I have started a new organisation called BUTT – Beings Under Total Threat. It’s an umbrella organisation which shelters a lot of off-shoots and splinter cells. The off-shoots are, for example, HUT or Hindus Under Threat. Or MUTT, Men Under Terrible Threat. Or UCUT, harder to pronounce, but stands for Upper Castes Under Threat.
As founder-president of BUTT, I naturally consider myself largely under threat from all sorts of things. How could I keep my insecurities under control with nary a reservation in sight? That’s when I heard of FATFIT (Facing Threats from Immigrant Types), a British-American outfit. It inspired me to set up BUTT, and after the Pulwama terror strike, I’ve found many, many takers for just such a place.
We held our first meeting last week and found ourselves nodding vigorously in agreement about all the dangers we face in everyday life. For instance, we discovered that we didn’t have to be soldiers on combat duty on the border with lives always on the line to feel threatened. We ordinary types are just as much at risk right in the middle of our air-conditioned homes. An eminent Bengaluru businessman had just tweeted that even shops selling trinkets and souvenirs in tourist spots could easily be Nefarious Joints. It made us firmer in our resolve. Can you imagine what dangers lurk in our pot-holed, traffic-jammed urban lives!
That’s the reason some of us decided to do pre-emptive strikes on students and shopkeepers. It keeps our war-wits razor sharp, not to mention that we look good on TV. For those of us less actively inclined, there’s social media. We can’t always find real photographs to explain to people how frightened they should be, but that’s a minor glitch. There’s always Photoshop. Real soldiers sometimes don’t understand how much we’re doing to help them. The CRPF official Twitter handle, for instance, has issued a warning against circulating fake pictures of body parts of jawans. So unnecessary — those pictures could have helped BUTT create an alert and threatened citizenry.
Anyway, last week we also sent a small recruitment team to a district in Bihar where we had heard that several villagers were organising protest marches. Our team was aghast to find that the villagers were fighting for jobs and health centres and schools. What a waste of a good protest! So the BUTT team sat them down and explained the short-sightedness of worrying only about teachers and doctors.
Did they know that the Taj Mahal in Agra was originally a temple? Not one of the villagers knew this. The team explained that their lives and happiness were in deep danger because of this one fact and instead of fighting for schools maybe they should focus their energies more usefully. I am happy to report that we garnered a lot of new recruits for BUTT from that district.
MUTT has had a similar increase in membership. The men are holding a separate meeting next week to discuss how the Rise of Toxic Feminism has Undermined the Indian Family and created Strife and Tension Among Members. These are all men whose wives have refused to press their feet at night and have gone so far as to actually ask their husbands to make rice in the electric cooker. The chairman of MUTT has had a very hard life. His wife who, horror of horrors, can’t make perfectly round chapattis, recently told him she might even buy a television brand of her own choice for the home. This unnerved him so much he contacted me and that’s how we began MUTT.
A significant sub-group of MUTT is TRU. It stands for They Rejected Us — and consists of all the men who decided they were in love with a woman who decided she was definitely not in love with them. TRU men are terribly misunderstood people. And since not even the woman they love understands them, they usually kill or maim her. (Incidentally, we’re looking for girlfriends for TRU men, so volunteers, please contact me.)
I am sorry but I have to rush off now. A lot of BUTT paperwork awaits completion. It’s for our Mhow conference next month on Eliminating Hazardous Blue from the Colour Spectrum.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.