“Not only will all my friends and family detest me and call me a monster; the united global multiculturalist media will have their hands full figuring out multiple ways to character assassinate, vilify and demonize.”

I’d say he’s being a little oversensitive.

This is a man who, for 9 years apparently lived a double life, while plotting to execute a grotesquely theatrical plan to kill as many innocents as he possibly could – including a bunch of picnicking kids in hunter-executioner style – simply in order to “market” his political views… and we’re to believe that all the while he was worried about being misunderstood?

Breivik’s lawyer has made an early plea for insanity, specifically requesting that Japanese experts be brought in to testify as they are well-versed in “the idea and values of honour.” He should instead instruct his client to fall on his sword.

The Norwegians are obviously in collective shock at Breivik’s premeditated display of pure evil. They cannot fathom how this “monster” could be one of their own. Without a precedent on which to base their emotional response to such a reprehensible tragedy, they scour their national psyche searching for an understanding of a sociopathy they had thought only to exist in the world of Scandinavian crime fiction. They’ve found that they don’t even have a penalty in their legal canon to befit a crime of this magnitude. Even their newspapers have struggled to label the act, and have fallen far short, resorting to describing Breivik’s actions as “Far Right Christian Extremism”,.

The rest of the “united global multiculturalist media” meanwhile, are making a spectacle of the entire affair in ways that Breivik, with his penchant for self-aggrandizing play-acting, could only have envisioned in his wildest dreams.

But, unlike the self-indulgent tenor of his rambling confession, the consensus that the world is correctly heading towards is that Breivik is nothing more than a vile terrorist and a murderer.

Changing the script

Despite his pretensions at being a political martyr, the authorities have chosen to focus on Breivik’s actions, which are patently criminal. Given that he was not at war with the Norwegian state, or even ordained by the Vatican to embark on his so-called Christian crusade, his deadly assault has been found to have no moral or political legitimacy whatsoever. And, despite the horrific extent of his crimes, it would be no mean insult to Breivik to call them not just unwarranted, but also unoriginal.

In fact, his choice of tactics borrows directly from the playbook of the very Islamic radicals he sees as his enemy.

Al Qaeda, although infamous for its dramatic attacks against the West, was born as an extension of radical Wahhabism and puts its primary focus on intimidating moderate Muslims across the Middle East into submitting to its conservative agenda. The Taliban in Afghanistan and various radical Islamic groups in Pakistan have each unleashed their own domestic reign of terror not just in order to ensure a return to traditional ideology but specifically to gain political ascendancy.

For all his delusions of grandeur, Breivik’s hysterical hatred of the Norwegian Labour Party’s policies and his attack against innocent non-Muslims (which he claims, with unintentional irony, was supposedly in order to save them from Islamization) most resembles the behavior of the anti-abortion agitators and white supremacist militia groups that are so numerous in the US, and have have time and again punished opposition to their extreme right wing agendas through similar tactics of bombing and assassination.

Fast on the heels of the attack, Fox News, the unofficial media representative for the Far Right Christian Extremists of the US, aired hours of programming featuring [usually growling] talking heads in sober denial of Breivik’s connection to even the most far-flung fringe sentiments within their community – a step they have never taken in the case of the anti-abortion lobby, which borrows its deadly pro-life fervor directly from the Catholic church. The rabidly violent and racist English Defense League, whose ideology Breivik maintains to worship, issued a statement distancing itself from his methods. Its leader claims he had earlier refused to accept a Facebook friend request from Breivik. And a day after its editors rushed to blame Muslim terrorists for what turned out to be the actions of a blond, blue-eyed European nationalist, the Islam-baiting Wall Street Journal even went so far as to blur the religious debate in an op-ed piece concluding that Breivik was simply “evil incarnate”.

With the world closing ranks in universal condemnation, it is surprising that none of the Norwegian anti-immigrant organizations Breivik is known to have supported have uttered a word reproaching his actions. They would do well to speak up against him

And so, despite the early confusion, and by taking control of the fallout with typical Nordic efficiency it seems that the government in Oslo has defused Breivik’s twisted plan of inciting a campaign of escalating sectarian violence, which he had hoped would lead to an apocalyptic holy war, and, perhaps after the debris had settled, cataclysmic social change.

If anything, it has served to put the Europeans on notice to address the rifts in their society and has succeeded in leeching some of the legitimacy away from the argument of their radicals.

As for Breivik, we can expect him to rot in prison, out of public view until the case is able to take on a sober pitch… and until the Norwegians are able to formulate a new law for dealing with monsters.

Are there any lessons that terrorism’s latest victim can teach an old warhorse like Bombay?

There are a few I can think of.

The first is that we must resurrect our collective sense of outrage.

Having cowered under terrorism’s dark shadow for decades, our city’s psyche now rests despondently at the opposite end of the spectrum of sorrow from that demonstrated by the wide-eyed, shell-shocked Norwegians who lost their innocence somewhere in the Utoya woods.

Like a boxer who has taken one too many hits and become inured to pain, Bombay’s citizenry seem to have fallen into a state of cynical, defeated acceptance of the fact that their city is a soft target, a soap box for violent displays of the grievances of the disenfranchised, who do not have the means or the courage to wage a conventional war nor the wits to win a logical argument against the state.

Government officials unhelpfully suggest that, outside of a police state, terror groups will always have the impunity to strike at random. They add that most of the more discriminating tools of counterterrorism like infiltration, intelligence gathering and selective detention need to be kept away from the public eye in order to be effective. Therefore, behind the guise of disinformation, they do nothing. Opposition minister Eknath Khadse summed up this policy admirably when he told the state assembly that Bombay’s best hope for security seemed to be “bhagwan bharose”.

Apart from the limitless grief of the victims and their families, who cry out in anguish, the rest of us are close to a state of terror fatigue.

We must not accept this callous and dehumanized condition. By surrendering our very souls to the many monsters operating within our midst, we will have allowed them to win, regardless of whatever it is they actually want as their ultimate prize in their unyielding war of attrition.

There is always hope.

An unanticipated side effect of a large-scale urban terrorist attack is that it unites the target population in a collective sense of shared destiny. Although uneven social mobility is moving us apart in too many ways, we are all equal victims of terror because, quite plainly, it could just as easily have been any of us. This is a very real but unexplored facet of the much-maligned “spirit of Bombay”, which gets washed away whenever we clean up the crime scene and move on with our singularly self-involved lives.

Just as the deeply divided population of Iraq has begun to come together to reject Al Qaeda’s bullying, fed-up with the relentless and indiscriminate brutality it has been fed daily, and just as the Norwegians, and even more recently, the civil-riot-hit British have stood up for the fundamentals which allow them to be an inclusive society, we too can embrace the equal and opposite reaction of our humanity and use it as a weapon against those that aim to destroy and bury it.

We have rallied together against telemarketers, alcohol prohibitionists, the pothole mafia and others who challenge our way of life in trivial ways; it is a pity that we cannot hold the line once more when it comes to our very lives.

It is truly pathetic that we have not been able to install a single public, non-political, permanent, and meaningful symbol to commemorate our collective stand against the barbarism of terror. Where is our memorial? What is our war cry? Why do we break rank so easily?

The problem resides in the existential nature of the threat and its agents.

Norway has an identifiable adversary with a well-defined set of priorities which can be confronted and addressed. With the latest attacks in Bombay, we’ve even lost sight of who could be responsible – Islamic or Hindu terrorists, state or local actors, opportunists or zealots. And, with no one coming forward to claim the act and therefore with no end game in sight, all that we’re left with is a grim sense of inevitability that someone will strike again. And soon.

A punch on the nose produces blood and tears, but also adrenalin. We all feel the same outrage and taste the raw desire for vengeance. But, without an outlet we allow these visceral feelings to dissipate, and as is inevitable in our times of opportunism, they get hijacked by grandstanders, who choose to manipulate our wrath for their own gain.

The second thing to do, then, is to find a means of channeling our anger effectively towards our enemies.

Since 26/11 we’ve been told to get used to a new trend of terror by remote control, where every new lash in the regimen of the “thousand cuts” by which we are meant to bleed to death is being carried out not by indoctrinated freedom fighters seeking to incite a revolution, but by an assembly line of petty criminals with no definitive political inclinations and who are able to take human life with pure transactional detachment. The handlers at Pakistan’s ISI who are the architects of this strategy realize that they can be freed from moral and legal retribution by farming out their war of attrition with the Indian government to an endless string of angry young men, all of whom are so frustrated with being marginalized that they are more than willing to take up arms, even though by doing so all that they manage to do is give up their lives for what is patently specious political grandstanding.

So we have our own cynical, mutated and many-times-more elusive version of “the monster”.

An agent driven to desperation not by extreme loneliness and a misguided sense of self, like Breivik was, nor by a zealous sense of entitlement, like scores of religious fundamentalists have been throughout History, but rather by banal financial considerations.

Ajmal Kasab languishes in a Bombay jail, waiting for karma to percolate through the Indian justice system and unleash itself upon him. The true tragedy [and the truly terrifying reality] isn’t that he was merely a pawn in the control of a malevolent master, who will get away without being punished. Or that, like Breivik, he lost sight of his humanity. It is that there are countless others like him deeply motivated to do exactly what he did, all without an ounce of conviction.

While it is a challenge to keep our sights trained on these nebulous, shape-shifting antagonists, and while we must pay heed to the bedevilling poverty which drives them to such desperation, we must also inflict much more damage with the ones we do apprehend.

Kasab and every single member of his growing ilk must be unambiguously judged on the gravity of their actions, and if indeed they are found to be enemies of humanity they must be made examples of by being cast out into whatever hell they each believe in. Or the tide of recruitment will never cease.

This cannot be limited to the legal process.

The system of justice will rightfully provide for moral balancing and perhaps even a sense of vengeance but, in order to create a real cautionary tale, we must exemplify that retribution and place it squarely in the public imagination, where the terrorist myth gets its power.

It is on these front lines that our effort against terrorism is frustrated from the start by semantics.

The very use of the word “terrorist” is self-fulfilling in that it signals someone to be feared, and conversely a role of power to be aspired to. It has become a nasty euphemism which gives our adversaries an unnatural psychological advantage.

But these villains are not extremists, warriors, martyrs, freedom fighters or members of any such awe-inspiring denomination. They do not possess a dauntless spirit, noble strength or heroic resolve. They’re bad human beings, plain and simple. And by letting them circulate their own propaganda and style their own legend, we allow them to literally get away with murder.

Worriers vs warriors

The time has come to replace the common noun “terrorist” and the vocation “terrorism” with something that better befits the crime.

“Nihilist” may be more accurate, because it hints directly to how all of these groups aim to subvert our value systems and gain ascendancy, but it is too arcane and weak a term to elicit the emotional response we require to deal with them effectively.

“Mass-murderer” works for me.

Although there is the argument that the use of so vague a prosaism will blunt our ability to respond in a concentrated fashion – just as the “war against terror” was not as effective a rallying call as perhaps a “war against [some proper noun]”, like a nation or a better defined enemy, who could be defeated.

Political “extremists” in the US caused much damage to the world with their recent act of holding the economy hostage, causing arguably greater long-term suffering than the actions of all the religious “extremists” who chose to act this year, but the law does not allow us to deal with them in the same manner as we would other political “extremists” like Breivik, who subscribes to their elitism, nor religious “extremists” like Al Qaeda, from whom he borrows his tactics. By that logic, grouping “terrorists” with other “mass-murderers” may seem to weaken our focus and response.

I disagree, because I think that having a common response for all manner of mass-murderers directly addresses and delegitimizes the terrorist’s choice of tactics and debases terrorism’s supposedly lofty goals.

We probably should go further.

Taking a cue from the Scandinavian crime authors who have had a field day painting the villainy of these lunatics, we could apply the many archetypes of modern-day evil to reveal their true depravity.

For instance, the one thing that does bind all these criminals together is their opportunism and cowardice. They almost always act covertly, without the fear of being discovered, caught, or brought to justice for their despicable crimes. Meanwhile, we allow card-carrying members of self-sanctioned political parties to provide these people logistical and philosophical support freely under the guise of democracy. Their abuse of our decency is total, so that, when they are cornered, they simply create another chimera behind which they can hide. Even suicide bombers are told that they will get amnesty in an afterlife paradise, with the bounty of 40 virgins for company.

Why not recognize these aberrations of character and add the modifiers “cowardly”, “inhuman”, “unworthy”, “hate-filled” or even something more base and effective. Something local and ownable. Call them “chutiyas”. Exchange an expletive response for a profane act. It seems more than fair.

Sample these reframed headlines, which could easily piggyback on the tabloid imperatives of our local press:

Cowardly Mass Murderers Kill Defenseless Citizens.

Low-lives Hide Behind Children and Shoot at Police.

Rats Place Bombs in Crowded Train and Scurry Away into their Gutter Holes.

A Known Chutiya Finally Caught and Brought to Justice

This kind of demystification will reveal the “monsters” for what they are. It will encourage ordinary citizens to qualify their fear, and perhaps even reverse it by giving it a vocabulary to confront the terrorists, inform on them, mark their houses, shame their families. At the same time, it will impose a real psychic cost on these reckless agents and make them think twice about choosing the glamour of chaos and anarchy over the penury of living as citizens of an organized society.

This is not a frivolous suggestion – Note how the perniciously well-entrenched Ku Klux Klan went into long-term decline in the late 40s after a folklorist gave details of its esoteric code book and rituals to the writers of a fictional radio show featuring Superman. The popularity of the show allowed the Klan’s rubric to be widely mimicked. It soon passed around like wildfire in schoolyard games. Demystified and ridiculed by the rhymes of children, the once-dreaded organization soon lost its charisma and, with it, most of its popular support.

While I don’t suggest handing over the jihadi argot to our kids for poetry class, I would be happy to see my son’s school run a drawing contest for a super hero who goes out and makes a mess of the terror nexus. Or to have him and his friends play Pin the Tail on Osama’s Ass at the next available birthday party. Think about how, with the help of some imaginative marketing, we’ve magically turned our often invertebrate cricket players into the Warriors, SuperKings and Challengers of the IPL. We could flip this trope on its head and rebrand the Al Qaeda Chickens, or the Lashkar e Toiba e Toiba. We could gratefully give SIMI the gift of a mascot: an ageless actress dressed unimpeachably in white with a beatific botox smile and a satanic alter ego which has a penchant for grabbing credit for the very operation of the universe.

The media must definitely help. With just a fraction of the energy and space they commit to sensationalizing the suffering caused by these base men, they can very effectively debunk the myth of their monstrousness. Destruction and bad news have an unavoidable resonance, but so do retribution, contrition and the story of justice that is well served.

Breivik’s father said he wishes his son had died before shaming his family. That headline never made it to the cover page of CNN.

Kasab cried like a baby at his court hearing. I’d love to see that on an endless loop on India TV.

And while we’re all waiting for the Youtube release of Osama Bin Laden’s favorite wife’s supposed confession detailing the tawdry sexual escapades they enjoyed together in his kink-filled country boudoir,  unfortunately, it seems that this last wish may not transpire because the Americans, who are the masters of the universe of brand warfare and who understand the power of even suggesting that they have this hot footage, recently signaled an interesting switch in tactics in their battle for perceptual ascendancy over their terrorist enemies.

I’ve often wondered when the US’ psyops machine would trump the genius innovation of  the Most Wanted Iraqi playing cards they released in 2003, which, as in the case of the KKK code-book leak, made a popular parlour game [and a very effective broadcast tool] out of their campaign against Saddam and his minions.

They just went one better.

The uncharacteristic reserve with which they made Osama’s death a quiet and confident footnote in their war against terror put potency back into their campaign in a way that a clinical nuclear strike to take out the Top-10 Most Wanted could not. It was even better than my suggestion – of letting Osama be raped to death by wild animals to debunk the “virgins in paradise” theory. Osama’s anonymous burial at sea, which denied the whole host of his supporters a palpable opportunity to grieve, pontificate and retaliate, showed the efficiency and resolve of a leader. With this move, the American campaign against terror [maybe they will also step away from the unhelpful bombast of calling it a war] gained a moral advantage it hasn’t enjoyed for a long time.

I call this move uncharacteristic [but certainly welcome] because it’s no secret that the US has also handicapped itself and indeed the entire free world from the very beginning of its campaign, thanks to the machinations of vested interests in its political class and in the military-industrial complex, who have fostered a false sense of insecurity in order to profit from the resulting climate of fear.

My third prescription, one that mirrors this newfound restraint from the Americans, is the hardest to follow, and it perhaps contradicts the first two: It is to do nothing.

The outspoken US Senator and one-time presidential nominee John McCain struck a dissonant chord with his countrymen when, in a 2004 book titled Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life he beseeched terror-obsessed Americans to ‘‘Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave. . . Suck it up, for crying out loud. You’re almost certainly going to be okay. And in the unlikely event you’re not, do you really want to spend your last days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape? That’s not a life worth living, is it?’

McCain was responding to the institutionalized fear that had taken control of public life and foreign policy in the US, and had given birth to a mega-billion dollar bonanza for counterterrorism operations, apart from a hawkish boost for the American war machine… which only today is being seen as hugely wasteful and even counterproductive.

It is important to countenance that he was suggesting that the American public do nothing out of the ordinary in response to the terrorist threat.

In getting back to business as usual, they could start to button down the widespread epidemic of hysteria, which had been part of Al Qaeda’s strategy all along, namely to force a public outcry in the US which would provoke an unequal militaristic response from the government, which would not only place a huge human, financial and psychic toll on the country, but would also radicalize fence-sitting Muslims across the world and unite them by making them feel persecuted by the heavy-handed retaliation of the West.

These are the very circumstances and therefore the very prescription that holds true for India as well, but the mealy-mouthed manner in which our government chooses to communicate it makes the strategy sound like a weak compromise and a concession to the terrorists.

We have thus far been fortunate that we do not have a well-organised, homegrown terror industry [arms contractors, security analysts, duct tape salesmen, etc] to fan the flames, although the rapacious Fourth Estate have always reaped the benefit of amplifying the impact of tragedy. We also have our fair share of right-wing nut jobs and fundamentalist splinter groups, all of whom are learning to manipulate the system in order to push their agendas.

While we should be offering kudos to our government for resisting the popular but ruinous urge to bomb Pakistan, instead we complain about our dysfunctionality. We fret about the sensitivity being shown to marginalized communities, while we know that the terrorists would love to have us target them.

Worst of all, we act ashamed of our honest and abundant resuscitative energy, which compels us to mark our losses and move on, even though we admit that the only option would be to surrender to despair and thus renounce our way of life.

I say it’s time to stand up for the spirit of Bombay.

We should immediately focus on building muscle memory around our resilience and our ability to boomerang back from tragedy. To do anything less would be to accept the hideous cynicism of men like Breivik.

We must grab back ownership of our public image and issue our own heartfelt statement of the fact that fortitude and apathy are two very separate responses. The best defense of our way of life would be to continue to live it with greater passion and investment.

We will find ready inspiration from the proponents of “Oslove”, the symbolic, mass-scale public mantra being chanted to guide Norway away from fear-mongering and a reckless response and back onto the path of its enlightened social system. Breivik sought to introduce masses of Norwegians to Islamophobia, but he only encouraged them to use the felled wood of the Utoya forest to build a strong defense against terrorphobia instead. We have plenty of wood and mettle in Bombay to build our own terroresistance.

McCain might have added in his plainspeak that the golden hours of the US’ campaign against terror were not witnessed in any act of reprisal but in the display of resourcefulness and mutual concern which followed the tragedies of 9/11 and beyond, where humanity was truly seen to triumph over evil. We’ve seen that kind of solidarity in Bombay time and again in our response to disaster, and it is the only inoculation we need against terror.

If we can begin to recognize terrorism [or nihilism or chutiyapanti] for what it truly is — an acceptable risk of staying the path and adhering to the values of a modern society, then we will have won without having to fire a single shot.

The choreographers of terror are obviously worried about us not worrying about them. They have stepped up the frequency of their attacks, but, in doing so they are pushing us away from paralyzing fear and closer towards this counterintuitive and effective learned response to their provocations.

Breivik’s 1500 pages of drivel and my own verbose offer of a rant for a rant are nowhere as compelling as these three little words:

Lage raho, Bombay

With a self-regulating karmic system in place and with the abjuration of violence as the central tenet of our founding father’s teachings, the business of law enforcement has largely been left to the Gods and the right to bear [or ‘bare’] arms is something you’d normally see being exercised on a beach in Goa.

This

...not this

But there is one day of the year when a state-sponsored war game, complete with Vietnam War-era quantities of mood-enhancing drug abuse and a cathartic bloodlust shared by toddlers and old timers alike encourages every man, woman and child to get armed and dangerous.

I am talking, of course, about the recently concluded festival of Holi.

Celebrated to mark the onset of spring, the festival probably took on a martial flavour when it was co-opted by the crusade of good versus evil. Throw in an uninhibited excuse for our repressed population to behave badly, newfangled ideas about the virtues of hypercompetitiveness and years of regressive Capulet v. Montague-themed Holi imagery from the Yashraj Film Studio and you’ve got a brutal mock civil war on your hands.

Hello Auntie. Can your son come down to play Holi?

Our finest engineering minds are deployed the night prior, in industrializing the filling of water balloons and in feverish calculation of the trajectory required for surgical strikes on pedestrians from apartment blocks. As in the Chandrayan 1 Moon Mission debacle, little thought is given to the standard acceleration rate of 9.8 m/s, resulting in many a blinding and much damage to property.

On the ground, the theatre of operations is prepared with the kind of fidelity seen only in one of those medieval battle reenactment fairs. We’re talking dunking pools, mud pits and tables piled high with mounds of powdered colour ammunition ranging from the potency of depleted uranium to child-safe food grade. Stadium-rated sound rigs pump frenzied DJ sets to stimulate all the barbarism.

The girls oil their hair helmet sleek and select appropriate armour [typically lengths of dupatta] to avoid getting mauled by some uncle with a license to paw. In a delightful twist to this clichéd aggressor-victim construct, there are places in UP where the ceremony focuses on a public beating of the village menfolk by the women.

And then there is Bhang, the narcotic lubricant behind all this frisky behaviour, which is doled out to otherwise pious homes in unholy chunks.

Guns N Gulaal

But, for my money, the real sign that our Holi posturing has us staring over the edge into a violent abyss is in the cherished acquisition and use of the water pistol.

In the paintball-styled arena of this festival, the axiom is every man for himself, and your gear generally determines your survival rate.

This is why, in the run up to the festival, we see mothers who would traditionally bare their bosoms to shield their kids from violence begin to resemble Mama Grizzlies at a Walmart sale, beating each other senseless to get to the last double-barreled pichkari. Fathers have been known to steal the good shooters from their progeny in an attempt to channel their own inner Dirty Harry. The children meanwhile are happy to just get a chance to shoot their parents in the face with greater impunity than in a video game.

Now you may talk all you want about the inconclusiveness of the evidence equating increased video game violence with its real-world counterpart, and you may argue that it is people, rather than guns, that wet people,  but there is clearly some writing on the wall when a spring rite festival makes a complete descent into a right to spring your amiable, 70-year-old South Indian neighbour with a riot dispersing water jet…. with the expectation that she will give back in equal measure. The words ‘cute’, ‘little’ and ‘terrorist’ have not been bandied about in combination and so often since the Intifada.

Chinese Water Torture

This bellicose drift has found more appreciation amongst the card carrying members of the Communist Party than those in the NRA.

Although it is only just emerging as a meddlesome arms superpower, China has long been fueling conflict in India by supplying us with cheap plastic weapons for Holi. Forget the stealth fighter, the real watershed came when the Chinese reverse engineered the popular Super Soaker and began flooding our market with ever-more sophisticated water warfare artillery. This was when we made the leap from Bapu to Terminator.

Holy Oral Tradition Batman!

From Mars Attacks!-styled pump action blasters with ammunition reservoirs large enough to hold an entire daily ration of our suburban water supply, to novelty peashooters which spit out water onto unsuspecting passers-by from what can only be termed as an obscene array of spoutlets; and lately to the ubiquitous, LED-lit pichkaris, which mix water and electricity in a audacious attempt to win the award for Worst Toy of the Year, Chinese hawks provide us with an irresistible arsenal of choices to act on our animal spirits.

But are we ready to be a gun nation? Do we realize that great responsibility and reserve must accompany great power? And, without having spent our formative years on a firing range, aren’t we dangerously misinformed about what makes the ideal weapon for Holi combat?

Does size matter most? What about range, accuracy, longevity and other such concerns? And is there any way to bring back the sense of play amongst the martial madness?

I took these questions to the one person in my family who has about as much firearm knowledge as a Pashtun tribesman. I asked my 6-year-old son.

Like Manmohan Singh at a post-scam press conference, he pleaded the case of simplicity. The lesson for [and perhaps from] India is that the best-designed equalizer is really the most straightforward…

Holi Squirt: Is this the World’s Greatest Water Pistol?

This pocket rocket, picked up at an anonymous roadside stall in Dadar, is everything you need to survive Holi – and a whole lot more.

The fact that I ran into it not by means of seamless distribution but rather via a random act of fate [I fought with the first roadside vendor I visited] makes it even more precious and the process of its acquisition all the more triumphant. Of course I picked up all four available pieces. I haven’t found any others since.

Best of all, because it isn’t a ‘soaker’, you can continue to use it all summer long. We’ve been driving around taking pot shots at [what we believe are] grateful pedestrians and drivers, giving them good humoured relief from the sweltering heat. Spraying a deescalating balm onto their hot heads.

If we do manage to spread a few smiles and keep thoughts of vengeance off their minds, then I’d believe we’ve bought ourselves another year of peace… or at least until the big guns come out for diwali

Other places where I’ve been spreading the good word
[and sharing the libel risk]

CNNGO
Down with Rules
There goes the neighbourhood
Shera the CWG Mascot
Re: the Rs Symbol
Go Team!: Why it’s so hard to be loyal to the IPL
Dharma Redux: The Goa Hippie Reunion

Elle
The one word I learned to use

Verve
New Kid on the Blog

Hint: it pays to know the editor

First, we did a double take at his unfamiliar and therefore effective tactics. Then, we chuckled at his guerrilla spirit. Eventually, though, we grew tired of his disregard for our habitat and the sense of entitlement with which he continued to target whatever was left of our open and unmarked spaces. Now, we’re just plain pissed off at his attitude, revealed in the article below, where he seeks official recognition and an award from the ad industry for his ‘innovative ideas’.

Farooq Ansari cleverly credits the Spirit of Bombay for allowing him to get away with his mildly illegal behaviour – and he has a point. Just as the Italians allow their rogue PM to get away with ever more shocking indiscretions because he makes no bones of flaunting habits they all privately share, Bombayites recognize that Ansari is very much like them – that he has no compunction in looting from the commonweal to fill his own pockets, and credit his tapori gall for breaking a few eggs in serving himself a high profit omelette.

The problem is clearly one of scale. If Ansari’s enterprise were a scrappy startup, as indeed it once was, or if he were engaged in an impossible David v Goliath battle against a large corporation, we might have brooked his freeloading ways. We might even have cheered for him or offered him our walls. Everybody loves an underdog. But Dolphin Bean Bags is now a nationwide concern, which can deliver anywhere in an hour; it commands profitable margins and even has the wherewithal and resources to erase a graffiti scar before the municipal corporation has the grudging chance to prove any transgressions. At this point, Ansari is, as they say, “making a ch&#tiya of us all”

it's even better when you can advertise it for free

There is the famous case of Microsoft – which took great liberties with the cynical population of New York City by plastering hundreds of thousands of stickers of butterflies all over midtown Manhattan for the launch of its MSN 8 product  – and ended up getting egg on its already-rotten face as well as a small but symbolically significant fine. IBM was earlier handed a much larger fine for a similar stunt in Chicago where some of the artists involved ended up getting arrested and locked up. Trust Microsoft to not be able to tell the difference between a virus and a cute bug.

I think these acts provide a very simple precedent. We need to go after this douchebag and the profits he’s making at the expense of the public exchequer. We need to fine him for every ad that currently exists after he is given a small grace period to clean them all up – and we need to fine him for any additional ad that he puts up. If he tries to circumvent the system as he has by removing them before he can be booked, let’s work out a system whereby we use technology (see the already active flickr page which catalogues his misbehaviour) to tag and report his crimes. Best of all, we should simply bite him where it hurts by resolving not to give him any more business. The HT article above provides a useful list of alternative bean bag merchants.

In the meantime, Mr Beanbag plans to expand into Europe and Dubai. Wonder if he’s done his homework on the penalty for defacing public property in the Middle East.

Bean Bag (Noun) A man's testicles and scrotum, bunched into a protective pouch called underwear.

It’s bad enough that the local press has (perhaps with the assistance of a really cynical PR antichrist) gone to town highlighting Lisa Ray’s uphill battle with cancer – just when she has a rare film release in town. Her story also dominated headlines at the Toronto International Festival, where she’s debuting another film.

But then I saw this retreaded Garden Vareli advert today, from way back in the 90s, on Star Cricket during a Champions League telecast.

Is Garden still a going concern even? What business does it have running an ad on a live telecast of the India-Pak Champions League cricket match? Will the memory of a not-quite-silently suffering Lisa help sell yards of chintzy chiffon? Or is this simply a really ill-advised instance of Cancer Porn?

Follow Lisa’s candid and heartbreaking confessional here.

The online travel agency (OTA) industry has fast become a commodity business, with all the large portal players now relying on other, high-margin offerings such as hotels, cruises and package holidays to help make up for losses incurred in their core ticket-booking businesses.

However, this expansion will require a good deal of ingenuity. In order to edge out full-service travel agencies from a category that has long been defined by, well, full service (destination expertise, trip customization, travel formality facilitation, etc), the OTAs have to rely on a lean infrastructure which is predicated upon replacing a live customer interface with efficient self-service. Where the OTAs have favoured a hybrid model (staffing up expensive call centers, etc), their profitability and business plans have begun to fall apart.

So, CLEARTRIP and the like are struggling to keep customers hooked, shilling hard to convince them that hotel rooms, holiday packages and the like are just as easily bought online as tickets, and treading very carefully to ensure that they don’t set off a comparison and commodification rush on these high-end products as well.

In the end I believe human nature will lead us to demand human interaction, if even an anonymous one over the phone, settling on a part-virtualization of the travel business.

In the meantime, I feel CLEARTRIP should not try so very hard to make its virtual machine look more efficient, responsive and indeed cost effective. They’re tripping over themselves at this point (see pic)

Just to be CLEAR - these TRIPPERS want you to PAY for your own feedback

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We’re A-TWTR!

After spending years in secret beta testing – a painful process which involved:
1. Abu Gharib-styled torture methods to reign myself into SMS-sized thoughts
2. Machiavellian and yet unsuccessful negotiations with the owner of “@whattothink” in an attempt to coerce him into handing over that address to its rightful owner – yours truly. Don’t ever sign up for his tweets – he’s a hard man who wouldn’t buckle, even when I eventually wept like a little girl over a skype video chat with him, while playing my best emo music in the background and having my infant son dash in and out of the picture asking for money for food.
3. Working myself into a frenzy over the woeful lack of crucial and instant consumer decision support, which was putting our good citizens at the mercy of marketing tricksters – see entry on local movie murketing. This effort bridges the gap between what to think and what to do
WTT has finally arrived on Twitter!

Sign up for the mobile updates, lrn 2 rd anyng shrthnd,  see if this new technology will help improve my current blog rate of one new post every other month (at least you won’t be bombarded by annoying updates about every degree of latitude I turn)

We march boldly into the future

Is it the oddness of its premise? The plainness of its ego-centric and heretofore unknown lead actor? Or is it the chutzpah and bravado with which he has plastered his mug all over the place – opening himself up to sublime ridicule from the sneering masses of our city.

Nasser Khan is a classic Bollywood wannabe – he possesses the typically inadequate attributes melded together in a tragic combination which suggest a life of unfulfilled cinematic yearning; and he couples these fatal flaws and the lack of an x-factor with the heartbreaking enthusiasm which one regularly sees up and down the leaden streets of Lokhandwala.

Except he is different. He faces a handicap most newcomers could not hope to see around: He is blind.

Thanks to the epic journey he has taken to create and release his self-embracing vanity project, he has made the entire clan of primping, preening B-town hopefuls look like shy debutantes.

While we will stay away from casting judgment over the manner in which Nasser has exploited his handicap, we must say that we are mighty impressed at a few best practices emerging from his attempt to emerge from obscurity:

A FEW POINTERS IN THE ART OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION (see also Verma, Ram Gopal)

Rule No 1: Believe your own hype. Remove every shadow of doubt.

Rule No 2: Co-opt other people to push your story. Smitten good samaritan Sallu attends Shadow‘s mahurat, ‘serious’ actress and co-star Sonali Kulkarni makes the following non-ironic quote: “(Nasser is) the only man I have met with extraordinary vision”, NGOs talk up the “un-romanticized” version of his dramatic tale.

Rule No 3: Prepare yourself for failure with a pre-emptive strike on your detractors. See this HT story, which brims over with passive aggressive barbs and sets up a trap for anyone wishing our hero ill.

We’re not sure that he needs it, but we wish Nasser all the luck with his career.

He has certainly shown more foresight than co-star Milind Soman, who, despite his God-given-gifts, proves, with his presence in this project, that his upcoming biography is very aptly titled A FEW POINTERS IN THE ART OF BLOWING EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT AND DISAPPEARING FROM PUBLIC MEMORY ENTIRELY

PS:
Readers interested in the bittersweet game of life that is Bollywood would do much better watching Supermen of Malegaon, an absolutely precious documentary following the heroics of a bunch of small-town Indian filmmakers whose hilarious and hugely inventive movies are no doubt top-shelf material in the Be Kind Rewind library.

There’s a standout scene in Supermen where all the camera equipment (basically an 80s camcorder and tripod) falls into a river, along with the movie’s epopnymous superman, which provides more drama and pathos than Nasser Khan could hope to produce through his entire repertoire of circus stunts and self-aggrandizement.

UPDATE:
In traditional style, Shadow has been declared a hit on arrival – even if the declaration has been made by the filmmakers themselves… see attached ad.

Printer's submission - the headline on this poster should read: THE BIGGEST HIT, EVER! FEATURING A PORTLY, BLIND ACTOR IN THE ROLE OF A NON-BLIND, NON-PORTLY ASSASSIN, PERFORMING HIS OWN STUNTS, WHILE INVOLVED IN AN UNBELIEVABLE LOVE TRIANGLE WITH TWO HOT ACTRESSES WHO COULDN'T POSSIBLY SEE ANYTHING IN HIM - WAIT, DID YOU SAY HE WAS BLIND?

These so-called success ads, success parties, etc are released with such predictable frequency that you’ve got to expect they’ve become a blunt marketing instrument. The savage reviews this film has received should also help keep crowds away. Finally, there’s word of mouth, read this interesting article about how instant WOM is helping audiences beat the machinations of fraudulent movie marketers.

According to rough statistics (hastily concocted by yours truly) car thieves have stolen the badges off a full 30% of the vehicles currently plying our city’s streets.

For the uninitiated, badges are the logo holders which transmit all the prestige for which one pays a serious premium when one buys, say a Volkswagen Jetta instead of a Skoda Laura, although we know we’re really getting the same vehicle. The removal of these labels amounts to a supreme act of class and marketing anarchy and threatens to derail a major sub-event of the Great Indian Status Olympics.

While this new rash of thefts is no real surprise, in a city where poverty, disparity and rising temerity has led to such desperate acts as the pillaging of freshly minted highway signs and smelly old trash cans for their scrap value – and while there are reports from across the world of the wholesale theft of copper and other semi-precious metals from rooftops and even from public art installations in the harsh light of the global financial meltdown – the scale of the situation in Bombay has reached a particular tipping point.

So much so, that the police recently raided the Chor Bazaar lair of one Mansuri Farouque, reseller extraordinaire of ‘used’ automotive parts, issuing him a strict warning to desist from supporting the resale of stolen emblems.

I know this because I tried to hit him up for a replacement for my ancient Merc’s three pointed star, which was unceremoniously removed by some less-than-human creature on a vile and dastardly night late last year. I was fully expecting to buy back my own stolen monogram – but came back empty handed. Rather than feeling guilty about tacitly and perversely supporting the theft and resale market, I felt upset about the rickshaw driver who was now going to end up with my prized posession on his vehicle’s mangled, smoky behind. The option I will now be considering is Ebay, which has facilitated a real market for replacement (a Mercedes Benz hood ornament trades for ~$40, as opposed to the showroom price of ~$500).

Apart from closing out my grey market-grey ethic source, the local police have had little success in curbing this menace and point to the token arrests of a few school and college-going delinquents caught red-handed in the act of prising off badges and who represent only the frontline of this trend.

The Western India Automobile Association has advised car companies to use stronger adhesives that will make it virtually impossible to steal car emblems – without causing serious damage to the targeted vehicles that is.

In this bleak scenario, several car owners have begun to resort to the supreme but honorouble sacrifice of debadging their own vehicles.

The beleagured Japanese auto industry – which once gave us such brilliant philosophies as kaizen and muda – can now look forward to a new contribution to the world: hara kiri.

If anyone is missing this shiny, new Jaguar badge, please contact me - I think I might have a clue as to where it ended up...

The colour of Prince and Hendrix – and, by extension, funk; Wimbledon – and, by derivation, royalty;  Barney – and, via popular imagination, gay dinosaurs. Technically a combination of 128 Red and 128 Blue but loosely defined to be any shade occurring between those two. Variously used to describe an act of passion or the art (in which I excel) of creating pretentious or overly embellished prose; to connote both friendship and poison, or simply to condemn a rhyming couplet to an unmasterful end*.

Significantly, purple also seems to have become the colour of choice for public design as preferred by our city’s floundering fathers at the BMC.

which way to disco station?

This is clearly seen in the shade of paint on the new, high-tech King Long(?!) BEST buses plying our streets  (a dark shade of violet, with Ramanand Sagar-influenced lightning bolt stickers on the windows), the new local trains running on our tracks (royal purple, with an equally subtle silver swathe) and the new paver blocks being used to tart up our sidewalks (you say they’re red – I say they’re tyrian purple).

Of late, Bombay has singularly done more for the colour purple than even the mighty Oprah Winfrey did when she included the Alice Walker novel of the same name in her Book of the Month club (actually, she rated it as one of her all-time favourites, not a surprising endorsement given that she acted in both the play and the movie).

With apologies to the specially-deputed NID team responsible for recommending this ‘calming palette’ to the BMC – the lead colour of which we are informed is violet – purple is hardly the need of the hour. Sure, we need to step away from the violent assertiveness of red. Granted, we’d do well to avoid the obvious replacements – yellow, green and, of course, blue. But purple? Where’s the connection with our big, bad city? What’s the inspiration? Who’s the audience?

one small aubergine?

Rather than serve to calm me down, purple actually gives me the creeps. It’s unnatural – it rarely occurs in nature – which explains the high value placed on the dye and its assignation to royalty in prior times. And where it does, it telegraphs visions of sickness and death, bruises and clotting blood and rotting vegetables. Yes, the Great Indian Aubergine is striped a healthy purple – but its tumescence can hardly be termed pleasant. One of the most common global references of the colour purple is the pill Prilosec, a drug used to treat acid reflux.

A deeper dig into the scientific, cultural and historical bearings of purple throws up precious few answers to explain the BMC’s predilection for getting deep with purple.

Julia Kubler, one of Britain’s leading colour therapists states that “Purple colours are consistent with intuition and higher understanding, with spirituality and meditation. It (sic) combines the coolness of blue with a bit of red that makes it not just passive but active.” Try explaining that to a kid who has severe psychosis caused by over-exposure to a hyperactive purple dinosaur.

In the Star Trek universe, Klingons have purple blood. But I don’t believe there’s any thread between outlandish alien lifeforms and wild and weird street furniture (the BMC’s forte).

A purple ribbon is worn to raise awareness against several afflictions, including:
-Xenophobia and homophobia
-Animal abuse
-Religious intolerance
-Homelessness
While all of these are widely prevalent in Bombay, I doubt that the BMC has raised the purple flag to make us conscious of them.

How about this for an explanation: People with a purple aura are said to have a love of ritual and ceremony. This certainly seems up the BMC’s alley. In fact, the attached aerial infrared shot of the corporation’s HQ in Fort clearly betrays the impact of all those collective egos.

Perhaps that is exactly the metaphor they seek for the city – a royal aspirant, with a flashy facade which barely disguises a rotting core…

On an entirely serious note – I think it is time we stopped cowering in the face of half-baked, ludicrously designed public projects and entrusted our city’s image to someone with a clue.

Apart from the odd and underappreciated success story (the Clean Up Mumbai campaign, the largely imported new airports, Mayawati’s entirely tasteful triptych replacement of the Ashoka capital pillar)  Indian public design is a textbook case of utilitarian malfeasance and aesthetic terrorism. Take a look at the NID website and you can see that the rot runs THAT deep.

I believe that we need to empanel and empower a local authority, like Prince Charles did in London, which can begin to regulate our city’s vast and disparate landscape. This effort needs to address both old and new. For every hastily concocted aluminum-clad paean to modernity, there is either a building next door being repainted cassata orange to keep up flashy appearances or a heritage structure being trampled underfoot by the shadow of the monstrosity, and this will continue ad nauseum until the cityscape with which we are left resembles a mash up between a low-rent Blade Runner poster and a cross-sectional anatomy diagram of the small intestine – all pink, haphazard and full of flagellating soft tissue. Take a look at the action in Lower Parel – Bombay’s version of the Big Dig – to fill yourself with dread over the coming future.

not a chip off the old block

In the meantime, I’m just glad the BMC committee didn’t follow Meru’s lead and paint our city electric/metallic/nuclear mossy/whatever the damn shade is green

*Robert Burns rhymes purple with “curple” in his Epistle to Mrs. Scott. Burns is, as far as we can tell, the only writer to have used the word. A curple refers to 1) the small of the waist before the flare of the hips or 2) a derriere, rump or behind.

** Can anyone crack the meaning of the home (and only) page on www.Purple.com? It certainly is amusing