SINCE street humour is the finest commentary on politics, one waits for the jokes of this campaign to emerge. Nothing good yet. But there was something brilliant from the recently concluded Russian election. This story that went viral after President Vladimir Putin gave the American journalist Tucker Carlson an interview.
Carlson reaches Moscow, gets into a cab, and instructs the driver to take him to the Red Square. On the way, the chatty cabbie wants to know what the American is doing in Moscow. Carlson replies that he wants to go to the Kremlin because he wants to ask Putin some questions. The taxi driver is astounded: “You have come from America to Russia to ask Putin questions?!!! Here, people go to America when they want to ask Putin questions!”
The third faith
In the old Soviet Union, vodka and literature were described as the two religions of the atheist state. Humour was the third faith, in the avatar of heresy. Humour runs like a sardonic beam through Russian society. The Russian mind has more sunlight than the Russian winter. Russians had the chutzpah to laugh at both themselves and the other even when the idealism preached by Lenin had been wrecked on the rocks of a brittle delivery.
The much-repeated story about the American and Russian space programmes cuts both ways. NASA spent yet another fortune trying to develop a ballpoint pen which could work in space, and failed. Russians gave their cosmonauts a pencil.
We often fail to recognise that Russia lives as much in the East as the West. It is obvious that the Russian word for emperor, Tsar, is a derivative of Caesar. Less known is the word for an heir, naslednik. The Persian word for lineage is nasl; a paternal line is nasl-e-pidari. Pidar and the Latin ‘pater’ give us father.
Ambition derailed
The esteemed British press does not necessarily wait for the results of a general election to describe a political funeral. This week a columnist of the venerable The Times, Tom Peck, checked the pulse of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “Has Rishi Sunak been photoshopped? Can we be sure he’s even real? Yes, we probably can, but something strange is going on….” The once chirpy Prime Minister had aged five years in a matter of weeks, even as he clutched vague straws in a desperate bid for revival.
It was a devastating portrait of ambition derailed: “But behind the usual quiet, calm, reasonable façade, the incessant rage hormones are targeting the usual telltale spots. When he tells, for the roughly ten thousandth time, the same folksy stories about helping out in his mum’s pharmacy as a little boy, the fake smile comes with a flash of teeth that lasts for a moment too long. The prime minister is an angry man stuck in angry doom loop….”
Jallianwala anniversary
As the anniversary of the horrific and unforgettable massacre of innocents at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 comes around, it may be pertinent to recall that the British colonial press in India was full-throated in its support for the chief barbarian, Brigadier General Dyer.
When Dyer was sacked, a London newspaper, Morning Post, launched a fund to finance his retirement. Among the Indian papers which helped collect donations were The Statesman, the Civil and Military Gazette, the Englishman, and the Madras Mail. They sent £9,860 for Dyer, out of the total of £26,317, 1 shilling, and 10 pence.
