Everything you need to know about everything in India today, where we came from, what we had, where we are, what we lost, why we are where we are and have lost what we have, and who is responsible for this state we are in, literally the entire history of this ancient civilisation starting from wherever you think we started and ending up where we find ourselves today and indeed where we are headed, the entire explanation of every question you have about us, about today’s India, yesterday’s India, and the possible future of this country, can be encapsulated within the two letters:
One written to the Prime Minister of India by a world-renowned economist, a two-term Prime Minister himself, a teacher to leaders, and an internationally respected statesman, Dr.Manmohan Singh,
and the arrogant response (with, no doubt, the blessings of the Prime Minister) to it by Dr.Harshvardhan, an ENT specialist and India’s Minister of Science and Technology, Minister of Health and Family Welfare and Minister of Earth Sciences (who is famous for claiming, at the 105th Indian Science Congress in March 2018, after the death of Stephen Hawking, that Hawking had said that the Vedas postulated a theory superior to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, despite the fact that there is no record of Hawking having made the statement) in the middle of a undoubtedly self-created pandemic of epic proportions (during which this medical doctor by profession endorsed and facilitated a quack snakeoil cure called Coronil from Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali) where people are dying so fast that there isn’t enough space or energy available to bury/cremate the bodies, while his colleague, the Chartered Accountant and incumbent Minister for Railways asks, via a Tweet no less, whether doctors in non-BJP-ruled states are prescribing too much oxygen to their patients, because therein might lie the reason for the growing demand in oxygen, to repeat, in the middle of a fucking pandemic where we now have the world’s fastest growing infections, rivalled only by our galactic stupidity and the complete (and insanely hermetically sealed) compartmentalisation of our knowledge of what causes the infection. viz., unmasked crowds of tens of thousands amassed at a political rally, and our actual actions of appealing (by the sitting Prime Minister and Home Minister) to the very people to come out in droves and amass themselves in tens of thousands for an election rally.
If that is all you read to understand everything there is to understand India and Indians in 2021 and through our entire history leading up to this date, this hour, this moment, this instant, and projected as far in the future you want to, then you’d have read enough.
