One is trying to save the idea of India, the other’s ambition is more limited: to become cock-of-the-walk in the street he was born in.Like Arnab’s pregnant silence, the different directions in which the two walked is full of symbolism too. On the one side we had courage and a calm tone, on the other a readymade slogan and incoherent anger.But again, like with stand-up comedy, where the Hindu Right needs to display urgent creativity to develop its own robust tradition, the Hindu Right lone wolf comes across as embarrassingly limp compared to the white supremacists the Jamia shooter was trying to emulate, especially in the FB live broadcasts preceding the incident. Think of new slogans. Both are in the business of instigating, harnessing and monetising outrage. The news anchor’s profession is already nowhere close to the peak of 2000, when print journalists felt sidelined by television. Both put on an act. The plan is to inflict maximum damage in the least amount of time and then have the courage to turn the gun on oneself. “Ruk, jao.Returning to Ground Zero, this face-off was one between literacy and philistinism, the civilised and the savage, tuneful music and the bestial cry, good hair and bad hair. The bhakt was walking away from the situation that he’d created himself, until the time he eventually falls off a cliff or the map. Shadab was moving forward, step by painstaking step, towards a potentially explosive situation. I choose to see it as a face-off between two rebels.
Both need to keep going viral to stay afloat and pay their bills.” Before you know it the editor has vanished into a nameless crowd of readers and critics, as the author is left holding her bloodied unpublished manuscript. Second, to counter Kamra et al, the Hindu Right needs to spawn its own stand-up comedy scene and come up with good anti-national/ go-to-Pakistan jokes. He kept the shades on for good reason.”As an author, the first thing that struck me about this was that this is exactly how authors approach publishers with their manuscript.The Hindu Right needs to work on it on a religious war footing. They have news anchors aplenty to spread their manufactured message but when it comes to the medium of tomorrow (and today), they are left floundering. Heckling is part of the performance.It was a classic face-off between two influencers on different sides of the divide.If anything, Goswami’s lapsing into silence was a sign of things to come, a time when the news anchor will gradually lapse into obsolescence.The bhakt’s rebellion is against Gandhi and the Muslim; it comes from social media radicalisation where ‘bhagwa boys’ from different Hindu castes — Jats, Rajputs, Gurjars — compete to out-saffron each other: I slapped the imam of a mosque and shot a viral video; now, better me on TikTok. The TV anchor is already a fading star. To his students, the schoolmaster looks strangely vulnerable and human when seen outside the confines of the classroom. White supremacists also plan their attacks in great detail, well in advance.
Very soon, we could have large auditoriums packed with bhakts, rocking in laughter to Hindi gags about dirty Muslims, playboy Nehru, Urban Naxals, and that amorphous category that even liberals love to hate: the liberal. The Jamia shooter’s Facebook page was laced with these videos and rivalries, withering masculine boasts and taunts. This will be far more influential than Goswami who, at the end of it, is an Angreziwallah with no real mass appeal to speak of.Goswami, minus the fortification of his studio, reminded me of a tyrannical schoolmaster, found strolling in the local bazar. Goswami has sent enough journalists into aeroplanes to heckle unsuspecting victims on his behalf.The urgent need for Hindu supremacists aping the racist white American fringe is twofold: invest in a good meaty diet and buff up. On the one side, we had silken-haired singer, Shadab Najar, who was asking China CNC Cylindrical Grinding Machine the shooter to calm down and talk. Aao baat karte hain baith ke. As the editor backs away weakly, trying to fob off the author with a pretend gun, the author advances calmly: “Relax, don’t be scared, let’s talk okay? I don’t want to harm you. The second face-off that took place was not between influencers but a Jamia student and a katta-waving bhakt. Shadab is the courageous one, grappling with the unknown alone, while the bhakt knows that his fall will be broken by a khakhi safety net provided by the State. The question though remains: Can an ideology of hate produce genuine peals of laughter, unless it is inadvertent and at its own expense?. Goswami, for a change, looked like a rabbit with sideburns, trapped in blinding headlights. At the moment, the BJP is losing the stand-up comedy battle. To sum up, I’m just repeating what my maths teacher used to say in Class 8: Do whatever you want to do, even if it’s a prank like stuffing sugar in my scooter’s exhaust pipe, but do it well, like a pro
ylntehiadi