My Facebook friends list is an eclectic one. On any given day, I can pretty much expect to see posts of a very varied type. There are the cat-lovers and the foodies, the activists and the trivia hounds, the fashionistas, and the forward-everything-ers. There are, of course, several people who are deeply interested in politics. Before I move on, I must point out that of all these people, a mere handful is Americans or NRIs resident in the US.
Till several weeks back, I’d log in to Facebook, and it was all predictable. Then, someone mentioned Kamala Harris, and within hours, nearly everybody jumped onto the bandwagon. People who had shown no interest in politics—or none in politics outside India, at any rate—could suddenly have quoted the Democrats’ manifesto at you and knew exactly which place in Tamil Nadu Harris’s mother had migrated to the US from (most of them knew somebody who knew Harris’s mother’s family’s neighbor’s pet dog’s former owner or some such person).
Then the elections began, and some of these people went even more berserk. One person I know began posting detailed analyses of every single Trump utterance, no matter if it pertained to politics, America, the elections, or not. Another went into overdrive and started spewing Trump-Biden memes at the rate of 10-an-hour. An old and very dear friend became so jittery about Pennsylvania and Nevada and how slowly the votes were being counted that she had to go offline to recuperate.
When she came back online, she made up for a lost time by staying up all night and posting updates every hour. I logged in in the morning to find my newsfeed filled with her tense, edge-of-the-seat worries about who was trailing where and whether Trump would finally be trumped or not. I was baffled. Why this odd behavior, I wondered. So I finally phoned to ask. “What?” said my friend, her voice filled with disbelief. “Don’t you get it? When was the last time you went out on your balcony and banged a thali?” I did not see how that tied into the US elections, and I said so.
“Aren’t we in lockdown?” she retorted. “Aren’t you getting bored? No cinemas to go to, no nothing to go to! Our best entertainers have either gone quiet or are in jail! Where do you get your entertainment from, then?!” She left it at that, and with a quickly muttered “Gotta go, more results coming in,” she hung up. Five minutes later, she was back on Facebook, reminding her online social circle that there were so many mail ballots still expected, and how that could make all the difference. I logged out.
Madhulika Liddle
Novelist and short-story writer Twitter: @authormadhulika