Preamble: I wrote this in 25 minutes on a dare (by me to me) that if we were to have thought police in India (If? When? Whatever), and I were to be arrested and put on trial, what would the opposing charges be like? What would the prosecution say? I was apprehensive about putting it up because it was just an intellectual exercise, a game, however interesting. But I showed it to 3 very wise friends of mine, and they all counselled me (after they stopped laughing) to go right ahead. After all, sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words can never hurt me. And, whenever I am indeed put on trial, perhaps it is possible that I may be assigned a stupid, inarticulate lawyer, which would be no fun; so, why not prepare their brief for them. At least I’ll go out in style!
In the tradition of Holi, which encourages one to abuse and curse anyone freely on this one day, I choose to turn it inwards. So, here goes:
My Lord, ladies & gentlemen of the jury, and my friends,
There really is none more nauseatingly hypocritical than the ultra-woke centrist liberals. Within them, the most despicable creature is the upper caste urban-educated English-speaking foreign-travelled privileged atheist heterosexual cis male who considers himself an authority on all matters ‘woke’ even though this woke-ness only came to him recently, and with much effort (very little of it his), but insists that now that he’s ‘seen the light’, he is entitled to lecture any and all who are within earshot about how they are not ‘woke-enough’ on a pyramid of which he is, presumably, at the apex.
Nothing, and no one, is perfect for him, not even his own erstwhile heroes. Especially his own erstwhile heroes. He revels in picking, and then picking apart, arguments that should be made with broad, general strokes, finding minor shades which he disagrees with, and then highlighting them loudly in public as a way to convey his moral high ground, applauded and feted by his mates who hold similar views (because they are made of similar constituents), collectively tut-tutting at a world that does not understand, and seeking in-group validation while specifically eschewing agreement, however broad or narrow, with anyone from the out-group, basking in the light and heat generated from all the hot air they excrete, and preening before other mini-mes, as if reflected in a mirror, congratulating each other on being good and shaking their heads at others who disagree, however slightly, virtue signalling being a part and parcel of their style of communication.
He sits comfortably in a job or business that needs him to compromise on every principle known to man, which he does willingly and often, with such intellectual justification that if it were entered into the Olympics of Mental Callisthenics, it would win the gold, silver, and bronze medals simultaneously, because he uses his sharp linguistic skills, ready wit, and wide reading to justify every transgression, every flaw, and every trade-off (that he has made in his everyday life) in a complicated language filled with heavy words, references to famous people & books, obscure popular culture references, and logical & semantic acrobatics.
And he complains about other people, the jobs they do, how morally corrupt and ethically compromised they are, the repercussions these compromises have on his life, and how they owe him for putting up with all of this. He shines a light on their vulnerabilities, contradictions, and accommodations they had to make to get the job done, and grumbles about how it debased the value of the entire job, and how that meant that they fell from the scales in his eyes. Of course, he refuses to do the job himself, and tells others from his privileged, moral, and oftentimes, financial high horse how this or that thing and/or person is imperfect, and how every solution they have thought of, and are implementing, is wrong, and why they not only ought to retract and apologise, reflect and introspect, but also that they must seek forgiveness specifically from him for not having measured up to the standards set for them by him.
He will pick on a word, or a sentence, or a generic stand on a generic item and hold the speaker/writer in contempt of the high moral standards he thinks the speaker/writer ought to hold themselves; he will critique every sentence, every post, every tweet, and parse every word to find fault and expose imperfections; he will ask for explanations and demand justification for every one of his interpretations of the speaker/writer’s utterances and declarations with the confidence of someone to whom such explanations are owed by divine law; he will arrogate to himself the authority to sit in judgment and pass verdicts on all that he surveys from his perch on his high horse. But ask him to pick up the weapon and fight or do the job he is so critiquing and he will refuse because he and his in-group find real struggle gauche.
He stands for nothing and no one. He has no beliefs that he will die for, and as he will himself pompously and self-righteously proclaim, none for which he shall kill. He claims he is neither a capitalist nor a communist, for these are purely labels (yes, he has a special revulsion reserved for any kind of labels, except the ones he has stuck on people and things).
He will tell you about Stalin’s gulags & purges and Hitler’s extermination camps while ignoring Churchill’s Bengal famine and Roosevelt’s internment camps and atomic bombs. He shall wax lyrical about why communism is closer to theology (while wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt) but get into a rage if you tell him that free markets aren’t known to have solved the problem of inequality yet as is advertised, but in fact made it worse. He will shit on the USA for being imperialists and applaud non-alignment, or even the Indian pro-Soviet stance by giving you examples of times when the USSR came to India’s aid, but ask him if he’d rather visit or study/work in the USA or Russia, and he’ll show you his 10-year visa to the land of the ‘free’. He prefers Tesla but hates Musk, Amazon but not Bezos, Apple but not Jobs. It is almost like he likes the fruits of capitalism but not capitalism itself. He will tell you about the Nordic countries and the NHS, about Cuban doctors and Russian vaccines, and then tell you how the laissez-faire approach and Dr.Manmohan Singh’s intervention in the early 1990s saved India from certain collapse. All of this without a hint of cognitive or intellectual, or even ideological dissonance.
He will tell you how he worships at no altar and holds no book holy, how he prays to no god and believes in no angels, and how everyone and everything is and ought to be open to questioning, mockery and ridicule even, though he will hasten to add, for reasons unknown, that the Constitution of India and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be his choices were he to find books/documents worthy of some sort of reverence, something he seems to have for nothing and no one except himself, though you wouldn’t catch him dead admitting it.
As for his stand on social justice, he appropriates to himself the right to speak on behalf of everyone while denying the same to anyone else, except, he claims, the oppressed who have the lived experience of the issues he claims to speak of. Of course, he is an exception, for he also claims in the same breath that just being privileged, which he readily admits he is, does not debar him from holding an opinion, which he does with great aplomb and passion, going forth to talk aggressively and confidently over the very people he claims to speak for, with a sense of sincerity exceeded only by his loquaciousness.
He is touchy about pronouns and the genderisation of nouns. He posts glibly about believing the woman and uses the hashtag for MeToo liberally even while mansplaining to his women ‘followers’ what ‘real’ feminism must be and how one does not need to be a woman to be a true feminist, indeed it might even be an impediment, if not an outright disqualification. His sense of history and geography, mostly gleaned from books written by Western authors pandering to his type and claiming to be ‘subaltern’ is warped and, at the same time, inimitable in its sense of righteous indignation about oppression and his allyship with the oppressed, who he never stops talking about (mostly in the context of his allyship and not much more) and encouraging to collectively rise up against the privileged, which he, with great humility, claims he belongs to, and hopes they spare him when the time comes, thereby managing in one fell swoop to send a message that he is on the right side of history without really having to do much in terms of correcting it, except telling those that are truly oppressed that he is their ally, whatever that means. Infrequently, he will tweet about mental health issues and how this or that is ‘normal’ and how he too went through some trauma which he is still suffering from, which puts him in the same space (kind of) as every other person who has suffered trauma while being able to claim a complete understanding and knowledge about all things related to mental health.
About caste, he will proudly display his last name and talk of how that should not be taken as a measure of his stand on untouchability and privilege. He will invoke Ambedkar and Periyar frequently, even while reading only the annotated works by Arundhati Roy on Ambedkar’s seminal speech and literally nothing about Periyar (ask him what Periyar’s name was and he will give you a blank stare). He will have almost no friends outside his caste but will talk of how once he had a Dalit girlfriend and why his understanding of caste is, therefore, infallible because, and he will claim this in all seriousness with a poker face, he now has a ‘lived experience’, even if, as he shall defend this in case you protest, it was a little vicarious in its connection with his life. But push him a little and he shall fall back on Gandhi, and if you are lucky enough to be entertained, Bhagat Singh. In fact, his one and only hero is Nehru, whom he has read superficially (but of whom he has read much), and understood even less. He is as uncomfortable with Bose and Patel as he is with Savarkar and Jinnah. He understands little about geopolitics but ask him to comment on the latest happenings in the Balkan, and he will (after Googling furiously for about 20 minutes), come up with some opinion not fully his, but using enough words to make it sound intelligent without saying anything at all.
In short, he is the epitome of hypocrisy and cowardly behaviour, in his life and his utterances online and offline. He purportedly stands opposed to the right (fashionable nowadays) and the left (except when it suits him) but has absolutely no clue where he actually stands, having no convictions of his own except the wishy-washy centrism he carries as a shield, hidden in his back pocket, to be used as an excuse to explain why he isn’t really left-wing (if and when he is accused of it) or even right-wing (if and when he is accused of that). He is, indeed, a धोबी का कुत्ता घर का न घाट का. (by the way, he is such a nitpicker that he will tell you how you have been mispronouncing one word from this proverb. Ask him to fuck off).
Such a despicable specimen of the species this person is that the only solution is to either steer well clear of him, or to take off your footwear and use it liberally on his head, with the hope that this coward, who will refuse to engage in anything but semantic shadow-boxing, will be scared shitless with an actual physical assault, or the threat of one, enough for him to reconsider some of his life’s questionable choices.
My Lord, I demand the strictest punishment for this man standing in the docks. I would strongly suggest that he be given an AAP (or worse still, a Congress) ticket and made to fight elections based solely on principles and with no money whatsoever. That should teach him a lesson he shall not forget in a hurry.
The prosecution rests.
P.S: Thank you for reading. I will let my readers know that the irony is not lost on me. Indeed that was the whole idea when I wrote this. I would like to encourage (challenge?) a self-labelled right-wing and a left-wing spokesperson (for the want of a better word) to write something similar. The problem is that when we talk, we always compare the best of us with the worst of the other side, and make it look favourable to us by designing our argument to reflect it this way. But what if we could write out an argument that is actually the worst of our side and see how it looks? This was an exercise in that.
Warning: Please note that this is written like how a right or left-winger will see a centrist and may or may not reflect the whole exact and perfect truth. This is satire, brutal though it may be, and I’ll confess, quite honest in places. Treat it as such. Please don’t be the idiot I have to block or hide comments from.
