As India turns 65, and Kindle turns 4, the world outside my window is spawning black humour…
The suddenly rich guy who makes more than Rs 28 a day, the gold medalist athlete whose gender becomes a national issue, the under-achiever Prime Minister, the rioter who means business, the outraged man who asks all the right questions every night at 10, the answers to which the nation has the right to know, the gun toting Gandhian, the skimpily dressed, soon to be victim of rape woman, hanging out at a night club, the slut-woman, walking down the street, the disfigured fasting woman, the man who stares into your eyes straight from the TV sets, with glycerine tears in his eyes or the man who stares into space, waiting hopelessly, hopefully for the rains…
It’s a puzzling landscape of romanticized contrasts, of cardboard caricatures of we-the people, of bizarre events that happen in such frenzied continuum, that in no time, the poignant turns pointless, the tragic turns comic… so, when a lovely tall woman writes against this ugly tall building, it all seems a bizarre waste, because we, in strangely morbid ways, aspire for both, with equal lust…and when a four year old magazine, keeps going around in circles, saying the same things over and over again, in relentless repetition, it seems another colossal waste…
In such times, the last resort is to laugh at ourselves…
And we still celebrate, Kindle at 4 and India at 65.
And here’s what the party looks like… half naked, dark, nubile men, bending backwards, to light up our streets, our ‘c-aaaars’, and our chandeliers at home, with their sparkly smiles, as we dance the night away…the perfect ‘happy – dent’ in the picture…
Funny, eh?
Consider it black humor…
But let’s try not to be cynical, because there is always some joy in the darkest of laughter, and we should laugh, just because…
So, in such tragi-comic times, we bring to you, the Kindle black humour special.
After all…as the song goes
“Barbadiyon ka sog manaana fizool tha
Barbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya…”
Cover: The cover is inspired and derived from the Jan, 1973 issue of ‘National Lampoon’, an American humour magazine. The cover is a parody on contemporary India and our collective conscience, and the threat, if at anything, is directed at our sense of humour, which inevitably, needs to get darker by the day, if laughter has to survive.
PLEASE DO NOT TAKE IT LITERALLY!
