Kamal Ghorui
Welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine.
‘Tis the month we say: Beware the Ides (pronounced eye-dz) of March, a reference to Julius Caesar being stabbed in the back, a historical event we observe to this day in corporate India by stabbing each other in the back during appraisal season. Perhaps old Julius could have avoided the sharp one if he had changed in time, and the Vine thinks it’s time for a little change. What better time to show initiative than appraisal season?
So, here’s a new revamped version of the Vine.
Also, dear reader, we know you are waiting with bated breath for Meow Times, and my co-creator has assured me we will be back in April.
Appraisal Season: Democracy Edition
Speaking of appraisal season, democracy’s turn was announced recently with elections in five states, what people from South Mumbai or South Delhi would call a ‘mid-term’. The five states participating in the dance of democracy are Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal.
In Assam, we have a showdown between the BJP and Congress.
The BJP is led by former Congressman Himanta Biswa Sarma, who famously quit the party, claiming Rahul Gandhi preferred playing with his dog rather than talking to him. The BJP is in pole position in the state and will be hopeful of keeping its grip on the sensitive border state.
In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and United Democratic Front (UDF) are facing off to decide who runs God’s Own Country, the abode of cricketing deity Sanju Samson.
The LDF consists of the CPI(M) and a host of other parties, while the UDF consists of Congress and its allies.
CM Pinarayi Vijayan is looking to make it three in a row and hold on to the Left’s last bastion in the country, while Congress hopes it can put its own internecine issues to bed, featuring a rather polysyllabic politician, to upset the applecart. The NDA is also in the fight but has as much chance in the state as Pakistani players have of appearing in the IPL.
Moving from the Left’s last bastion to a land where the Marxists once held sway, the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC will hope to keep the BJP at bay as she faces a surge that has already launched a thousand memes and FIRs, and too many mispronounced speeches to count.
The election occurs under the shadow of SIR (Special Intensive Revision), which some claim was contrived to make hallowed Bengalis like Amartya Sen prove their Indianness, and others claim is necessary to prevent outsiders from voting.
Bengal remains one of the last bastions for the BJP to conquer, but Didi, as Mamata Banerjee is referred to fondly, is a formidable opponent who will use any means necessary to maintain the status quo. She is a street fighter who upended the Left from their proverbial ivory tower and will not give up without one hell of a fight.
Meanwhile, in Tamil Nadu, the battle is between the DMK-led Secular Progressive Alliance (SPA) and the NDA, which is led by the AIADMK in the state. A third wheel is Vijay’s TVK, and frankly all I know is that he’s a great dancer with unmatched charisma, based on the one Vijay movie I’ve watched so far: Master.
And as for Puducherry, the battle is between the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the All India NR Congress, and the Secular Progressive Alliance (SPA), led by the DMK.
So, who’s going to win? Who knows…
Appraisal Season: War Edition
In Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister tells Joffrey: “We have had vicious kings, and we have had idiot kings. But we have never had the misfortune of having a vicious idiot as a king.”
Just like that, we have had evil US presidents, and we have had not-so-bright US presidents, but I don’t think we have ever had the misfortune of having an evil, not-so-bright US president who doesn’t just attack other countries (every American president has done that), but then brags about it on social media while posting edits about it interspersed with Hollywood memes to the Mortal Kombat theme, ending with ‘Finish Him’.
So where are we on the US-Israel vs Iran war?
Yesterday, Trump posted an angry message on Truth Social complaining that none of his NATO allies are willing to send ships to fight in his ill-conceived war to help police the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, there are reports and rumours that Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s security council and the man tasked with the succession plan if the Supreme Leader shuffled off his mortal coil, may have been killed. Larijani often made liberals go weak in the knees by virtue of being a Kantian scholar, but his fate was ostensibly decided by a man who has written more books than he has read, as suggested in emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Noam Chomsky.
Also, the internet is rife with rumours that Benjamin Netanyahu too has departed for Elysium, which led to Israel releasing a bunch of videos that did little to dissipate the rumours, though Bibi critics would argue that he never qualified as human.
Appraisal Season: Hollywood Edition
And finally, we had the Oscars recently, one of those last vestiges of WENA pageantry that we still pretend matters, where the main showdown was between One Battle After Another and Sinners.
Now, I’ve not watched the former, but Sinners, in my humble opinion, is proof that political movies can be made without boring people to death.
Just throw in some vampires, Michael B. Jordan, blues music, and Irish rock songs. Jordan and Ryan Coogler are building an impressive body of work together, looking like they will lay their claim to the greatest director-actor duo after Scorsese and De Niro.
Of course, Jordan plays the same role in every Coogler movie.
In the first, he was a guy getting shot for being Black. In the second, a Black guy who wants a shot at becoming world champion. Then a Black guy who wants to shoot everyone who oppressed Black people. And finally, he doubles up as two Black brothers who want to shoot humans and vampires.
Anyway, coming back to the Oscars, there were two complaints:
- That it was too political.
- That it wasn’t political enough.
For right-wingers, the fight between One Battle After Another and Sinners was a showdown between Antifa the Movie and Get Out from Dusk Till Dawn, which isn’t surprising because MAGA’s version of art is editing other people’s videos.
For liberals, the Oscars weren’t political enough at a time when Trumpian tyranny had overshadowed the world. So was it too political or not political enough? The Vine doesn’t know. What it does know is that fewer and fewer Hollywood movies are watchable these days.
Appraisal Season: Box Office Edition
Speaking of pedantry and propaganda, Dhurandhar 2 is set to hit theatres today. The first movie became such a cultural phenomenon that it seems to have permeated every aspect of our lives. Every reel on Instagram is either a meme of Aditya Dhar’s ‘peak detailing’ (Middle East countries that banned Dhurandhar are all ‘closed’ due to the war), “first day as a spy in Pakistan”, or AI slop imagining different folks (Indian politicians, Marvel Cinematic actors, cricketers, etc.).
And it really must be tough, showcased by the fact that Dhurandhar Derangement Syndrome has become a global phenomenon. Everything about it irks my liberal brethren: not claiming Pakistanis are Aman Ki Asha enthusiasts, not saying Indians and Pakistanis love each other, revamping popular qawwalis into techno/remixed bangers, and in general being passable RW propaganda that smashes all records at the box office.
Now I will reserve my judgement about the movie till I watch it, but I can tell you one thing: as the Dhurandhar Revenge trailer points out, critics will still not be ready for it.
Postscript by Prasad Sanyal: The quiet defiance of bespoke
To walk into a tailor’s shop today is to commit a small act of cultural rebellion, not the dramatic sort that involves barricades or slogans, nothing that will trouble the stock market, but rebellion nevertheless.
In a world where clothing has been industrialised into algorithms, size charts, and seasonal ‘drops’, the act of standing patiently while a man measures your shoulders with a tape feels faintly insurgent.
Modern fashion has solved the problem of clothing with ruthless efficiency. Walk into a store, locate a rack marked ‘42 Regular’, and emerge ten minutes later with a shirt that has been produced somewhere far away by a machine calibrated to fit millions of broadly similar bodies. It is efficient, democratic, and astonishingly convenient.
Post-Postscript
Word of the Week: Caesar
Imagine being so important that your surname becomes a synonym for a ruler.
Despite being stabbed by his own allies, the surname Caesar became so big that his heir Augustus styled himself Imperator Caesar Augustus. And since the Roman Empire was the biggest dawg, everyone else adopted the name to showcase themselves as inheritors of the mantle.
The German rulers titled themselves Kaiser.
The Slavic rulers called themselves Tsar or Czar.
The Greeks (Byzantines) used Kaisar.
Even Mehmed II, the Ottoman ruler, titled himself Qaysar-i-Rum, which sounds like he’s an Old Monk fan but was actually styling himself the Caesar of Rome.
Even the British monarch, who called themselves Emperor of India, used the title Kaisar-i-Hind.
So the lesson is, if you go big, go so big that your surname becomes the literal synonym for royalty.
Book of the Week: Open by Andre Agassi
All of us have comfort books, and for me it was Open by Andre Agassi, the first man in the Open Era to complete the Career Golden Slam (winning all Grand Slams plus Olympic gold) and then convincing the only woman to win a Calendar Golden Slam to marry him. I read Open in one of the darkest phases of my life, and it has always served as a sounding board to revive my spirits.
The book tracks Agassi’s rise in tennis, despite his hatred for the game, his battles with Pete Sampras, drugs, and even his inner demons, bouncing back after losing it all. It’s perhaps the best sports biography ever written and should be mandatory reading.
Meme of the Week: TFW You Don’t Agree
No matter what Leonardo DiCaprio does, it becomes an internet meme.
So far, we’ve had the Titanic “King of the World”, the Great Gatsby cheers, pointing at the TV in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the Wolf of Wall Street chest-thumping, the Django Unchained evil laugh, the slightly racist Inception one, and finally the “TFW You Don’t Agree” meme from this year’s Oscars that was born while Conan O’Brien decided to create a new meme with Leo.
And that’s all for this week, folks. See you next week. All the best for appraisal season.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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