Kamal Ghorui
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Weekly Vine. In this week’s edition, we wonder whether the BJP has become the Bhadralok Janata Party, decode the hype around The Devil Wears Prada, offer a brief Star Wars lesson for beginners, and finally celebrate the joys of the perfect club sandwich.
Bhadralok Janata Party
May the 4th is known as Star Wars Day to the fandom because it rhymes with May the Force Be with You, the catchphrase from the franchise which has become a ubiquitous greeting for nerds across the world.
The phrase is so popular that PM Modi once used it to sign off while giving a speech at Central Park in New York. And the force was certainly with the BJP as it finally conquered the bastion which had hitherto refused to succumb to saffron overtures, while also retaining Assam.
In Kerala, the Congress-led UDF returned with a bang, or as a loquacious Congress MP might put it, re-emerged from one’s temporary obscuration with an orotund, cataclysmic and quasi-apocalyptic resplendence, announcing not merely a return, but a grandiloquent recrudescence of one’s erstwhile magnificence upon the unsuspecting theatre of public attention.
Meanwhile, in Tamil Nadu, Vijay managed something that Hitler never could: defeating Stalin. And Vijay’s first name is Joseph to boot. And in Puducherry, it was a return for the NDA.
But the real Death Star moment was Bengal.
For decades, Bengal had treated the BJP as something that happened to other people. To the Hindi heartland. To television anchors. To people who said “culture” without first passing through Tagore, Marx, Satyajit Ray and a decaying College Street bookshop. Then the saffron party breached the one fortress that had treated resistance to it as an aesthetic principle.
Now, because one was born in West Bengal, and even though one identifies as an Anglo-Bihari, people kept asking me before the election who was winning. And now they ask me why they won.
So, here’s my honest take: Bengalis have a cultural, pronounced kalcharal, chip on their shoulders about their homeland to the point that the world is divided between probashi Bengalis and non-bashi Bengalis. Somehow, one of the hallmarks of that culture became ensuring that one never voted for the BJP, which is rather odd given that the BJP’s precursor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, was founded by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee.
In other words, Bengal spent decades looking at the BJP as a Hindi heartland import while quietly ignoring the small historical inconvenience that one of its founding fathers was a Bengali bhadralok. This is a little like discovering that the loudest DJ at a Punjabi wedding was trained in Santiniketan.
My first brush with cancel culture came long before it was co-opted by the woke community. Having grown up in Chhapra, of Ara Heele Chhapra Heele fame, and the centrist’s Promised Land, Singapore, one wasn’t very familiar with Bengali bhadralok cancel culture, but one learned very early in life.
As a nine-year-old, I was asked, “What’s your favourite Rabi Thakur poem?”
My answer, that I had no clue who or what a Rabi Thakur was, Tagore’s non-anglicised name with some filial love thrown in, was immediately met with pierced looks and derisive stares at my parents, who were promptly berated for not raising their only child properly.
That was the moment when my deracinated personage was cast out of Bengali heaven, and I realised that not venerating Tagore is the only cardinal sin that exists for people born either in “Ooest” Bengal, because the letter W doesn’t exist in the Bengali lexicon, or East Bengal.
For some reason, Bengal’s politics wasn’t politics but an aesthetic choice, a moral declaration, a pronunciation test, and proof that despite the mendicity on display across the state one was still somehow superior to non-Bengali speakers.
The bhadralok imagination had its own sacred trinity: Tagore for the soul, Marx for the conscience, and Ray for the camera angle. Everything else was suspect. Hindi cinema was too loud. Gujarati businessmen were too efficient. North Indian politics was too muscular. Voting for BJP was the gustatory equivalent of ordering paneer at Olypub.
And yet, here we are.
Now I don’t know why my fellow brethren are so upset. Will we have to stop listening to Rabindrasangeet? Eat paneer steaks at Olypub? Watch propaganda films instead of Satyajit Ray movies? Paint our buildings every year instead of leaving them unwashed like they survived from the Harappan era? Worship a different bearded deity instead of Tagore or Marx?
Only time will tell.
But this, perhaps, is why everyone is behaving as if the Hooghly has turned saffron overnight. The fear is not merely that Bengal has voted differently. The fear is that Bengal may have lost the one thing it treasured even more than Rabindrasangeet, mishti doi and the right to correct your pronunciation: the belief that it was too intellectually refined to vote like everyone else.
Star Wars for beginners
Speaking of Star Wars, the other day when I told a colleague that May 4 was Star Wars Day, she asked: “What do you do on Star Wars Day?” And my reply that we celebrate Star Wars was met with a questioning: “What do you do on other days?”
This made me realise that there still remain among us non-believers, people who have no idea what “Baby, do the magic hand thing might mean”, people who haven’t watched Star Wars or, worse, might be Star Trek fans.
So, as a worshipper at the cult of the Force, here’s a small guide to Star Wars for Beginners.
First, Star Wars is not really science fiction. Science fiction is what happens when people with physics degrees imagine the future. Star Wars is what happens when Joseph Campbell, Akira Kurosawa, Flash Gordon, samurai films, cowboy movies, daddy issues and a toy company walk into a cantina. It has spaceships and laser swords, but at heart it is mythology which Disney has converted into a formula for minting money.
The basic story is simple. There is a galaxy far, far away. It is usually in trouble because someone in a black cloak has decided democracy is inefficient. On one side are the Jedi, warrior monks with excellent robes and terrible emotional intelligence. On the other are the Sith, who are what happens when ambition, resentment and dramatic lighting are allowed to make policy. Between them lies the Force, an invisible energy field that binds everything together and lets chosen people move objects, sense danger and ruin family dinners.
The original trilogy follows Luke Skywalker, a farm boy from a desert planet, who discovers that he is destined for greater things, as all farm boys in fiction eventually do. He meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, joins Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca and two quarrelling droids, and fights the evil Galactic Empire. Leia is technically a princess but spiritually the only competent person in the group project. Han is a smuggler with commitment issues. Chewbacca is a giant furry warrior and somehow the most emotionally stable character in the franchise.
Then there is Darth Vader, one of cinema’s greatest villains because he understood branding before brand consultants existed. Black armour, cape, mask, asthma machine, red lightsaber, deep voice, excellent entrance music. He does not enter rooms. He occupies them.
The great twist, now less spoiler than civilisational fact, is that Vader is Luke’s father. This turns Star Wars from a simple good-versus-evil story into a family drama with laser swords. It becomes a story about fear, power, inheritance, redemption and whether children can escape the sins of their parents.
That is why Star Wars endures. Not because of the spaceships, though they help. Not because of the lightsabers, though every emotionally underdeveloped adult wants one. It endures because it tells the oldest story in the world: a nobody discovers a destiny, a republic falls, an empire rises, fathers fail, children forgive, and hope survives.
So what does one do on Star Wars Day? One remembers that every civilisation needs rituals. Some light lamps. Some fast. Some rewatch The Empire Strikes Back. And some of us simply whisper, with full nerd conviction: May the Force be with you.
The Devil Needs Pageviews
After years of hearing about it, and to keep the marital peace, I recently watched The Devil Wears Prada and its sequel. Now, The Devil Wears Prada is Gangs of Wasseypur for women. PS: don’t tell them that, they get angry. I watched the first on a Saturday evening and the second one the day later in the hall, and while I understood the cultural impact Miranda Priestly, a fictionalised version of Anna Wintour, had on everyone, the second one felt like a damp squib.
Priestly is humanised a little too much, her eccentricities dialled down, and it’s ghastly that she has the same problems I do: pageviews and EBITDA targets. Miranda Priestly is a goddess, and gods should not be forced to sit in meetings about audience funnels, subscription conversion, newsletter open rates and whether a headline has enough SEO juice.
The original worked because she seemed to exist above ordinary capitalism, like an oracle who could kill careers with a whisper and decide the colour of next season while lesser mortals worried about rent, card bills and office appraisals. To see her dragged into the same swamp of dashboards and quarterly anxieties is like discovering Zeus had to optimise thunderbolts for engagement.
The first film understood power as theatre. Miranda did not merely enter a room; she changed its oxygen levels. Everyone around her became smaller, quicker, more terrified and better dressed. The sequel, at least to me, makes the classic mistake of explaining the monster. But monsters, especially elegant ones in sunglasses, lose something when they become relatable. Miranda Priestly should not worry about targets. She should be the target. She should not chase metrics. Metrics should nervously rearrange themselves when she walks past.
Some devils are meant to wear Prada, not refresh Chartbeat.
Postscript by Prasad Sanyal: The Misfit Next Door and the Art of Making a Good Club Sandwich
Right next to the Taj in Mumbai, that grand, perfectly lit overachiever of Indian hospitality, sits the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, looking like it has absolutely no interest in competing. If the Taj is a well-dressed host who knows exactly where the light falls, the Yacht Club is that old uncle in a cane chair who has seen too much to rearrange himself for anyone.
“Members Only,” the board says. Not aggressively. Not defensively, just factually like gravity. You walk in and the first thing that hits you is not nostalgia. It’s space. The sort of space that makes a Mumbai resident briefly check if they’ve accidentally wandered into a real estate hallucination. Six hundred square feet here is not a listing. It is a mood. A room so large that the furniture appears to have been introduced to each other but never formally acquainted. A table here, a chair there, a bed that looks like it has been where it is since Pandit Nehru was experimenting with roses. Nothing matches and yet everything belongs.
Word of the Week: Hot dog
The hot dog, like most great American inventions, is actually an immigrant with a better publicist. The sausage came first, carried across the Atlantic by German immigrants who brought with them frankfurters from Frankfurt and wieners from Vienna. The bread came later, because Americans have always understood that civilisation improves when grease can be eaten with one hand.
The name “hot dog” is said to have emerged in the late 19th century, when vendors sold hot sausages in rolls at baseball games, street corners and fairs. The “dog” bit probably came from the old joke that cheap sausages contained dog meat, a slander that somehow became branding. There is also a popular tale about a cartoonist unable to spell “dachshund” and simply writing “hot dog” instead, but like most good food legends, it is more delicious than verifiable.
Over time, the hot dog became less a snack and more a national mood: German meat, American theatre, working-class convenience, stadium ritual, and mild suspicion in one bun.
Book of the Week: Ready Player One
If you grew up believing the internet was supposed to be a portal and not a workplace, Ready Player One is either a love letter or a hostage note. Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel imagines a broken future where most people escape into the OASIS, a vast virtual universe built by a dead tech genius obsessed with 1980s pop culture. When he dies, he leaves behind a treasure hunt: find the hidden Easter egg and inherit his fortune.
The book is not subtle. It wears its references like Iron Man wore armour: arcade games, Atari, Rush, Dungeons & Dragons, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and every other relic from the great temple of nerd adolescence. Its hero, Wade Watts, is poor, lonely and brilliant in the way only fictional gamers are allowed to be. His weapon is not strength or charm, but obsessive trivia.
That is also the charm of the book. Ready Player One understands that nostalgia can be both comfort food and prison food. It offers a world where knowing the right reference can save your life, which is a dangerous message for anyone who has ever won a pub quiz and briefly mistaken it for greatness.
Meme of the Week: Indian Dads watching elections
And finally, our meme of the week was a cut scene from the movie that gives my liberal brethren the heebie-jeebies: Dhurandhar: The Revenge. There’s one particular scene where the film’s master of spies, Ajay Sanyal, interrupts a havan to FaceTime a terrorist who is about to receive the “unknown gunmen” treatment, and that was exactly what Indian dads felt like watching the last round of results.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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