Kamal Ghorui
The Economic Drive
Austerity has always been the operating system of Indian politics since the days of MKG, famously prompting Sarojini Naidu to lament the rising cost of keeping the Mahatma poor, which involved booking full train compartments and procuring demure goats for milk to satiate his specific and peculiar gustatory needs.
So, when PM Narendra Modi recently urged Indians to rediscover restraint in 2026, which has sent oil prices spiralling, two different traumatic memories kicked in.
For younger folks, it was probably the lockdown days, but for older citizens, it harked back to the pre-liberalisation era.
The era of scooter waiting lists, relatives preserving plastic bags like family heirlooms, and foreign-returned uncles distributing Toblerone bars with the solemnity of humanitarian aid workers. Now PM Modi’s advice is all sensible: save fuel, don’t buy gold, avoid unnecessary foreign travel, particularly for a country that imports most of its oil and buys gold like Fort Knox is a starter home. The PM has asked for his own carcade to be reduced by 50%, which is also a fairly obvious nudge for others in government to follow suit.
But it is also slightly difficult to sell to a civilisation that believed it had finally graduated from the hair-shirt phase of its national life and entered the airport-lounge era of history. Pre-industrialisation India is, to borrow a line from John Lennon’s communist manifesto, a bit hard to imagine.
This is the India of UPI, SUVs, destination weddings, gold ETFs, airport selfies and people describing their fourth foreign holiday of the year as a “much-needed break” for their mental health. It is also an India where airport lounge access is now treated like a constitutional right and where credit card advertisements promise “global lifestyle experiences” to people who still panic if the Wi-Fi stops working for three minutes. Asking this India to rediscover restraint is a bit like asking a Punjabi wedding band to try to play Lennon’s Working Class Hero.
But belt-tightening, or politicians asking us not to do as they do, is a script as old as the Republic, India’s, not Plato’s or the loudspeaker’s.
PM Nehru asked a hungry republic to save food. PM Shastri preached skipping a meal when intermittent fasting and one-meal-a-day weren’t dietary fads but harsh realities. Indira turned enforced simplicity into discipline, with the state watching prices, hoarders and eventually everything.
Perhaps the new gospel of restraint feels a little weird because many of us, who are wrongly called the aspirational middle class, have never stood in lines for ration cards or gas connections, and are instead used to ordering avocados and iPhones on delivery apps. Earlier generations reused plastic containers because they had to. Modern elites call it minimalism, buy beige furniture, own four linen shirts, and make YouTube videos about Marie Kondo and decluttering their lives. It’s like asking a 2026 South Delhi resident to live like a troglodyte.
And therein lies the rub. Calls for sacrifice were par for the course because self-denial was an essential part of nation-building. The citizen gave up rice, gold or dinner because the republic was still a work in progress, held together by ration cards, radio speeches and the belief that tomorrow would justify today’s discomfort. Today, consumption itself has become the evidence that the Republic has arrived. Petrol, gold, foreign holidays, quick commerce and destination weddings are no longer treated as indulgences; they are needs.
Of course, we can only live with the cards we have been dealt, which include the whims and fancies of a former reality star and America’s broken electoral system, but perhaps that’s why calls for restraint feel so out of place in 2026: because we believed we were past that. We didn’t just become richer in the last three decades; we had psychologically moved past the notion that restraint, and not flaunting our closeness to Mammon, was still a virtue.
Starmer’s Labour Pain
No country has fallen as fast as Albion in recent memory. In two decades, the UK has gone from being mocked for going along with George Bush’s WMD hoax to a point where no one cares about its opinion anymore. A small island whose entrepreneurs sailed the globe to sell opium and torture natives by making them read Dickens and Shakespeare, an endeavour that eventually saw them controlling the biggest landmass of any empire in history, one on which the sun never set, has become a punchline, an afterthought whose politics is now followed mainly for its King’s comedic timing. And there is nothing more comical than how the Brits pick their PM in a bicameral, first-past-the-post system that somehow involves sacrificing a prime minister every few months. The one whose head is now on the proverbial chopping block is Keir Starmer, a man with the air and personality of a chartered accountant who only gets excited during tax-filing season.
A version of the British Parliament has been around since 1265 in one form or another, and has survived murderous kings, civil and world wars, lord protectors, skirmishes that inspired the Game of Thrones Red Wedding, and one lettuce that briefly became a constitutional actor. It has seen its fair share of entertaining characters.
Starmer was supposed to be the antidote to the Tory tawdriness that began after the self-inflicted Brexit referendum, and included a prime minister who had to remain tight-lipped about a rumour involving a tallywacker and a deceased pig, a follicularly challenged rugby-tackler who was called out for bragging about Scotch deals in a gurdwara, a premier who somehow couldn’t last longer than a lettuce and yet managed to oversee the death of a long-living monarch who shared her name, and a finance bro who is definitely not putting in the number of hours that his father-in-law demands.
So, why is Starmer under fire?
The Toaster F* Theory
The internet is good for many, many things. Booking tickets, slandering strangers, mocking Musk, sharing memes, finding obscure film clips, learning how to fix a leaking tap, and discovering that the actor you vaguely remember from a 2007 sitcom is now apparently running a cult in Idaho. But perhaps its greatest downside is what Reddit calls the toaster f*** theory.
The theory is quite simple. Pre-internet, if someone said they wanted to perform coitus with an electric appliance, they would be mocked, derided, possibly exorcised, and then gently removed from polite society by their physical friends. The village had many flaws, but it did have one great virtue: it could tell you when you were being an idiot. Shame, for all its bad press, was once a useful civic technology.
Then came the world wide web, or as it should more accurately be called, the world wild web. Now, if an individual believes it is perfectly normal to make love to a toaster, he no longer has to sit quietly with that thought and allow it to die a natural death. He goes online, where he immediately finds a thousand other people who also believe it is normal to make love to a toaster. Within minutes, they have a subreddit, a Discord server, a flag, a vocabulary, a grievance, and a pinned post explaining why society has always oppressed toaster-attracted individuals.
Soon, all these people stop thinking of themselves as oddballs with a very specific problem and start believing they are pioneers of a new moral frontier. The fringe becomes a community, the community becomes an identity, and the identity starts demanding recognition. Anyone who says, “Perhaps don’t have intercourse with kitchen equipment,” is dismissed as a bigot, a prude, or worse, a person still using a two-slice model.
This is how the internet made us weird. It didn’t invent human strangeness. Humans were always strange. It merely removed the old filters that kept our strangest thoughts from becoming manifestos. Every eccentricity now gets an audience, every audience becomes an army, and every army eventually starts a podcast.
There is a particular kind of person one encounters increasingly in modern urban India. They wear smartwatches that congratulate them for standing up, use phrases like “life hack” without irony, and believe every problem can be solved faster with an app, an AI tool, a productivity framework or, in moments of culinary barbarism, a pressure cooker. These people must never be allowed near kosha mangsho.
And it’s not because cooking is sacred. We Bengalis are far too argumentative to keep anything sacred for long. The reason is that kosha mangsho represents one of the last surviving acts of resistance against acceleration itself. And acceleration, as it turns out, ruins mutton.
Post Postscript
Word of the Week: Red-pilled
Funnily enough, the first time the term red pill made an appearance was in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall, but since no one recalls that, its origin story is linked to The Matrix, when Morpheus offers Mr Anderson two choices: take the red pill and become Kung Fu Jesus or take the blue pill and go back to living in a basement. Mr Anderson takes the red pill and the rest is history, as are the terms red-pilled, blue-pilled, black-pilled and white-pilled. To be red-pilled originally meant waking up to a difficult truth, though online it has often been hijacked by reactionary subcultures to mean, “I have discovered what they don’t want you to know.”
To be blue-pilled is to remain inside the pleasant illusion, blissfully plugged into consensus reality, HR language and the belief that LinkedIn posts are written by humans. To be black-pilled is the doomer upgrade: the belief that the system is rotten, the future is doomed and nothing can be done except post through it. To be white-pilled is the counter-dose: a slightly embarrassing but necessary return to hope, where one accepts reality without immediately turning into either a cultist or a nihilist.
Book of the Week: The Iliad
There’s a running joke on philosophy Twitter that states that The Iliad could be called Troy Story, which is actually accurate given Iliad translates to a poem about Ilion (Troy); ergo, it ought to be called Troy Story. Now Homer’s classic epic is back in the news, not because it’s, along with the Gospel, the civilisational text of Western civilisation, but because Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (the sequel to The Iliad) is about to drop nine weekends from now (SNL fans will get the joke), which already has a bunch of folks angry because they can’t imagine Lupita Nyong’o as Helen or Elliot Page as Achilles.
For beginners, the safest answer is Emily Wilson’s 2023 translation. It is clean, fast, modern and mercifully free of the sort of antique throat-clearing that makes people think the Greeks spent most of their time speaking like retired Oxford dons. Wilson keeps the blood, rage, grief and masculine stupidity intact, but makes the poem feel like something people can actually read rather than something they merely pretend to have read at dinner parties. If you want something grander, more Bronze Age blockbuster, go for Robert Fagles. His Iliad has sweep, thunder and the feeling of men with terrible emotional regulation solving every workplace dispute with spears. Fagles is probably the best version if you want the poem to feel properly epic. Wilson is the better first read. Fagles is the better “I want Achilles to sound like the first influencer of rage” read.
The more scholarly option is Richmond Lattimore, which is closer to the Greek and beloved by classicists, but perhaps not the ideal gateway drug unless your idea of a fun weekend involves arguing about dactylic hexameter. Avoid starting with Pope or Chapman unless you specifically want the old poetic grandeur. They are beautiful, but they are also the literary equivalent of choosing to enter Troy by climbing the walls instead of using the gate. So, the beginner’s verdict is simple: read Emily Wilson first, Fagles second, Lattimore later, and Pope only when you have become the sort of person who says “Homeric” without irony.
Meme of the Week: Main Tera Day
May the Fourth may belong to Star Wars, but May the Thirteenth belongs to Arijit Singh and every Indian who has ever weaponised phonetics for romance. Say “May 13” quickly enough and the calendar stops being Gregorian and starts crooning main tera, main tera. Which is why, once a year, the Indian internet briefly becomes a Karan Johar mandap with broadband.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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