My editor likes it best if this column stays light and satirical; nobody wants angst on Saturdays, she reasons. But then come the weeks that make it impossible to dig out a single joke. Depressing days when satire proves terribly elusive because summoning it needs a sense of humour you begin to fear you no longer have. Days when opinion itself seems such a cheapened commodity you baulk at adding one more to the mix.
Depressed (that word again!) is what I felt when I followed a recent social media exchange where an MA student spoke of how he had refused to take off his headphones in a New Delhi Metro station security check because the CISF jawan’s tone was “despotic”, and how this led to a fracas and his being roughed up.
The majority of responses to his post lamented the dystopia the country had descended into, the brutality of security forces, the unfairness of it all. When news websites picked up the story, the narrative became more charged. It was now a student being targeted because of his name and his university. The outrage was shriller.
The fact is, you can’t wear headphones while passing through security anywhere. If we use public transport, we have to follow some rules regardless of how much we dislike them. And regardless of how much we want to parade our contempt for the much-hated ‘security forces’, those poor sods still have a job to do. To stage a romantic ‘civil disobedience’ act during a legitimate security check is about as sensible as driving through a red light because you dislike the ruling government.
There are horrendous inconveniences and indignities that a citizen in a modern state is subjected to. From strange hands patting you down intimately to having your suitcase opened and your clothes mauled in public. Unfortunately, we have to live with it or do a Thoreau. What we can’t do is break quotidian laws because that way anarchy lies.
Strangely, the Indignant People are also often the Drawing Room People, lamenting the lawlessness of our streets, bemoaning how ‘Indians’ ignore traffic rules, or how VIPs break security protocol.
One wonders on such days if it might be better after all to step off this online conveyor belt of incessant comment and outrage because, ultimately, we are like hamsters on a wheel, running endlessly in our little cages of conviction.
The latest outrage is against Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk because the film doesn’t depict Indian soldiers. Of course, that would have made it per se a more authentic film, but what will actually be truer to our history is when we begin to tell it ourselves.
I don’t expect Hollywood to do justice to our stories; I expect it from studios in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. We don’t have the excuse any longer of lack of money, technology or agency. As filmmakers and audiences, when we are smugly content with the song-and-dance junk produced on mammoth budgets, dissing Dunkirk because it ignores our history is a facile, dishonest response.
Last week, I attended the finals of the Short and Sweet theatre festival organised by Ranvir Shah’s Prakriti. The History Boys, a tiny potted history of the freedom struggle, used slang, song, slapstick and tight choreography to contemporise that period. Rice Water chose to enter the life of Irom Sharmila from the poignancy of her decades-long separation from her mother. Now, this is how we get to own our stories and our past.
These might be amateur productions, but they are important baby steps that seize the narrative. They show the courage to move beyond the endless, arid retelling of mythology. Beyond the easy, loud tragedies and boy-meets-girl tales.
Easy. That’s the word. Whether in creative areas or as online commentators, we are content to take easy positions that require little thinking and less rigour. What our online life, like our art, needs most perhaps is a little less melodrama and a lot more quiet.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.