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Satire In The Silly Season

Two books that seek to rain satire on Indian politics fall short of becoming full-
blown showers. Kajal Basu looks at what works and what doesn’t

KAJAL BASU Comment Print & Email

2014-05-10 , Issue 19 Volume 11

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 RELATED POSTS

LOLing on the web

Drawing a dangerous
line

Hollow Laughter

Tweets

Double the fun CS Krishna and Karthik Laxman, founders of The UnReal Times website Tehelka
@Tehelka
When the dust has settled, General Election 2014 will have a lot to answer for, including #Election2014 Money and muscle. Booze and hate speech. I
bringing the newspaper concept of stop-press to publishing in India and inviting – on
bended knees, no less – the dreaded PS (Politischeparodie Sturmtruppen). And the
history of world literature shows that once encamped, the PS never leave.

The problem with the PS is that it is, like everything that marches to the beat of iron-
clad irony, heavy-footed and heavy-handed. And after an evening of listening to the PS
gallumph by, you could be left with deafness and a memory of clangour and demotic
speech.

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 Not to diss it overly, but UnReal Elections reads like the PS advance guard. Clearly — as
with The Candidate, a satire allégorique — Penguin thought it imperative that the final
draft be held back until the general election not just loomed but actually fell upon the
country like a tsunami of bricks.

This, of course, falls under bigtime publishing risiko. Books can never mimic news
magazine deadlines and escape being discrepant, however ardent the wish of publishers
to match the hyperkinetic flow of on-ground information. There’s a reason why political Tweet to @Tehelka
satires based on realtime events don’t do well: first, quickies that need to catch the
wave, so to speak, don’t exactly gel with the exacting literary demands of satire; second,
nothing works against satire like unintentional gaffes.
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And Unreal Elections has more than its share of them. For
example, a SWOT analysis of Robert Vadra vs Narendra
Modi on who will make the “better PM” mentions Modi’s
“chappan ìnchí chhätí ” brag — but the chapter is datelined
‘October 12’, and Modi created that much-derided même
only this year.

And that is a bit depressing, considering the book is the

joint effort of the two most gifted political spoofers in
India: CS Krishna and Karthik Laxman, two über
management types who’ve been running The UnReal Times
website since 2011. Both of them — and URT’s columnists,
who tend towards an Anglicised-North Indian
acculturation — are crackerjack humorists à la The Onion
(if homologated and, therefore, a bit dumbed-down). But Unreal Elections cs krishna &
that’s on the website, where their skills lie not so much in karthik laxman Penguin books

original thinking but in mash-ups of existing photographs 298 pp; Rs 250

of políticos and comic-style blurbs written expressly for LATEST ON TEHELKA
‘fart-in-the-face’ send-ups.
Second round will decide Afghanistan’s
It’s a style that fits wonderfully in the visual dynamics of the Web. But the humour is president
almost entirely nontransferable to word-dominant print. URT carried a ‘report’ (‘In
Pictures: Celebrities attend Book Launch of “Unreal Elections”’, 18 April 2014), which Satire in the Silly Season
ended with four panels that showed a stoney-faced Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
still parked at the launch venue after the revellers had left. When he is told, “Er..sir, the Star power in three tiers
launch party is over,” he responds, still po-faced, “Theek hai.”

This ‘dead response’ has been transferred to the book (rather, from the book to the The dancer and her feat
strip, since the book came first), where Manmohan Singh is mistaken for a wax copy of
Ukraine forces seek to retake Slovyansk,
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 himself at Madame Tussauds in London by a gaggle of American schoolgirls and the tour Ukraine forces seek to retake Slovyansk,
guide, who then apologises to the PM, who gives him a fish-eye stare “for a long time” 3 killed
and mumbles “Theek hai” and leaves. It works in a comic strip. It deflates like a soufflé
in print. Sensex falls for 5th day in a volatile trade

The Candidate demonstrates no ‘in the present’ impulse and, therefore, suffers from Will form govt on our own in Telangana:
absolutely its very own whimsies. (Disclaimer: I content-edited two drafts of this book, TRS
and the author is a friend.)
Rig-marole of the Northeast polls
The author, Anirudh Bhattacharyya, is a Toronto-
based NRI with a long history as a journalist in Delhi.
More to the point, he is the founder of the oldest Congress may back Third Front govt to
keep Modi out: CPI(M)
Indian satirical webmag, Jaalmag, which got itself a
cult following soon after its commencement in 1998.
The Eye Within
The how-to (and how-not-to) experience that comes
of sorting through warehouses full of wannabe
satires means that The Candidate slips more easily
READ MORE
into the ‘literary satire’ category. For one, no
politicians in it – the living, the dead or the living
dead – are named. Nor is the year of election
specified. The candidate of the title is a New York-
based, pink-slipped NRI filius prodigus who lands up
in Delhi seeking a poultice for his scalded ego (his
Stretching the boundaries
wife has also left him) and gets virtually shanghaied
Anirudh Bhattacharyya
into standing for election by an old friend, a político
with his eye on the main chance. He does, of course,
Portrait of the artist
come to appreciate his roots, stumbles upon the unmentionably secret hideout of the The Chosen One as a young Madrasi
swing vote, and, eventually, dreams of winning, despite that he is, basically, a good man
out to repair all of creation when he can barely repair himself.

The whole story is as likely as a snowflake falling in the Sahara and turning it into a
fecund greenhouse. But it allows you, therefore, to fall head first into the waiting
mantrap of suspension of disbelief and, in order to keep your head, to read the story as
an allegory of everything that is wrong with the electoral process in India.

Not that you don’t know what’s wrong. But knowing wrongs is pretty much the same as
knowing of and knowing about wrongs. Everybody knows knowing isn’t enough — they
need it in writing; and everybody loves a story. If the story is a dark tale made light, so ‘I tell micro stories The Emperor’s new
much the better. of the Northeast’ clothes

The Candidate seems to be, by design, an antigrav book, light reading — though,
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 The Candidate seems to be, by design, an antigrav book, light reading — though,
strangely, not speedy reading — in a time of darkness. Unreal Elections is heavy TEHELKA RADIO
reading. The Candidate, with everyone an Everyman, can be understood by non-Indian
readers. Unreal Elections so firmly anchors itself to the minutiae of time, event and
place that a neighbouring Bangladeshi or a Sri Lankan reader would be lost.

Classical satire (is there another kind?) needs a bite that

leaves a deep impression. And Indian writers don’t, as a
rule, do biting. “The fawning nature of Indian politics,
whereby many leaders are surrounded by yes-men and
rarely bother to learn how to laugh at themselves, makes
such jokes all too rare in the public sphere,” wrote The
Economist (‘All the news that’s fit to fake’, 21 May 2013).
“Strong cultural codes about deferring to elders provide
another stumbling block…” These are kneecapping
proscriptions, so our writers replace satire with slapstick:
which works, too, in the manner that Bollywood works. It
does not work at all as literature — which, really, is the
crucible and casa of satire — but as comoedia de
distinendae, the déclassé fun-making of authority. Where
The Candidate
satire seeks to disassemble — totally, down to gristle and
Anirudh Bhattacharyya Penguin
synapse — Indian satirical writing in English seeks to do
books 306 pp; Rs 299
no more than demolish. In a way, in these times of
systemic depravity, demolition works too.

But satire is purpose-designed to hold up a mirror to the self. Subcontinental satire just
doesn’t. Maybe there is far more to elections in India aside from merely the
mindboggling numbers, loopy logistics and unscalable methodology, than single books
of fiction can handle. Maybe we don’t have the wherewithal to make good mirrors (we
don’t, not materially, either). Or maybe we don’t like what we see.
MAGZTER
Whatever the case, it’s striking that it took an incautious publisher to print two side-by-
side satirical books on politics in India. (That it’s bang in the middle of the most
significant, and acrid, general election in the nation’s history is proof that a certain
axiom speaks the truth: Everyone needs to hit the till when the iron’s hot.)

It’s also striking that, in this nation in which the threat of being legally docked for
slander stops the best of journalists from publicly naming known crooks, Unreal
Elections has got away with naming the whole spectrum of living political characters
and turning them into archetypal caricatures that play to popular notions and
misconceptions: Rahul Gandhi the Mama’s Boy; Sonia the Regina Arpia; Narendra Modi
the Too- Capable-By-Half, Manmohan Singh the Catatonic… It’s a long, unkind list, and
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I look forward to seeing Unreal Elections get away with it.

If we can’t have satire, maybe our politicians can, finally, have self-deprecation. The Untold War Stories I: Col
Ashok Kumar Tara (VrC)
letters@tehelka.com

(Published in Tehelka Magazine, Volume 11 Issue 19, Dated 10 May 2014)

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Tags: Anirudh Bhattacharyya, book review, books, CS Krishna, Kajal Basu, Karthik Laxman, Lok Adhikari
Sabha elections 2014, political satire, satire, The Candidate, The UnReal Times, UnReal Elections,
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