An open letter to insufferable Indians
Dear Indians,
Forget the New Year resolutions you made with impractical, turbo-enthusiasm to excavate the best version of yourselves from beneath the layers of blubber and bullshit. Of course, most of you had impressive goals.
These included flying all the way to the Trou aux Cerfs to livestream your guided tour of volcano craters and lava fields, discovering your life’s passion, running into the love of your life at Muniyandi Mess, eating only organically sourced vegan food while training for the triathlon and giving up gadgets entirely because it rots what’s left of your rapidly deteriorating brain.
The noble aspirations are truly impressive but since you have done little more than write these down and stick it on the fridge proceeding to ignore it thereafter to focus on Instagram reels while chowing down on a bucket of KFC and staying put on your recliner, the smart money says that your high-flown aims shan’t be achieved in the immediate or even distant future.
Never fear, though. Republic Day is just around the corner and it is entirely possible to reaffirm your commitment to making India Incredible Again, or at the very least, less irredeemable. Rather than sell your admittedly annoying neighbour’s kidney on the black market to fund your trip to the Côte d’Azur, perhaps you could stay home for a change and take up meditation or lazing around. That way you don’t have to humiliate humara Motherland by being the typical unruly Indian tourist who puked in the pool after demolishing the buffet and tried to escape with purloined products from the resort.
Rather than trying to live it up by walking on our far from pristine shorelines or mountain trails with your boozehound buddies who carelessly discard their liquor bottles and risk maiming others, you could concentrate on sparing your liver and pavement dwellers among others by not drinking yourself into a stupor and getting behind the wheel of the imported Bugatti Centodieci your ‘Benami Daddy’ bought you.
A lot of you are convinced that all it takes to clear your crippling karmic debt thanks to a lifetime of depravity is frequent trips to places of worship with hordes of the similarly misguided risking the loss of lives due to stampede friendly conditions.
Perhaps you could eschew this unholy behaviour in favour of actually being nice, well-behaved and the sort of citizen a nation can take pride in by cleaning up after yourself instead of leaving a mountain-high trail of garbage wherever you go and whatever you do. And if you must visit manmade dwelling places of the divine or even any public place, refrain from shoving, spitting, or shouting. And do refrain from pissing or pooping anywhere outside a toilet.
Remember, the odds of finding love are enhanced if you are lovable. And you can’t be that if you make it a habit to stalk, molest or harass women. If you are a woman, do not file false cases and betray the feminist cause. Strive to do better fellow Indians. Mother India will thank and bless you!
Yours in exasperation,
A disgruntled Indian.
Anuja Chandramouli
Author and new age classicist
anujamouli@gmail.com