Sponging off political evolution
Humanity feeds off metaphors. Metaphors are the explanatory markers in the development of language. The prevailing political metaphor is the not-so-humble sponge. It soaks up the primeval muck of power politics and regurgitates the phonetic nuances of Indian rajneeti. Coincidentally, the oldest animal on earth is the sponge, a multi-cellular life-form that sucks in oxygen to survive. Like current political ideologies, sponges had no organs, muscles or nervous system. Their only talent was to filter food from water. Apply the sponge allusion to electoral Mahabharatas; water is voters, and the oxygen comes from the mud of rhetoric flung at opponents.
If the oldest profession in the world is prostitution, no relationship implied, the second oldest is being a sponger. Going by the molecular metaphor of political language, everyone is compressing the sponge of oratory ‘foephobia’. The master of metaphors, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is determined to squeeze the life out of the Opposition with raids and fiery speeches and turn it into a waterless sponge to be flung back to the ‘boring billion’—the first two billion years of life on Earth when nothing happened and only microbes ruled the pond.
Undoubtedly the shine of Modi’s magnetism comes from hitting up the desires, pride, identity crisis and ideological confusion about an Opposition that offers nothing but pathetic platitudes. The Gandhi organism has been sponging off its well-publicised involvement of the Freedom Movement and Indira Gandhi giving the Pakis a good thumping in Bangladesh. Today’s generation doesn’t give a damn about such achievements; ask a Gen-Z dude what a ‘Navratna’ is and they’ll probably tell you ‘Tanishq’, not one of the PSUs Nehru established.
The top jobs India’s youth aspire to are business managers, marketing managers, software architects, commercial pilots, chartered accountant, data scientists, AI experts and medical professionals. The pay is good, the perks are better and promotions are faster. Which is why consultants are sponging off public funds—they have better expertise. Welfare politics is enjoying the free pastries in the sponge lounge while boosting the corporate world as the parallel alternative: an evolutionary process the Congress began and BJP perfected. Offer religion as a political vocation and they get the cigar. The Opposition’s evolutionary theory is contradictory to evolution: compassion and Nyay does not survive the ruthlessness of the fittest.
Now that the sponge has come a long way and become Homo sapiens—by comparing the DNA sequences of currently live animals, geneticists can trace the evolution of organisms right back to the point when the first lineage split—it is important to flag other sponges too, such as RLD’s Jayant Chaudhary and AAP’s Sushil Rinku who are soaking up the sludge of opportunism. Life has existed on Earth for more than three billion years, with humanity accounting for less than 0.01 per cent of these millennia. Civilisation is a baby on this timescale.
A billion years later starting now, the Sun will expand to make the Earth too hot for life. Maybe the miraculous possibilities of AI will show us what eternity looks like. Use it as the survival sponge that absorbs the best in us and expels the filth—acerbic political campaigns, deep fakes and lost jobs. Mankind needs a new language to relate the bipartisan efforts of political leaderships to beat the Sun at its own game. An effort that goes beyond the miniscule speck of time in humanity’s chronology where we behave like gods. As the Sun god would say, “This ain’t cool.”