BENGALURU: Dear Santa,
Hope you’re doing fine. You must be busy at this time of the year, distributing gifts to people around the world. You usually visit those who have conducted themselves well over the year, and I was wondering if you will visit us this year. I gave this a lot of thought, and I think we do deserve a visit from you.
As I look back at the year, I notice that we as a nation have done quite well for ourselves. This year flew by before we noticed, but we managed to stamp our presence on it.
There’s this thing called Twitter. It’s like a public mailbox where you can send short messages to anybody on the planet. On Twitter, you’ll find that Indians are the best in everything. Anybody who dares speak against us will be trolled till they apologise. 2017 was the year when we got to experience the real impact of demonetisation. It was a scheme where the government decided that all the money that belonged to a billion people was non-money, supposedly to target 0.01 percent of the population. You might think it absurd, Santa. We had no money, had to stand in lines, and convince ourselves that it was a great move. It was essential to our economy, even though we say so ourselves!
In sports, India has won medals in earlier unheard-of games like badminton and boxing. We are on our way to becoming a cricketing powerhouse, and if you happen to visit Sri Lanka later, please apologise to the children there for what Virat Kohli and Co. did to them over the last few months.
If you’re visiting Bengaluru, you’ll find in every lane a ton of upcoming companies called ‘start- ups’. It’s difficult to explain in this short letter what that means, but let it suffice to say that just like you, youngsters on motorized carts are rushing to deliver food and goodies to the people of the city. If you get stopped by someone and enquired about ‘second round of funding’, just tell them you already have an angel investor!
However, there are a few things to keep in mind when you visit. Kindly do not come down through the chimney. If you ride through the roads of Delhi, you’ll find the atmosphere isn’t too different. Also, make sure your reindeers aren’t mistaken for blackbucks; no good can come of that. If you visit Mumbai, avoid using the roads or the footpaths.
When it comes to gifts, we have a few requests. Please increase our GDP by at least 4%. We have been receiving news of it slipping all through the year, and it doesn’t reflect well on the greatest nation in the world.Also, could you please get us tomatoes, onions and petrol? Inflation is at a 15-month high, and we could do with some utilities. Lastly, if you stop by our friendly neighbourhood country, could you please pick up some beef biryani for us? There’s been a shortage of sorts.
Yourstruly,
A well-behaved nation.