Ma Jhandewali of Shastri Bhawan, known to the laity as Smriti Zubin Irani, has granted us a boon against academic scepticism — a flag atop every central university to remind the shifty characters within about her government’s overarching authority. A whopper of a flag big enough to eclipse the sun, and illuminated at night in a manner designed to crowd out the few stars still visible in our smoggy skies. The manner in which the prescription was appropriate to these dark times, when fiction and fabrication make war upon facts, and almost win. It was first noticed on social media. The weight of the flag was set to 125 kg, it was first reported, but then was ratcheted up to 135 kg. Presumably, someone with normal intelligence and some memory of high school physics deduced that such weighty flags would cause vice-chancellors, enervated by extreme scholarship, to rise rapidly into the air when called upon to fiddle with them in the course of their duties. The present incumbent at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, isn’t exactly Man Mountain Jake, for instance. In the act of unfurling, a 135 kg flag could easily place him in elliptical low earth orbit, like Sputnik. As a matter of caution, the first digit of the figure was extracted by liposuction, leaving the tractable figure of 35 kg. Then there was the matter of the length of the flagstaff: 207 feet, a number of grand arbitrariness. It is not even a prime number. But then, the original designers of the flag itself had had no time for mathematical beauty. The ratio of the height to the width of the flag is set to 1:1.5, just a whisker short of the Golden Ratio of 1.6180339888, which expresses many perfect relations in nature, such as the spirals of galaxies and nautilus shells. The US flag, emblem of a pathologically nationalist nation and more ostentatiously venerated than any other, has a ratio of 1.6363636364. It is a happy accident of history, nothing to do with the America temper. It is descended from naval flags designed by Sir Samuel Pepys (he of the scandalously candid diaries) according to the width of cloth on the market. Since that width varied over centuries, so did the dimensions of the flag, before settling on something like the Golden Ratio. This ratio could explain its pervasive popularity — it is almost impossible to traverse a hundred metres of US territory without encountering the flag in some form. If it isn’t visible on the landscape, you would find it emblazoned somewhere on your clothes. Having wrapped itself in the flag, India is one step closer to its role model, the USA. It has been slouching closer and closer for decades, from the Indira Gandhi era, when blue jeans, dollar watches and Coca-Cola cans were coveted and the foreign hand was feared. Now, apart from the lifestyle disorders which go with the territory, the country exhibits numerous features of American popular culture. We both love cults. We don’t have a Jonestown yet, but we have Asaram Bapu, patron saint of Desi Valentine’s Day. We both adore strong men and huge statues, and have rabid television news packaged as entertainment. We harbour illiterate xenophobias about people who share our citizenship but have the temerity to resist assimilation into the majority. The classic US hysteria was about communists, in the McCarthy era, and now Donald Trump has given us something to worry about together: Muslims. But our main anxiety concerns anti-nationals, a delightfully broad term. Four out of five humans have no nationalistic feelings about India, since they live elsewhere. That’s a lot of anti-nationals. We differ from our role model in at least three important regards. One, though ministers and officials routinely growl about “fitting replies” and even “hot pursuit”, we have not yet gathered the foolhardiness to bomb anti-nationals beyond our borders. Two, we can stigmatise, harass, maim and even kill the ones within our territory with impunity, because our legal system isn’t half as robust as the US courts. In the course of the JNU fracas, Delhi’s Patiala House courts took on the appearance of a wild animal safari thanks to lawyers running amok, but neither the judges nor the bar association showed any alacrity to contain a lynch mob clad in lawyers’ gowns. That was a spectacular show of weakness. Most significantly, though the US is almost pathologically nationalist — witness its relentless warmaking capability — it is utterly insensitive about the star-spangled banner. No sentiments are hurt when it is abbreviated into a bikini. It appears on rednecks’ boots and adorns Hello Kitty AK47s which you can buy on the internet. Americans who swear allegiance to the Stars and Stripes have no anxieties about fellow Americans in the deep south flying the Confederate flag. In the world according to Smriti Irani, that would have been high sedition, punishable by forceful extrusion to Pakistan. And by the way, there is a reason why the flag she prescribes to put academics in the shade must stand 207 metres tall and weigh 35 kg.Those are the vital statistics of the flag put up by Naveen Jindal in Delhi’s Rajiv Chowk. It is not the considered view of the government. It is just there.
