I swear I’m reading The Discovery of India

You may be under the mistaken impression that a new government is quickly voted in and quietly gets on with its job of guiding India to even...

You may be under the mistaken impression that a new government is quickly voted in and quietly gets on with its job of guiding India to even greater heights. This is a great, big myth, assiduously kept alive in social studies textbooks for 12-year-olds.

Since most of you are considerably older, let me let you on to a secret. Things are not quite like that. The moment a new government is voted in, it brings out a gigantic pot of honey, labelled ‘Power, Prestige and Placements’. This honey pot, you may be sure, attracts all manner of insects, winged and wingless, even as other insects who had drunk deep at the honey pot of the earlier dispensation retreat into the dark for a period of at least five years (although some nurse the hope in their insect breasts that their return is imminent). In other words, government is all about getting to that pot of honey before others do.

I don’t have to dwell here in great detail on the remarkable health-giving properties of that honey. Suffice it to say that once you get to drink that ambrosial offering, you are immediately eligible to break all rules; get invited to every cocktail party, dinner party, farmhouse party worth the name; get to rub shoulders with the Nehru-Gandhis; snap up a job that entails signing international treaties in New York on a dollar salary; get your brother, uncle, cousin and pet poodle a government job; and even get to stop city traffic with a personal red light atop your car if you’re lucky.

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You would now, doubtless, want to know how one goes about accessing that pot of honey. Well, follow these eight easy stages. They may help…

• Procure, with immediate effect, copies of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History. A copy of Two Alone, Two Together, edited by Sonia Gandhi, may come in handy. If you are a government servant, ensure that these volumes casually decorate your working table.

• Ensure that all copies of V D Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who is a Hindu and M S Gowalkar’s We, or our nation redefined—which may have worked wonders in the earlier dispensation—are completely out of sight. Burn them or, if you are inordinately attached to them, wrap them in brown paper and store them away.

• Long tilaks on the foreheads of upwardly mobile babus are out. Indeed, sartorially, the colour saffron is out, the tricolour is in, whether in angavastrams or waistcoats. Similarly, long robes of orange are a strict no-no. While the Nehru cap and jacket have not yet made a comeback, you could, if you so choose, kickstart the trend and win frequent walker miles in the corridors of power.

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• Do not hesitate to catch the eye of the Powers-That-Be. You could do this in a variety of ways. Write long articles in newspapers extolling Nehruvian values, Indira Gandhi’s pragmatism, Rajiv Gandhi’s futuristic outlook, and Sonia Gandhi’s ‘renunciation’. Don’t stop at this. Get on to TV talk shows and extol the Congress legacy with passion. Think, also, about writing a book on it some time soon.

• If you are a filmmaker, you no longer invite L K Advani and his daughter, Pratibha, for a special screening of your latest film. Also don’t forget that the Daughter and Son-in-law to be given pride of place at such screening is not Namrata and Ranjan Bhattacharya but Priyanka and Robert Vadra.

• If you have the stomach for it, perhaps you should try and procure a copy of Manmohan Singh’s doctoral thesis on India’s export competitiveness and internalise its finer points. This is tricky. You would need to be a trained economist to handle the subject with some elan.

• In any case, remember that Hindi poetry is out, Keynesian Economics is in.

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• Also, never, NEVER make the mistake of calling the upwardly mobile in the new order, ‘‘self-seeking time-servers’’. They may be that alright, but there’s always room for one more time-server in the system and, you never know, it could be you.

As for me, I’ve almost reached the final chapter of Discovery of India. It’s a fascinating book, let me tell you, written by the tallest figure that India ever produced. Next week, I aim to tackle ‘Two Alone, Two Together’…