Ladies and Gentlemen presenting Rahul Roy who has Aashique to his credit and from whose legacy he can never come out of. Secondly we have Kalki Koechlin, an Anglo Saxon who speaks half-baked Hindi and who apparently acts in “ooh! That is too mainstream!” independent movies and who thanks to a famous director in the cine world, is continuing to prove to be a hideous actor too. Rajat Kapoor is here too, my humble folks. The last time we saw him in the news was when he couldn’t find a producer for his next movie. Sir, our humble advice is please stick to acting. Is that Vikrant Massey over there? Well hellou sir, thanks to the ongoing protests, we managed to know that your name is Vikrant Massey else we would only remember you as the hit and miss character who does an abominable impersonation of Dev Anand in Lootera. You did your job well here. You got the attention you wanted.
Finally, we have in our list of “A-Listers”, Ranvir Shorey (Only famous for being arrested due to his assault on his then girlfriend, Pooja Bhatt), Ramachandra Guha who has never in his life played first class cricket and yet finds himself to be worthy of dictating values of integrity to the BCCI and what is “Oxygen tube” Girish Karnad doing here with a contraption in his nostrils? Wasn’t he in on news when he called the great Rabindranath Tagore (absolutely no satire intended when I talk about Sir Tagore) a “second rate playwright”?
I see on stage Saba Dewan, the leader of this congregation- which is soon to falter and die- and whose post went viral. I shall not comment on her because I or for that sake none of us did not know she existed or if she has in anyway contributed anything at all for her to find a place in this obnoxious article of mine. I understand I am guilty of providing a running commentary on these most valued men and women of our society and wasting your time my reader, but I feel even more nauseous because I have had to waste my time researching these masquerading third rate controversy mongers.
Barely two weeks has gone by, when Deputy Superintendent of Police Mohammed Ayub Pandit was lynched by a mob of 400 people in front of the Jamia Masjid. Ironically it was the Shab-e-Qadr or the night of power when forgiveness is begged for and all sins are forgiven by the almighty. We have not seen a single protest against the lynching that equals the magnitude of the ongoing protests in all the major cities. Fresh out of the Academy was Lieutenant Fayaz of Rajputana Rifles, who was kidnapped and murdered in May. The body of the 22 year old was found riddled with bullets. May I ask the real Kalki Koechlin and other Bollywood B graders to please stand up? Or are they in no mood for contrition?
It has been a couple of days since seven innocent pilgrims which included five women were slaughtered by terrorists. Thank you Shabana Azmi ji, for retweeting some comments and a vague comment stating “Perpetrators must be brot 2 book asap”. Thank you Vikrant Massey for retweeting Ramachandra Guha. Your twitter handle tells us that you are the President of Armchair activism. You have lived up to that name in this instance. Thank you Konkona Sen Sharma, Kalki Koechlin and Rajat Kapoor for maintaining a stoic silence on Twitter. We couldn’t see you protesting anywhere else either. Thank you Girish Karnad Ji for giving us Mr. Raghu Karnad. I shall never hold in contempt family members, but the younger Karnad has had the audacious tenacity to publish an article on ‘The Wire’ just a day after the massacre i.e. on 11th July, 2017, stating the impact of the pilgrims and the security forces on the ecological system of Amarnath and that Buddha Amarnath, Kauser Nag and Sindhu Darshan Yatras are used drive “political conduits” further into the state by “Hindutva elements”. A certain round of applause please my reader.
One of my friends summed up the mood of the country, “And you are free to empathize with the army and the security forces, while others are free to empathize with civilians.” As a firm believer in democracy and as a subject of a free world country, I must agree with this assertion. But my question is why are protests not organized or questions asked against lynching and murders of our security forces in Kashmir by these Sants and the perceived crème de la crème? And in case if protests are organized, we are violent fundamentalists carrying tridents, aren’t we? Why are the voices of true influencers and icons muffled and suffocated by the media the moment they raise it against anti national and fringe elements?
Hindustan Times were one of the first to report upon a bunch of ragtag dissidents conjured out of thin air, trying to protest the “killings” of Amarnath pilgrims under the banner #notinmyname. The few numbers that did show up after the murders, looked like wayward misguided sheep who did not have a clue on whether should they be protesting lynching’s or in the second case, brutal terrorist attacks. The protest seemed to be an exhibition of sorts. In all probabilities the organizers might want to curse the murderous perpetrators of the Amarnath tragedy, not because of the murders but because they are now forced to advertise and placate the sentiments of the mainstream public. The protest is dying but these dodgy crooks understand it is time to change course since the tide is against them.
Now comes the heroics of our new age media. Huffington Post had no qualms in calling Sonu Nigam a desperate attention seeker. They went a step ahead and juxtaposed him as a Sanghi obsessed with medieval Islam. Virender Sehwag and Randeep Hooda were termed misogynists and whatnot and were accused of instigating rape threats and “systematic hatred” against a Delhi University student for voicing her substandard opinions. Hindustan Times with the customary egotistical bravado of a ‘know it all’ secular had the tenacity to label Gautam Gambhir a Mass murderer when he tweeted his dissent after our Jawans were slapped and heckled by fanatics in the valley.
This might be an emotional outburst from a nationalist and irreligious nobody and I have tried to keep personal insults to a bare minimum- I shall wink here- but I have taken a certain level of freedom to take potshots at charlatans desperate for a bit of self-aggrandizement.