To those of my liberal friends who genuinely believe that this regime will obligingly collapse tonight, right on cue, when the Epstein files are declassified or released in the United States because some high-ranking leaders, perhaps even the Führer himself, might appear in them, caught red-handed in an illegal and immoral sexual act with minors, I have, with great affection and minimal paperwork, an early seventeenth-century white marble mausoleum on the banks of a dying river in North India for sale, going cheap, just for you, or for people with your level of childlike innocence, because if demonetisation that erased livelihoods overnight did not do it, if mass migrant deaths on highways did not do it, if oxygen shortages and bodies floating in rivers during a pandemic did not do it, if children dying in a paediatric ward fire did not do it, if crony capitalism, monopolisation, and the discounted sale of national assets to a single party did not do it, if shoes thrown at a Dalit Chief Justice did not do it, if bulldozers flattening Muslim homes extrajudicially as public spectacle did not do it, if military embarrassment did not do it, if repeated rapes and murders of women including (and especially) by men in power did not do it, if bridges collapsing, roads dissolving into potholes, floods and landslides wiping away entire villages, gruesome railway accidents, horrifying air crashes, shocking aviation shutdowns, regular paper leaks, an unstoppably rising dollar, unprecedented unemployment, asphyxiating pollution, corruption at an unheard-of scale, the loss of thousands of square kilometres of land to China, and the casual conversion of the Army into campaign property and Army officers into rose-petal-showering fanboys and fangirls did not do it, in a country where governments once fell for onion prices, for the mere allegation of corruption, or for a court ruling that a sitting Prime Minister misused a single government official for election work, then a name, or several, or even a photograph, or several, in filings connected to a dead billionaire in a far-away American court is not going to suddenly restore a moral universe we ourselves abandoned long ago, and while you refresh your feeds waiting for regime change to drop like a Netflix twist as you lounge in your pyjamas on your La-Z-Boys with microwaved popcorn, I will be here, waiting, looking indulgently at you, and laughing in Nirbhaya.
