Opinion Cigarettes and biscuits

They know that in news TV,ten trillion dollars are not big enough to interrupt a chat. You don’t say,er,excuse me,you said America is a four trillion dollar economy,but actually it is fourteen trillion. That’s bad form. It doesn’t matter. Don’t obsess over details like that. Let the show go on. Which is no doubt why when the prof who wasn’t agreeing with the IIT prof said 77 per cent of Indians live on less than Rs 20 a day,no one objected either. That’s an even smaller matter,folks. India’s economy is after all only a shade over a trillion dollars. Within minutes of a half-hour news TV show,nearly 80 per cent Indians have been reduced to living on less than Rs 600 a month and America’s economy has been shrunk by more than two-thirds. Without a debate. Without dissent.

So,as I said at the beginning,what are the Chinese fretting about? Ok,yes,Times Now told the nation that cigarettes and biscuit wrappers left behind in Uttarakhand were proof again that China’s forces were here. They were here,they were smoking and eating while they were here,and what are we doing about it? Also,who exactly were here? Times Now traveled to Ladakh and the anchor,prepping us for news that was going to break and Chinese lies that were going to be nailed,said the bad guys were China’s People’s Republican Army or the PAC.

Try to understand the deep strategic meaning of this. You think,like I think,that China’s soldiers belong to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). No! There’s a People’s Republican Army so sinister that its acronym in English is not even PRA,it’s PAC. A secret army,perhaps reared on a diet of biscuits and cigarettes,and trained to leave signs of incursion easily identifiable by news TV crews.

So,what do we have: India considerably poorer than you thought,menaced by a secret Chinese army…it could have been worse. We could have become like Afghanistan! This,I got from a masterly counterfactual history analysis on NDTV’s We the People: India minus the colonial heritage of the English language equals Afghanistan. Aha,so the problem in Pakistan,which actually resembles Afghanistan a lot but where the elite speak excellent English,is…I don’t know. Does God know? Why am I bringing up God? Because I saw Him—on India TV,which went to the mountains and found Him. But,and this is the problem with us English-speaking,deracinated,godless,American economy-admiring people,I wish India TV had found Chinese soldiers instead.

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com