In an ideal world, I would have said that I have never seen someone so arrogant, despite having so much power over the lives of so many people (and hence, the responsibility to behave correctly in a public forum), and with such scant thought to the rather little they have to be arrogant about. Remember Churchill’s ‘He’s a modest man with much to be modest about’ quip about Atlee? I wish I could paraphrase it for Ms Sitharaman. Except ‘modest’ would be the last word anyone would find fit to use when generally describing absolutely anything about her bearing, behaviour, conduct, speech, or action.As I was saying, one would be forgiven for claiming that they’ve never been acquainted with such a unique specimen of humanity, with the most basic graces lacking, while unceasingly lowering the standard of debate, regardless of what the subject of the said debate is, behaving as if the entire point of the said debate is to drag the discussion, the other participants, as well as oneself, down into the gutters and then claim you were pushed, and therefore are a winner by default.
Unfortunately, given my station in the caste and socio-economic pyramid, combined with a childhood and youth spent outside the society I was purportedly born into, but looking in, and having expended (invested?) considerable time and effort (involving much reading, debating – mostly losing, and learning -, and introspection) in attempting to break the conditioning, I can assure you that such uncouth, uncivilised, uncultured people who are so steeped in their self-confessed cultural (ha!), linguistic (ha! ha!), sartorial (ha! ha! ha!), nutritional (now, I am ROTFLing), and academic (I’ll give them this, though not for reasons they’d like) superiority (mostly stemming from their underlying inferiority complex and the intimate need to be validated and feted for their ‘merit’ and ‘intellect’), constantly angry at perceived slights (indeed seeking them out, even when none exist), thin-skinned (by design, as also by birth, and from all the baggage loaded on their shoulders by the lottery of that birth), schoolmaster-style sarcasm-spouting, perfecting the ‘quivering, flared nostrils and the sucked-in, thin, sneering lips with an upturned chin looking down over the bridge of the nose’ look as they point and threateningly wag fingers at someone supposedly below them and use dismissively passive aggressive tones (including exaggerated voice modulation to mock their target: without even hearing her, I can tell you that the way she pronounced ‘jijaji’ was dripping with the lowest form of humour: sarcasm) of communication, are not rare, but indeed the norm in the environments where people like me grew up: Sadashiv Peth, Pune, which is perhaps the mother of all ‘intellectual’ thought behind today’s (and yesterday’s) militant Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva (yes, even the Nagpur kind) movement, and even though our honourable FM has never been here, I am sure that there are similar pockets down south, on the other side of the Vindhyas, where this kind of talk, action, and behaviour is par for the course, and is in fact encouraged and possibly applauded by the spectators and bystanders, wherein the point being debated is less important than the mockery of the opponents in the most juvenile manner possible, with the line being drawn at ‘anything above sticking out your tongue and thumbing your nose’ is kosher, and hence enjoyable, for how else can someone ‘win’ the battle of words without actively jeering and mocking the opponent and making the audience laugh, never mind the subject under discussion, or the position one occupies.
Whew! Actually, I have said what I wanted to in that last sentence.
tl;dr: Sitharaman is not an abhorrent but rare and infrequently occurring exception of the human species in her socio-economic circles. She’s just the one with the microphone at the moment.
