Six years of blogging : what did I get out of it?

I just remembered it this morning. It’s May 31 and I am about to hit six full years of running this blog. What did I get out of this? I didn’t have to think very hard. I got out of it a sense of fulfillment beyond any other. Call it vanity if you want, but being able to reach to people and being heard in some small way is deeply satisfying. Maybe that’s why politicians crave crowds so much. It’s a heady feeling.

Obviously, I am not the most well known person out there, but I can tell you this much… whatever little attention I get, it’s pretty addictive 🙂

Actually, the first thing I should be doing is thanking all the followers of this blog, especially those who comment regularly. Some of you have been with me almost since the first week I began this blog. It has been such an honor to have you along on this journey.

I have always been a politically excitable person. Even in college, with exams and competition looming over my head, I would avidly seek out the news of how elections were going. The internet was still a new thing in those days and not as much integrated into our daily lives as now. But I remember reading the political news on rediff, sitting in the computer room even as others were listening to music, hitting up websites of American universities (and of course, watching porn).

I wonder if our old hostel still has a computer room… LOL. Everyone must have their own laptop by now.

There was this time in May 2015 when I could no longer keep it all to myself. I was bursting with stuff I had to say on politics. I needed a vent. My only worry was whether I would be able to keep going. This was surprisingly easy. There is always so much happening in our country that there is always something to say.

When I started, my blog posts were merely angry outbursts. It was the written equivalent of yelling. Because the internet is so vast, yelling into the void seemed only natural, even necessary, to be heard. Over time, I realized this is not true. I learned to get a grip over my language and compose much better. When I look back at my posts from 2015, I find most of them quite embarrassing. But that’s okay. This is how we learn. I once read somewhere that the reason grown ups find it harder to acquire a new skill, such as language, is that we are too self-conscious and afraid to fail. Think about a kid saying their first words. They don’t care about the grammar; they are not self conscious about failing. That’s why they learn.

If I could make one appeal to most of the Hindu right, it would be this. Please come off as less angry and more composed. The other side … they got nothing on us except that they come off as polished and well spoken. I understand this is harder to achieve on the right than on the left. Most of us are everyday people with everyday jobs. On the other side, they make a living out of sophistry. But we’ve got to try. Remember it’s really easy. If a liberal with a useless art history degree can do it, anybody can.

This is supposed to be a “daily” blog in some sense, even though I do not update it all seven days of the week. Sometimes, people ask me if the blogging is a drain on my time. I would argue it is exactly the opposite. This blog brings discipline into my life which translates into greater efficiency in all kinds of work. Having a task to accomplish every day keeps me honest about my daily calendar and getting stuff done. If I have not blogged on a particular day, there is a 99% (or more) chance that it’s because I slacked off with everything else as well. In fact, in these six years, I think it only happened twice that I was too busy to blog. Every other time, I was just being lazy with blogging as with everything else that day.

So if you are out there and you feel like you have something to say, don’t wait. Get it out there, even if all you want to do is blow some steam. It might be just steam at first, but you will soon work out how to put together a steam engine. With the internet at our fingertips, this has never been easier. Trust me, it won’t be a drain on your time. It will make you a better person.

Fake fundraisers & funeral pyres : How do India’s Covid vultures sleep at night?

First of all, referring to them as Covid vultures is a misnomer. And that’s not just because it is an insult to the vulture, a noble bird which performs a scavenging role that may seem disgusting to us but nevertheless is crucial for the ecosystem to sustain. It is also because the term limits our understanding of the wide variety of ways in which India’s Covid vultures are monetizing our dead. Calling them vultures is a bit like referring to a Boeing 747 as a “flying auto-rickshaw.” The former is just too versatile for the description to make sense.

Consider all the ways in which the dead and dying can be useful to the vulture journalist. The first and most obvious is old fashioned ambulance chasing. You find a family desperately trying to find a place in hospital for their loved one. You shove cameras in their face and record their cries for help. The more the despair in their eyes, the more compelling the coverage. If you can, you shove something in the face of the one gasping for breath. Then you wait. Because you don’t want to cash out too early. If that person dies, your video footage will be worth more money.

However, the second wave saw this perversion taken to a sick new level. They followed the dead bodies all the way to the crematorium and took pictures of rows of burning funeral pyres. Some of these pictures were taken from a very great height to capture a full panorama view, which I can only suppose is drone footage. After all, I suppose the New York Times had taken out a global tender of some sort and they don’t compromise on quality. So move away, you wretched scavenger birds, because there is a vulture drone flying over the burning ghat.

The pandemic took millions of lives all across the world, but did you see such coverage from anywhere else? In New York, hundreds of bodies were piled into freezer trucks, where they still lie today, over a year later. Entire neighborhoods in Italy and Spain turned into death valley, but the dignity of the departed was not violated like this. Not for the voyeuristic pleasure of others.

You have to understand their compulsions. When the pandemic began, these people must have taken huge advances from Western media, anticipating a collapse of the health system in India. But India went for a swift nationwide lockdown that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. They tried to squeeze out whatever they could from the lockdown misery, but nothing could be as dramatic as scores of funeral pyres. Meanwhile, the West went through a second wave and an even deadlier third wave. In other words, both demand and supply were choked up.

Things were different when the second wave eventually hit India. The West had mostly recovered by then. Or at least, the Americans had come around to the idea that seven hundred deaths per day (equivalent to around 3000 deaths per day in India) means nothing at all. India’s Covid vultures had to make sure they were good for the advances they had taken, plus a year’s interest, denominated in US dollars.

Then, I guess someone had the bright idea to also start selling the pictures online. Indeed, why stick to the traditional mandi system, paying commissions and middlemen, when you can make more by selling on the open market? Something that struck me here was not the high prices they were asking, but their strange choice of numbers, like Rs 17,000, Rs 23,000 and something like that. How did they come up with that price point? Did they do market research to find out how much customers would be willing to pay for pictures of dead bodies from India? We will never know.

I also wonder who bought these pictures. Media organizations for sure. But did individuals also buy them? For what? To use as wallpaper on their desktop? A screensaver perhaps with a series of pictures of burning funeral pyres from various cities… I wonder how the families of the dead would feel about this. Don’t forget that the journalists probably took a series of pictures and then selected the ‘best’ ones. How would you like to know that the funeral pyre of your loved one was judged as ‘not sensational enough’ for the front page of the New York Times?

I might be picking too much on the photojournalists here, who are rather low on the scavenging chain. Real journalists don’t get out of their homes to make money. They write columns. The real money in news is always in writing opinions.

And so they did. They opened their laptops, got out their morning coffee and snuggled themselves into their favorite writing corners in their homes. To show the world the ‘truth’ by means of op-eds. These are like word pictures, except you don’t have to wait in the heat and general unpleasantness of a crematorium to get the perfect shot. The top newspapers abroad often pay their op-ed writers as much as $1 or $2 a word. This means a thousand word essay could sell for as much as one and half lakh rupees, minus some of those pesky forex conversion charges. Everyone hates them, I know…

I wonder about the economics of these deals. During the second wave, did these columnists charge a “surge fee” to foreign newspapers? Or was it that so many people offered to write columns that their wages got depressed? But my guess is that these newspapers follow the celebrity system. A small number of celebrities get the most retweets and so they get to corner the market.

But the top celebrities went a step further. If your columns are going to create a sensation in the West, why not cash in by creating additional revenue streams? Why not plug your article on your Twitter handle, get thousands of likes and retweets and use that reach to solicit donations to your “team” for Covid relief? There are well-meaning people everywhere who would like to help. I should note here that only the truly lazy would forget to register an NGO and start collecting donations into their personal accounts.

Of course, for those willing to put in just a tiny bit of hard work and register the NGO, there are better rewards. Shady foreign interests want to bundle money to you? No problem. If they deposited money in your personal account, you would owe taxes on it, which could be 30% or more. Instead, they make a donation to your “non profit” NGO which buys you — the head of the NGO — say an expensive car or a new home. It’s the same money, just a lot more that it otherwise would have been.

And this is why they created a racket of misinformation around PM Cares. The fund that paid for thousands of ventilators and will now pay for the education of children orphaned by Covid. The more donations went into PM Cares, the less people would give to the vacation fund of Covid vultures.

But there is one thing no foreign money can buy — a good night’s sleep. The traditional wisdom goes that the more ill gotten gains you have stashed away, the more scarce your sleep becomes. So how are these people managing any?

I am guessing this is one of those things where they have truly learned from the vulture. You see vultures have adapted to carry special gut bacteria and chemicals within their system that allows them to eat rotting flesh safely without getting sick. India’s Covid vultures might have evolved something similar. Perhaps an over supply of sleep inducing hormones.

“Indian variant” is a repeat of how the world changed Hitler’s “hooked cross” to “Swastika”

Brace yourselves folks, because a great evil is upon the world. Here it is, casting its evil shadow on the faraway nation of Australia.

From America to Europe to Australia, no human being on the face of this earth is safe. Because the “Indian variant” is coming for everyone. Look, the BBC even decided to release videos in five languages warning people about this most dangerous “Indian variant.” That’s right: five languages.

Here is a tiny side note. Notice how the languages belong to some region called “South Asia,” but the virus belongs only to India!

It is quite natural to compare the pandemic to a World War. It has spread to every corner of the planet and has caused at least 35 lakh confirmed deaths. The real number could be much larger. It has devastated economies, forced hundreds of millions of people into poverty. There is likely no human being anywhere whose life has not been turned upside down over the last year and half. Each one of us breathing today is lucky to still be alive. This is World War 2 all over again, possibly even worse.

And just as with World War 2, the global media faces a problem. One of these days, it’s going to be over. And then, the media and history books will have to record for future generations about the nature of the evil that caused this.

The “hakenkreuz” or hooked cross was the dreaded symbol of Hitler and his Nazis. At its peak, the Nazi flag with the hooked cross flew over almost all the capitals in Europe. Millions of innocent people were snatched from their homes and they perished inside gas chambers.

Who was behind this horrific crime? It was Christian fundamentalists, acting on their age old hatred against Jews.

But if you are a western historian, you can’t put that down. You cannot tell future generations that every member of the Nazi SS wore a belt with the words “Gott mit uns” (God with us). You cannot tell future generations that the Nazi symbol of the hooked cross is a variation of the Christian cross. You cannot tell future generations about the deals between the Fascist Party and the Church. When tourists visit Vatican City, you cannot tell them that the city was a gift from Mussolini to the Pope.

So you change terminology. You can’t use the original German word “hakenkreuz” that the Nazis used to describe their own symbol. You cannot use the term hooked cross, which would be the literal English translation of that. You can’t use English, French, German, Spanish, Russian or Portuguese to describe it. That would leave the Christian west with too much blame.

So you go halfway around the world and dig out a Sanskrit word for a somewhat similar looking symbol. And thus the hated Nazi symbol becomes designated as the “Swastika.” For hundreds of millions of people in the west, “Swastika” will be the only Sanskrit word they know. And they will despise it. Each time they hear it, they will think that Hitler was inspired by the pagan Hindus.

The same thing is happening today. They can’t name where the virus came from. That would hurt the global compact between the Religion of ‘Love’, the Religion of ‘Peace’ and the Religion of ‘Equality.’ Instead, they want to settle on “Indian variant.” They want to blame the pagans again. With a reported 33 crore gods, it has to be the fault of the pagans somehow.

Look at poor TIME Magazine, wondering what other options they have, other than calling it “Indian variant.”

Oh India is “demanding,” are they? How dare the pagans stand up for themselves? Why are they making this inconvenient in some small way? If people don’t call it “Indian variant,” what other name could they possibly use? All the possible names in all languages of the world have run out. If you don’t like names, you could use combinations of letters and numbers to designate viruses. As in B.1.617.2, the official scientific name. But hey, with the media looking for something to call it, even the numbers ran out somehow, despite there being infinitely many by definition.

By the way, if we have to have geographic names, did anyone consider calling it the “South Asian variant”? They already designated my entire culture and history as “South Asian” instead of “Indian,” so why not use it for virus variants too? I know. Because South Asia has a lot of countries and you can’t point a finger at the ones that have an Abrahamic faith as their state religion.

The blame must go to the one country and the one culture with a billion pagans in it.

They can’t name the country where the original virus came from. But the variant is from India and they make sure everyone knows that. They did it with the hooked cross of Nazis. It came from Christian Germany, but it was remembered only as the Swastika. Now, we have a virus that came from Wuhan in China, but all we should remember is the so called Indian variant.

Unless Maharashtra opens up, the rest of the country cannot

I think I might have said this about Covid earlier. The biggest problem with it is that bad governance anywhere becomes a threat to governance everywhere. And right now, the whole nation is paying a price for the inability of the MVA government to stop the spread of the disease.

The state has now been under “lockdown” for over a month, since the middle of April. I put “lockdown” in quotes because there was some deliberate confusion around the use of this term. The government initially shied away from using it and instead imposed “lockdown like” curbs, whatever that means.

Perhaps this was the only piece of responsible conduct by the MVA government during the second wave and I certainly do appreciate that. The Maharashtra CM appeared keenly aware of the significance of his state. He was aware of the psychological impact of the word and its chilling effect across the country. He tried, he hesitated, but eventually had to do the inevitable.

It’s been over a month now. Yes, cases have come down in Maharashtra, but the speed of the decline has been much more underwhelming than we would expect. Most states, such as Uttar Pradesh or Karnataka or Rajasthan managed to bring down cases very quickly once their lockdowns came into place. Remember these lockdowns began much after the one in Maharashtra.

Let’s not forget the stunning performance of Gujarat. It is the only big state that didn’t even do a total lockdown. But see how quickly they bent the curve and brought it under control.

In Maharashtra, there was en extended plateau period. Then cases began coming down and have been stuck around the 30,000 mark for over a week now. Initially, it was very encouraging to learn that Mumbai or Pune cases are declining. But that was a while ago. When can these cities open up again? The administration cannot keep extending lockdown, they have to figure a way out of it.

But that time clearly hasn’t come. Covid deaths are reaching up to 1000 per day. Clearly, things in Maharashtra are not under control yet.

As with starting the lockdown, Maharashtra plays a big role in when we get to lift them. Maharashtra went first. Unless they begin to relax restrictions, no other state will follow.

One lesson that every politician has learned from the second wave is this. People would rather pay a long term economic cost of the lockdown than go through the nightmare caused by a surge of infections. Under these circumstances, there is no way any state is going to lift its lockdown without Maharashtra taking the lead.

Maharashtra was the first to lock down. Which state would dare to “break the line” and lift? There is no media praise for trying to safeguard the economy. What if cases start surging again? Media will be at the throat of that Chief Minister.

There are of course different incentives for BJP CMs and “liberal” CMs. If a BJP CM lifts lockdown and cases surge, media will chew them up. As for liberal CMs, what incentive do they have to take risks? If there is more long term economic pain, it is essentially a bonus for them..

The onus is on the MVA here. They are very good at setting targets, but not for the right stuff.

We cannot afford third wave, India must unite to stop selfish interests behind “farmer protests”

It is becoming difficult not to question the intentions behind the so called farmer protests. In the last few days, the second wave in India has only just begun to lose strength. Yet, daily cases new cases are still close to two lakh, which is twice as much as the peak of the first wave. The number of deaths is still above three thousand a day. We have lost fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, parents of young children. We have already lost so much and still we have so much to lose. The economy is still not open. We don’t know how many jobs and livelihoods have been lost.

And then we have self-styled “farmer leaders” who are adamant on holding more mass protests? That is extraordinarily selfish and cruel. We have just seen how deadly the second wave was and how quickly the virus can come back. Do we not all realize what is at stake here? How could anyone play around with causing a third wave?

When these protests began, they were billed as a grassroots movement against the power of the state. Even though there were never more than a few thousand people at these gatherings, mostly from Punjab and a handful from Haryana, they enjoyed enormous moral authority. The media got involved at an emotional level and civil society pitched in with protest songs, music and literature. Across India, there are over sixty crore people who depend on agriculture. There is no way the protesters could have represented a majority of them or even a significant percentage of them. But the imagery of the humble farmer taking on the might of the Indian state led to the sympathetic manner in which these protests were framed.

But how can something be a grassroots movement when its leaders routinely get away with things that no common citizen would? Most of the country is under strict lockdown. Common citizens are getting beaten, kicked humiliated for violations such as not wearing a mask, or if they are outside trying to find essentials. While not official policy, this is how the administration everywhere is used to treating people who have no power. Our citizens are getting booked for having too many guests at a wedding or too many people mourning at a funeral. But the farmer unions get to go ahead with mass protests?

Six months down the line, these protests represent the worst of VIP culture: entitled, selfish, thoughtless and with no regard for common people. For a while, their blockading of roads made it difficult for trucks carrying oxygen to enter Delhi at the peak of the second wave. Even the circumstances surrounding a horrific sexual assault near Tikri border failed to undercut their power. How is this different from the infamous Jungle Raj in Bihar of the 1990s?

In retrospect, the signs of this were everywhere. The unions were allowed to get away with rampant destruction of property and infrastructure such as cellphone towers. Riding big wheels on Jan 26, they were allowed to chase Delhi Police personnel into a ditch, causing grievous injuries. They were allowed to sack the Red Fort and plant a flag of their own. At another time, they even attacked a Jan Aushadhi Kendra which provides cheap medicines to the poor. It is obvious that these protesters never lacked funding nor political support. The Canadian Prime Minister spoke in their favor, interfering directly in our internal affairs. The British Parliament discussed their matter. Their sympathizers took out full page ads in the New York Times. Incidentally, another group of sympathizers blew up railway tracks near Chaibasa in Jharkhand for a bandh on April 26, to mark five months of the protests. At the time, goods trains were supposed to be on these tracks, rushing life saving oxygen to parts of the country worst hit by the second wave.

In Punjab, which is the epicenter of these protests, the case fatality ratio for coronavirus is a grim 2.5%, by far the highest in the country. But much more than that, consider what these protests did to the mentality of the public. For four straight months, they occupied our minds. They took focus away from the fact that the virus was still out there. Their gatherings inundated our TV screens, their so called mahapanchayats grabbed all our attention. What was the underlying message that everyday people, those not directly related to the protests, took away from this? That the pandemic is over and the country has moved on to other things. They dropped their precautions. Half of Covid preparedness is a matter of public awareness. Unless we all take precautions, no health system in the world can prepare for the kind of tidal wave that comes with exponential spread of the virus.

Shall we allow them to distract us again? Shall we allow a group of entitled, self-styled leaders to enforce mob rule? While discussions may continue, repealing these laws right now would set a terrible precedent. We obviously cannot afford all the lives that would be lost in a third wave and so we give in? That is called paying a ransom. Tomorrow, anyone with a crowd of supporters can get anything by threatening public safety.

About the motivations of the twelve opposition parties who have backed in writing the continuation of these protests, the lesser said the better. Writing letters to the Prime Minister did not make the second wave any better. If these protests lead to a third wave, the Prime Minister is likely to receive more letters. But I am guessing the letters won’t make the third wave any easier.

This should be an easy choice. Remember the cries for help on social media, for beds, oxygen, Remdesivir and the lines at the crematoriums? That was less than a month ago. Today, we want to move on and pamper the egos of a bunch of union leaders who are protesting some law that doesn’t even come into effect for at least another year? No way. This time we cannot afford to let them mess with our heads. Our lives depend on realizing this, very literally.

Why Congress is going after Raman Singh

The most interesting political development in India over the last one week has been in Chhattisgarh. When the whole toolkit thing came out, the Congress accused the BJP of forgery. They filed a number of FIRs against all and sundry, including Sambit Patra. That’s just the standard muck that flies at anyone who is in politics. Politicians would think nothing of it, generally speaking.

But why are they going after Raman Singh, of all people? They questioned him once the other day. Today, another team of Chhattisgarh police has reached his residence, to question him again. Has Bhupesh Baghel gone completely crazy?

No, of course not. He is a very canny politician and he knows exactly what he is doing. First, there is the most obvious benefit to him here, by creating a diversion. In the second wave, the worst hit state was actually Chhattisgarh. Sure, the fact that the state is Congress ruled shielded him from all media coverage. But those who lost relatives are bound to know what happened.

But there is something more interesting, which I believe is happening. By targeting Raman Singh, I think Bhupesh Baghel is sort of propping him up in some way within the BJP.

Look at it this way. Raman Singh was a much beloved 3 term Chief Minister. He gets that favorable buzz that every “first CM” of a new state gets. He technically wasn’t the first, but come on … Yes, in 2018, the people got tired of him and decided to try something new. That happens. But with the BJP’s 2018 defeat, one thing was sealed. The Raman Singh era was over in Chhattisgarh BJP. Time for new faces and a whole new party.

Naturally, this would set off a flutter inside the BJP. Who would be the party’s new choice in the state?

But in politics, nobody ever goes away. Why would Raman Singh want to be out of the game? He has a son as well, who is in politics.

There is bound to be a power tussle here. There are going to be many in the state BJP with ambitions of their own. They would argue that Raman Singh has had his era and now someone else should have the opportunity. But why would Raman Singh give up so easily? He has been a 3-term CM. He has built everything from the ground up, signed off on every plan, appointed every officer. In the 2013 election, his slogan was:

“Atalji ne rajya banaaya, Dr. Raman ne ise sajaaya.“

He knows every nook and corner of the state. People of the state know him. In fact, the whole country knows him. Why would he just go away?

It is in Congress’ interest to keep this internal power tussle going on in BJP. By victimizing Raman Singh, I believe Bhupesh Baghel is forcing the BJP party to rally around the former CM. This is sure to irritate other aspirants within the Chhattisgarh BJP.

Clever, very clever. By the way, they say Raman Singh used to do something a bit similar himself. The close relationship between Raman Singh and the now late Ajit Jogi was no secret. For over a decade, the Congress in Chhattisgarh struggled with the Jogi question. And BJP kept winning.

Although Chhattisgarh is a small state, it is important for BJP to win it back. It’s one of the three states that Atalji created. Of these three, it is the only one where the BJP never lost an election until 2018. Not at the state level, nor at the Lok Sabha level. It’s a “natural BJP state.” But, ironically, in Chhattisgarh, there is really not much difference between Congress and BJP. I am not saying this in a cynical “all parties are the same” kind of way. Rather, I say this in quite a positive sense. The Congress in Chhattisgarh is made in the image of the BJP. The discourse, the way things are framed in Raipur, is all BJP legacy. The BJP way of thinking is the default. Ruling parties can change, but the establishment thinks in a certain way.

No such thing as “allopathy” : Why the Indian Medical Association should be embarrassed

Apparently, the Indian Medical Association is angry, very angry. Because it seems someone said that “allopathy” is stupid. I am angry as well. Because it seems that the Indian Medical Association does not understand that modern medicine uses no such principle as “allopathy.” It’s a total misnomer.

Surprised? Your first clue should be the fact that both the terms “allopathy” and “homeopathy” were coined by the same guy, one Samuel Hahnemann who lived from 1755 to 1843. Hahnemann came to the conclusion that there are fundamentally two systems of medicine. One is allopathy (“allos” in Greek means “different”), in which a disorder is treated by administering substances that produce the opposite effect as the symptoms. For instance, if a patient is unable to fall asleep, you give them a chemical that induces sleep.

The opposite of this is homeopathy (“homio” in Greek means “same”), in which you treat a disorder by administering something that produces the same effect as the symptoms. In other words, if you want to cure insomnia, you prescribe something that causes loss of sleep! Like caffeine, for instance.

Yes, homeopathy certainly sounds more ridiculous and it certainly is. That’s why homeopathy is considered a pseudoscience. So if homeopathy is wrong, allopathy must be right, no? The real answer is that both principles are outdated and meaningless today. Much of 20th and 21st century medicine, including its most recognizable tools such as antibiotics and vaccines, follow no allopathic principle.

To understand this, notice what is missing from the discussion around “homeopathy” and “allopathy.” Both talk of treating symptoms and not the disease itself. In the times of Hahnemann, it was still not clear that germs such as bacteria caused disease. And as for viruses, their existence was not known at all. When these terms were created, people thought a disease was just made up of its symptoms. This is the equivalent of thinking, for instance, that Covid-19 is the same as asthma, because you find the patients unable to breathe.

That is why, in the times of Hahnemann, the only debate was over how to treat symptoms. People did not even know what a disease really is, let alone how it could be treated.

Today, we have antibiotics. The antibiotic attacks the disease causing bacteria, not the symptoms. For example, fever could be a symptom. You could reduce the fever probably with paracetamol. But, paracetamol is not an antibiotic. You will need an antibiotic to kill the bacteria. The latter has nothing to do with allopathy. The same with vaccines, which contain a weakened form of the disease causing microbe itself (living or dead) and build immunity against that particular disease. No allopathic principle in picture.

In some ways, asking whether modern medicine is “allopathic” is a bit like asking what kind of color film or audio cassette is inside your smartphone camera. The technology has evolved so much that the question has become meaningless.

The most hilarious thing about this episode is that it made both sides look bad. For one side, “allopathy” seemed to be the imaginary villain. And then, the other side came out in defense of their imaginary hero.

But most of all, this episode has exposed liberals who consider themselves so high and mighty; always on the side of science. Unfortunately for them but luckily for humanity, science is not a political party. And if you believe yourself to be scientific just because you support a particular politician, you are no different from those who you consider superstitious fools.

Are BJP supporters wrong in their approach to intellectuals?

Does it ever make you angry just how much liberal politicians get away with? Even if they do or say the most outrageous things, commit the worst crimes, the media simply looks away. Do you ever find yourself muttering in disgust : imagine if a BJP leader did this…

I bet it makes you angry. About 90% of BJP supporters are like that.

What makes BJP supporters even more angry? The way in which liberal intellectuals manage to clamp their mouths shut whenever someone on their side does something nasty. Their resolute silence will drive you nuts. But their silence is both total and final. You can rail against it, but you will get absolutely nothing out of them. You might as well bang your head against the Himalayas; I read somewhere that those mountains move like half an inch every year.

And then, politics being politics, soon there is a time when someone from the right wing is at fault. It need not be a politician or a big public figure. It could be any random person who is right wing or even perceived to be right wing. Like someone walking down the road wearing a Hanuman shirt. They don’t even have to do anything actually wrong. They just have to activate the prejudice centers in the liberal brain by their speech or their appearance.

In an instant, the liberal machine comes to life, belching smoke and breathing fire. The snow capped mountains begin to spew hot lava. The right winger, taken by surprise, pleads in vain. Where were you till now? Why were you silent when X, Y or Z happened? Not only will they refuse to admit guilt, the liberals will accuse you of a made up crime called “whataboutery.” You see, exposing hypocrisy is a crime in itself. Or at least a crime much worse than hypocrisy.

We on the right have come up with a typical set of explanations for this familiar phenomenon. The intellectuals are hypocrites, prejudiced, or simply bought out. We even have an abstract notion of ‘ecosystem’ where these people are all compromised, all of them incentivized in invisible ways by a vast shadow network that dates back to Jawaharlal Nehru.

What if that’s wrong? Sure, there is an ecosystem of mutual back scratchers, but what if it is way smaller than we think? What if the explanation is more simple? Just bear with me here as I try to think in a new way.

Below our building there is this stray dog. I am shit scared of it. Somehow that dog can smell my fear. Each time it sees me, it starts barking and sends me scurrying right and left to reach the elevator.

Why doesn’t this dog bark at others? Is that dog a hypocrite? Is everyone else feeding biscuits to that dog? I doubt it. I bet the others simply have figured out how to be confident and not worry about the stray dog.

Perhaps liberal politicians are just grown ups. They know how to treat a stray dog.

The so called intellectuals are a lot of things. They are hypocritical, they are compromised, they are prejudiced and they are hateful. But at their absolute core, they are cowards.

What are they really good at? They are very good at picking on the weak. Here, I include those who are not aware of their own strength. They are good at smelling fear or a need for validation.

Why don’t Indian liberals ever go after Mamata Banerjee? Does she pay every single one of them? I don’t think she does. She just projects power. Any intellectual who tries to cross her knows that she will throw them in jail. In Bengal, no bhadralok dare to stand up to her. Top Bengali film stars literally post pictures of her hawai chappals and swear undying loyalty to them. They grovel before her. She never acknowledges them. So they grovel even more.

Like the Queen in Kolkata, there is an even more powerful Queen in Delhi. Nobody intellectual dares to bark against them.

I may not support these liberal politicians, but I have to say I admire their ability to take to power like a duck takes to water. They have the mentality of true rulers. Very much unlike BJP and its supporters, who still think like an opposition.

Did they tell you that the Gaza violence began because Palestinians refused to follow Covid rules during Ramadan?

As the second wave of Coronavirus raged, the Indian state appeared to run out of everything: hospital beds, ventilators, oxygen cylinders, even space in crematoriums and burial grounds. The tone of our liberal critics was at once both furious and self-congratulatory. See? This is what happens when a nation talks more about building temples than building hospitals. As we struggle to cremate our dead, you can barely miss the gleam in the eyes of our critics.

We are having a hard time right now, which means we have to swallow all the bitter pills they toss in our way. Perhaps the critics were right after all. Come, let us beat ourselves up on how stupid we were. Why did we have to get busy with Ram Mandir or have those giant gatherings for Kumbh Mela? How could we not have known better?

Hospitals over temples! It certainly sounds like something that enlightened people would say. Let’s just hope that this principle applies not only to temples but to all houses of worship.

Oh well. Important for us not to lose sight of what matters. Among that, the crisis in the Middle East. So take a map of the Arab world and follow along. Now, increase your image resolution until you can see this microscopic country, about one fourth the size of West Bengal, which is occupying the whole of the Middle East and all of North Africa. It’s the state of Israel. Found it? Good.

So why is there a crisis over there? You probably already know. First, the Jewish people just had to insist on having a state of their own. Then, they just had to win a series of wars thrust upon them by like half a dozen countries. And then, they just had to have a democracy, the only one in the Middle East. Enough to trigger most liberals.

Anyway, I was talking about more immediate reasons for this crisis. What did Israel do now? To quote Al Jazeera:

“There have been nightly disturbances in the area since the start of Ramadan on April 13, with Palestinians outraged by police blocking access to the promenade around the walls, a popular gathering place after the end of the daytime Ramadan fast.“

That’s just wrong of Israel. Everyone knows that religious gatherings are the most important thing in the world. By the way, did the Israelis give any reason for this undemocratic ban?

“… worshippers were angered by Israeli restrictions that denied access to West Bank Palestinians without COVID-19 vaccination documents.“

Come on Israel, be reasonable. What kind of sensible country would ask people for Covid vaccination documents before coming to a religious gathering? Have you ever heard what Indian liberals have to say about this? Or listen to the great Ikrima Sabri, religious leader and possibly world renowned medical doctor, explain:

“Ikrima Sabri, who led Friday prayers, accused Israel of “exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to intervene in the affairs of the blessed Aqsa mosque” “

I agree. Israel can’t interfere with freedom of religion just like that. At least, they could allow people to have small gatherings, of say 20 people or 50 people, or something like that.

“But Israeli officials said they restricted to 10,000 the number of vaccinated Palestinians entering from the West Bank because of “high morbidity rates” from coronavirus in Palestinian Authority areas.“

Sorry, 20 people, 50 people, or 10,000 people. What’s the difference, really? It is still government interference in matters of religion. Any limit is undemocratic. What happened next? As Al Jazeera explains:

“Later on Friday, the Israeli army said at least 10 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards southern Israel into the early hours of the morning – the most in one night since the beginning of the year.“

So Israel required vaccination certificates and restricted religious gatherings to 10,000 people. At this, people got so angry they fired rockets into Israel and started a whole war. Now tell me how many media reports have highlighted this aspect of how the violence began.

Stop Kumbh Mela.

Tricks of “fact-checkers” and how to call them out

A few years ago, a well known satirical right wing website in the US posted an article saying that CNN uses a washing machine to spin the news before broadcasting it. Snopes.com, perhaps the world’s oldest fact-checking website pounced upon it and declared it fake news. No, they explained, CNN does not have a washing machine in which to spin the news around…

This is actually no laughing matter. Once their article was labelled as fake by fact-checkers, the right wing website received a notice about it from Facebook. They could get demonetized or kicked off the platform. Given the current media landscape, any outlet which gets taken off Facebook will struggle to survive financially.

Like so many other things, fact-checking might have begun with a handful of good intentions at heart. But it has quickly transformed into a propaganda tool and ultimately censorship. It’s happening all over. If you are on the right, they don’t like you. They want to shut you down. But how? Using “fact-checkers.”

One good thing to come out of the recent ‘toolkit’ situation is that people have started questioning these fact-checkers all over the place. This moment could not have come soon enough. For decades, people in India believed in the socialist myth of a “neutral” media. Then, about a decade ago, they finally began discussing media bias. Once they began looking for it, they realized it was everywhere. Today, the media cannot fool a single person in India with headlines like “Delhi man commits XYZ crime” or expressions like “one community.” If people had taken another couple of decades to wake up to the scam called fact-checking, we were most likely doomed. Luckily, that does not seem to be happening.

First with the post-poll violence in Bengal and now with the toolkit. The fact-checkers got a bit carried away with their new found moral authority and pushed their luck too far. Their reputations crumbled.

As with journalists, once you start noticing their tricks, you can easily see through the games that fact-checkers play. So let me list here a few simple tricks

(1) Passing off counter-claims as “fact checking” : Party X makes a claim. The fact-checker dismisses the claim in their typical headline format: “No, so and so did not happen … ” When you click on the story, you realize that their source is claims made by Party Y, which is the enemy of Party X. So that is just a counter claim, not fact-checking.

Who gets treated as the trusted source depends on the bias of the fact-checker. This is what happened with the “tookit” situation and the post poll violence in Bengal. Any time the West Bengal police said this or that incident is fake, or so and so committed “suicide,” their claim was taken at face value. Anyone who questioned the version of WB police was declared fake news. Even though the political interests of the ruling TMC were quite obvious. Those who question every claim of UP Police also insist that WB Police must be believed on everything.

(2) Fact-checking irrelevant details to divert the conversation: This happened after the Republic Day violence, for instance. A lot of people were angry with protesters who had stormed the Red Fort and planted some other flag there. It was looking really bad for the liberals.

So what were the fact-checkers up to? They decided to change the subject to the exact shape and color and dimensions of the other flag and began a bunch of fact-checks based on that. How objectionable was this new flag that the protesters brought with them? Was it a little objectionable, a bit acceptable, totally unacceptable or very very little objectionable? Who cares!! It wasn’t our national flag and that’s what matters. But the job of the fact-checker is to delay and cause confusion. The more you get drawn into a fact check of irrelevant details, the more you are likely to forget the big picture of what happened.

(3) Finding random contradictions within an uncomfortable story: Suppose there is a report that members of “one community” have pelted stones on the roof of someone’s house. That spells trouble for you, because you probably need the votes of that “one community.” As a fact-checker, what do you do?

Well, you go to the ground and talk to people. There is bound to be someone who challenges some random aspect of the story. I am sure there is someone who will say the stones were pelted not on the roof but on the wall of the house. There you go! That’s a “fact-check” right there! You can now use this to create a headline that says, “No, stones were not pelted on the roof of …” This is the kind of thing that was done during Delhi riots to discredit the stories of one set of victims.

It’s all about the headline. The biggest advantage of this trick is that you don’t even have to name the source. You can just say “eye-witnesses on the ground.” And if you don’t feel like stepping out, you could just make them up.

(4) Using one fake to discredit hundred real ones: Whenever people are reporting partisan violence on social media, you are always going to find some fake images and videos if you look hard enough. You pick these up and publish screaming headlines junking all claims by the other side.

As with unnamed eye-witnesses on the ground, the fact-checker could always speed up the process perhaps by planting a fake image or two themselves. It’s elementary, really.

(5) Fact-checking as a form of trolling: Any time you make a claim, you should be able to substantiate it. That is fair. But any event can be broken down into an infinitely long chain of sub-events. No matter how solid your story is, there is going to be some sub-event in the chain for which it is impossible to find proof.

Was PMCares money used to buy ventilators? Yes, you reply, please see purchase order and receipt, here.

Okay, but were these ventilators actually supplied to states? Yes, you reply, here is proof…

Okay, but where is the proof that these ventilators were actually working? Ummm …

The fact checker now exults. Don’t have the proof that each one of these ventilators is working, eh? Your “lie” has been exposed.

(6) Using weasel-words like “misleading” or “unsubstantiated” : Suppose that none of the standard tricks are working. Despite the best efforts of the fact-checker, their target has made sure that every little thing is in perfect order. The fact-checker has one last trick up their sleeve.

If they can’t label your story as false, they can always label it “misleading” or “unsubstantiated.” For the casual reader, both terms are as good as calling something false. The psychological effect is the same.

Notice that calling something “misleading” is literally an opinion, not a fact. And like I explained, there is always going to be some sub event in a chain for which you cannot possibly have proof. Was every single ventilator bought from PMCares money working perfectly? Nobody knows. That’s an opportunity for the fact checker to label the whole thing “unsubstantiated.”

I am sure there are more tricks of the trade that are not listed here. But here is a common sense question that can give some clarity about who the fact-checkers really are.

What do fact-checkers claim to do? Find out facts, right?

Bur didn’t we already have people for that? People whose job it was to cross check claims made in the public sphere and find out the facts? Yes, we called them journalists.

So why the need for this rebranding? Likely because people figured out that all journalists have an agenda. The myth of the neutral journalist lost its power. It had to be replaced by the myth of the neutral fact-checker.

In many ways, the fact-checker is worse than the traditional agenda pushing journalist. The legacy format of journalism requires some amount of separation between opinion and fact. It puts a bit of pressure on the journalist to at least mention all sides of an issue. And ultimately leave it to the reader to make up their mind. Even the most shameless propagandist in old media will feel pressure to do this from time to time, just so they can look people in the eye.

But fact-checking is a new brand and so its rules are different. It crafts its headlines with absolute finality. “No, this did not happen…” End of story. No room left for doubt or disagreement, not even as a formality. The job of fact-checkers is to put a full stop to our thoughts. And that is why propagandists love it so much.