underdog. And then in one moment, pfft! She tweeted she wouldn’t be taking questions and asked people to direct questions to one Ram Subramanian. I thought she moved up in life quickly and had hired an agent. Then she got a blue-tick badge from Twitter.
She has a verified account now, with an agent who worked for biggies like Arvind Kejriwal. She was not an underdog. She was the top dog. And I have a special corner in my heart for top dogs. I called it the Purana IDGAF Maidan. I pushed good Gurmehar in that corner and I couldn’t care less.
But this whole fracas has led to all kinds of nincompoops into the field.
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| TV anchors ask half-baked questions and poke this guy (Kiran Rijiju) to come out raw, and he does, because he believes the sun rises from his Arunachal Pradesh. |
Virender Sehwag attempted some facetious humour. He got laughed at. You don’t joke in this country when people are talking nonsense.
Randeep Hooda got a stick up his rear cavity for clapping and LOLing at Viru’s joke.
Enter Gautam Gambhir, always under pressure to perform. He came up with a gem, saying freedom of speech is absolute. It’s not cricket where you fail to make the national team, but still captain an IPL team, Gauti.
This is politics and you are a lump of lunacy if you believe we have freedom of speech in the first place. Absolute is not a vodka brand, it has an "e", Gauti.
This country has blasphemy laws, laws against using some words, laws against certain slogans, laws against hurting sentiments and there are non-state actors with their own sets of laws, like you can’t say Bombay in Bombay since it called itself Mumbai.
The Sena will fix your Bumbai if you tried that. Try batting on the familiar pitch because this pitch is queered and Article 377 doesn’t like queers.
Then you have Anil Vij. This guy was made a minister only to make Manohar Lal Khattar look not-so-bad.
This MLA from Ambala thinks people who support Gurmehar are Pakistan supporters and should be sent to Pakistan. Gurmehar is more Indian than your bearded self, Mr Vij. She speaks like an Indian, argumentative and defiant. Your tenor has finality, no space for argument. Much like Pakistanis are. Final prophet, final book, PSL final. Did your daddy migrate from that part of Punjab by any chance? Karma is a Vij, check your karma.
But you can’t blame a lowly minister sitting in Chandigarh when the high and mighty ministers of Modi are opening their mouth and putting both feet in.
“Oh we have freedom of speech, but... She shouldn’t say this, he should say that.” These but-lickers who add but after a well-meaning sentence to drown in a well.
A small college with an average name has a small little seminar in a university and small little troublemakers throw smaller stones into the little hall to disrupt it and Union ministers consider it worthy to comment upon.
Law minister, I&B minister, home minister and his deputy take it upon themselves to lecture the unfortunate people of India on their misfortune of having limited freedom of speech.
In the process, they expose the impressionable Kiren Rijiju to TV cameras forgetting half the anchors in this country are half-literate at best.
They ask half-baked questions and poke this guy to come out raw, and he does, because he believes the sun rises from his Arunachal Pradesh. Real Jijus don’t make this kind of allowance to real saalis. Say no, goddammit. Resist the temptation of simsat windows on news TV.
Since Oscars have happened and Indians haven’t won anything, let us hope something really bad like a plane crash happens — somewhere preferably far enough to have a few Indians onboard and close enough to make it to prime time — so that we move on from these silly sixer celebs, one two-bit college and this low-level discourse about who has got a tinier brain to something real like: Are our skies safe?