Remains of the day

In Gujarat, BJP won 99 seats, and in Himachal, the party got 44 seats

Students of chaos theory and climate science know that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can start a causal chain which culminates in a tornado in Texas weeks later, and that the cataclysmic butterfly would remain anonymous and the force of its critical wingbeat unknown. However, India’s wisest heads don’t know this. They began to enumerate the takeaways of the Gujarat election within hours of the exit polls being aired, and were straining to reach double digits by the time the real results began to roll. But the truly wise remembered the butterfly in the rain forest, and sat back and enjoyed the show, knowing that the first causes of the Gujarat results are shrouded in mystery forever.

With the election over, a myriad curiosities will go unanswered. We know the guest list of Mani Shankar Aiyar’s dinner for Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri. But what was on the menu? It is not an irrelevant metric, for Gunter Grass (The Flounder) and Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children) have established that political action is influenced by diet. And while Hardik Patel has a right to privacy, the same as young people everywhere, the quality of his personal life remains a valid field of inquiry. What is his happiness index, as computed by the Bhutanese?

Indeed, the opposition’s mysteries are gripping. Is Rahul Gandhi’s janeu physical or metaphorical? Is it an antenna which catches the music of the spheres? Do magic mushrooms grow in Taiwan, and how many melanocytes do they inhibit per gram used? These important facts are forever lost in a mushroom cloud of surmise. And there’s that shadowy seaplane which came from Karachi, buzzed the nation’s consciousness, and disappeared into a Sargasso Sea from which no information will ever emerge. What the butterfly was to Texas, the seaplane is to Gujarat.