Congratulations to all my fellow citizens on the completion of the first year of the hundred-year glorious reign of our eternal king Lord Narenderus Damodardas Cyclops Modi. If you were lucky enough to bear witness to the dispatches of chief royal town crier Rahul Kanwal, you would know that our illustrious leader is currently on his quest to complete his own version of Around the World in Eighty Days, wherein he traverses the globe imparting important learnings of Indian culture to various heads of foreign countries. He is the best advert for Indian tourism! Nothing says “visit us” better than a guy who insists that everything was garbage before he took the reins of power. As he keeps telling anyone who cares to listen, he’s #1 in humility.
He never fails to burnish India’s positive image whenever he addresses his local NRI fan club in whichever godforsaken alien land he deigns to grace with his divine presence. However, our favourite part of his routine is when he provides us with hitherto unknown “fun facts” about our magnificent history:
If our current central government were a person, it would have won the title of Most Likely to Promote Outdated Ancient Traditions at its senior prom. So, as a tribute, we decided to “borrow” our fearless leader’s time machine and import a patriotic Indian from the days of yore to tell us how unfortunate we are for not being able to live during that spectacular time.
* * *
Greetings, unworthy descendants. I suspect that my coherent use of one of your languages has caught you off guard. You probably thought I’d be some timid, thick-brained doofus who spoke haltingly and spent all his time being fascinated by perfunctory gadgets that look like human genitalia. Well, that’s offensive. I’m visiting you from the past, not from the set of an Adam Sandler movie.
I got news for you, sunshine. I’m not some idiotic simpleton who’d go speechless at the mere sight of something he couldn’t understand. I didn’t “graduate” from IIN, for crying out loud. I am well versed in six languages, three of which don’t even exist now. I know more mathematics than your most brilliant scientist because I’m the direct descendant of the person who invented the zero. And I once spent a hundred years inside a secret Himalayan cave after one of my buddies challenged me to do so during a game of Truth or Dare.
Frankly, from what I’ve seen ever since I’ve arrived, your bigoted assumptions about me seem par for the course. I came all this way expecting to meet an enlightened populace that had managed to overcome the needless prejudices that plagued even the best minds of my time. However, I discovered that somehow, you’ve actually managed to reverse the evolutionary process and become even more ignorant.
Let me begin with the belief that things were so great during my time. Which wooden-headed halfwit started that meme? Do you realise how lucky you people are? Back where I come from, calling on someone living in the next village meant half a day’s hike through an unpaved road full of dacoits and man-eating wild animals. It was like your present-day state of Uttar Pradesh.
We used superstition to explain things we couldn’t understand. We thought thunder was god yelling at us for experiencing sexual desire. We thought that the noise caused by the wind blowing through a hollow cave was proof of the presence of a soul-snatching ghost. We assumed that a child born of a mother who died during childbirth was the illicit spawn of the devil.
Medicine in my time was a little different from what you are used to now. You know what my last prescription said?
You have devices that can take a thousand selfies per second. It took us three months just to carve our face into the wall of a cave. You have people who deliver you food in the middle of the night. We had avoidable famines. You have technology that can bring water to a farm in the middle of the desert. We thought that singing a nice song to a passing cloud would bring in the rain after years of drought. You have been able to eradicate whole diseases from your planet. When I was a kid, most of my peer group was wiped out by a bad strain of smallpox.
Some of you seem to think that we were also able to invent a lot of things that you use now. How utterly insane can you be? If we would have discovered plastic surgery, then my great-uncle wouldn’t have died a lonely man just because he had two noses on his face. If we’d invented airplanes, do you think we’d still be using bullock carts to carry ourselves around? We weren’t steampunk hipsters nostalgic for a simpler time. Also, wouldn’t you have found remains of our accomplishments? If you could find dinosaur bones from millions of years ago, surely you can also dig up my own personal 747?
And don’t even get me started about your insistence on still following the gender norms we put in place. We thought that men are so useless that we could never alter their behaviour. We thought that from the second they were born, the only things male humans were concerned with was food, sex and proving that they have the biggest penis. We believed that men are simple dunderheads who can’t even understand basic human phrases like “no” or “deodorant”. We used to train other contributing members of society to work around them.
Which is why our behaviour remodification efforts were directed towards women. We policed every minute of their life because we knew they wouldn’t mind. They had been trained since the day they were born to live their life suppressing every need and want in service of others. We treated women like they were mythical creatures who must be spoken about only in patronising terms. We told them that their self-worth comes from their relationships with men.
We never treated anyone like we should have: flawed individuals who could be boring, funny, needy, artistic, emotionally unavailable, or unfit for human companionship. We put a label on everyone and expected them to live up to that for the rest of their life. Do you really think that a bunch of people who believed that the best way to calm down a volcano was to sacrifice a nubile virgin had things figured out?
Now please excuse me, I’ve to go back to where I came from to tell everyone that you guys adopted our version of Five Point Someone as a holy book.
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He never fails to burnish India’s positive image whenever he addresses his local NRI fan club in whichever godforsaken alien land he deigns to grace with his divine presence. However, our favourite part of his routine is when he provides us with hitherto unknown “fun facts” about our magnificent history:
1. In ancient India, all babies were born with a PhD in science and aeronautical engineering.
2. The remains of the world’s first microbrewery were found in the ruins of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
3. The East India Company won the Battle of Plassey because the anti-national communists in the local army were directed by the Ford Foundation to go on strike that very day.
If our current central government were a person, it would have won the title of Most Likely to Promote Outdated Ancient Traditions at its senior prom. So, as a tribute, we decided to “borrow” our fearless leader’s time machine and import a patriotic Indian from the days of yore to tell us how unfortunate we are for not being able to live during that spectacular time.
* * *
Greetings, unworthy descendants. I suspect that my coherent use of one of your languages has caught you off guard. You probably thought I’d be some timid, thick-brained doofus who spoke haltingly and spent all his time being fascinated by perfunctory gadgets that look like human genitalia. Well, that’s offensive. I’m visiting you from the past, not from the set of an Adam Sandler movie.
I got news for you, sunshine. I’m not some idiotic simpleton who’d go speechless at the mere sight of something he couldn’t understand. I didn’t “graduate” from IIN, for crying out loud. I am well versed in six languages, three of which don’t even exist now. I know more mathematics than your most brilliant scientist because I’m the direct descendant of the person who invented the zero. And I once spent a hundred years inside a secret Himalayan cave after one of my buddies challenged me to do so during a game of Truth or Dare.
Frankly, from what I’ve seen ever since I’ve arrived, your bigoted assumptions about me seem par for the course. I came all this way expecting to meet an enlightened populace that had managed to overcome the needless prejudices that plagued even the best minds of my time. However, I discovered that somehow, you’ve actually managed to reverse the evolutionary process and become even more ignorant.
Let me begin with the belief that things were so great during my time. Which wooden-headed halfwit started that meme? Do you realise how lucky you people are? Back where I come from, calling on someone living in the next village meant half a day’s hike through an unpaved road full of dacoits and man-eating wild animals. It was like your present-day state of Uttar Pradesh.
We used superstition to explain things we couldn’t understand. We thought thunder was god yelling at us for experiencing sexual desire. We thought that the noise caused by the wind blowing through a hollow cave was proof of the presence of a soul-snatching ghost. We assumed that a child born of a mother who died during childbirth was the illicit spawn of the devil.
Medicine in my time was a little different from what you are used to now. You know what my last prescription said?
Take the blood of a Burmese Oxen, mix it with this rare herb only available at the foothills of the Himalayas, add 2.5ml of frog sweat and boil the mixture for 10 minutes before using an unobtanium stone to rub it all over your body. And that’s how you get rid of your recurring headaches.
You have devices that can take a thousand selfies per second. It took us three months just to carve our face into the wall of a cave. You have people who deliver you food in the middle of the night. We had avoidable famines. You have technology that can bring water to a farm in the middle of the desert. We thought that singing a nice song to a passing cloud would bring in the rain after years of drought. You have been able to eradicate whole diseases from your planet. When I was a kid, most of my peer group was wiped out by a bad strain of smallpox.
Some of you seem to think that we were also able to invent a lot of things that you use now. How utterly insane can you be? If we would have discovered plastic surgery, then my great-uncle wouldn’t have died a lonely man just because he had two noses on his face. If we’d invented airplanes, do you think we’d still be using bullock carts to carry ourselves around? We weren’t steampunk hipsters nostalgic for a simpler time. Also, wouldn’t you have found remains of our accomplishments? If you could find dinosaur bones from millions of years ago, surely you can also dig up my own personal 747?
And don’t even get me started about your insistence on still following the gender norms we put in place. We thought that men are so useless that we could never alter their behaviour. We thought that from the second they were born, the only things male humans were concerned with was food, sex and proving that they have the biggest penis. We believed that men are simple dunderheads who can’t even understand basic human phrases like “no” or “deodorant”. We used to train other contributing members of society to work around them.
Which is why our behaviour remodification efforts were directed towards women. We policed every minute of their life because we knew they wouldn’t mind. They had been trained since the day they were born to live their life suppressing every need and want in service of others. We treated women like they were mythical creatures who must be spoken about only in patronising terms. We told them that their self-worth comes from their relationships with men.
We never treated anyone like we should have: flawed individuals who could be boring, funny, needy, artistic, emotionally unavailable, or unfit for human companionship. We put a label on everyone and expected them to live up to that for the rest of their life. Do you really think that a bunch of people who believed that the best way to calm down a volcano was to sacrifice a nubile virgin had things figured out?
Now please excuse me, I’ve to go back to where I came from to tell everyone that you guys adopted our version of Five Point Someone as a holy book.
