Breaking down news: Headlines Will Roll

Perhaps Arnab Goswami would find this blasphemous, but the Parliamentchannels have become livelier than his. High-spirited performances by Arun Jaitley and Smriti Irani opened the season as, from the safe zone of Parliament, they took on the seditious majority out there, where the wild things are.

The wildest thing in media this week was undoubtedly Kolkata’s The Telegraph, which is generally enjoyed for its sharp opinion section, while the news pages are relatively provincial backwaters. However, it rose to the occasion during the beef pogrom, which began in Dadri and continues this week in Aligarh. Its front page ran the headline “Aunty National” with a story about Irani, and Twitter exploded. It was dismissed as reductionist, misogynistic, illiberal and plain stupid, in contrast with Shekhar Gupta’s “Rage of the Uncles” in the Business Standard, which was received with cheerful equanimity. Gender stereotyping is still asymmetric, it appears.

The Telegraph headline was all of the vile things that set Twitter afire, and websites and blogs very rightly attacked it in grim, prim, high-minded seriousness. But when the world according to the government gets as absurd as it is today, when fact and fiction become inextricably intertwined, it becomes impossible to engage with reality rationally, reasonably and responsibly. The only trope capable of expressing this predicament is the internet joke, which tends to be low-down and misogynistic — just check your WhatsApp. The Telegraph has only cracked an internet joke in print. It’s a category mistake, nothing to get all starchy about. Of course, if you type “aunty” into Google now, it immediately suggests “national”. That’s serious troll triumph and somewhere in the BJP’s internet cells, some poor sap isprobably being tortured for it.

The fact that Irani sprang Marcus Tullius Cicero upon Parliament is most intriguing. Who exactly are her advisers? Or was she relying on one of those quotation sites which have mushroomed all over the internet? Because, while the orations Contra Catiline and Civis Romanus Sum do establish Cicero as a nationalist, his consulship was also besmirched by the execution of five dissidents without due process, something that Roman governments generally insisted on. At this juncture, the BJP really does not need associations with old Marcus Tullius. That’s Latin for Mark Tully. No relation. Just saying.

The Independent, one of the world’s poshest mastheads, goes out of print on Monday. Its retreat to the internet will occasion yet another bout of soul-searching about the heady aroma of a freshly printed page, the virtues of paywalls, the failure to monetise and the dangers of always on media which has no time to reflect. Nevertheless, it will provide relief from the budget, which promises to be twice as boring.

And by that time, perhaps the greatest mystery of the week will have been solved: the alleged mass rapes in Haryana, on an underwear-strewn highway to hell. How did all those undergarments get there, and what happened to their occupants? Perhaps we’ll never know.