Take That, Creepy Dinner Guest

In November, came the Barack wave. And now the progressive, and hopefully practical (for how effective can progressivism be without practicality?), center-left is back in India and in the USA. And we can breathe again, I hope.

About 14-15 years ago, the son of one of my father's colleagues contacted me in Chicago - you know, the Indian network - and invited me to dinner at his uncle's house in suburban Oakbrook. His uncle and aunt were wealthy physicians, very nice and hospitable people, and I attended a dinner party at their wonderful, elegant house. Great food, great drinks, a bunch of local Indians and one visting creep from Delhi.

Said creep was in the United States, visiting family (all of them solid supporters of the Hindutva parties), and was working the dinner party, talking tough about Muslims and "culture" and the need to stand tall and proud with one's "Hindu-ness", etc. And this when the shame of December 1992 was still a fresh wound. Of course, he was scoping the joint for potential big donors to his party. And of course, I, being younger and more ardent than my middle-aged hosts, argued with him then and there, to show him that not every one at the party was so easy to brainwash (actually, I don't think anyone there was getting brainwashed, they were just being polite to the visitor from desh).

The next ten years were highly frustating ones for people like me, your average liberal, constitutional democrat (with a small 'l' and a small 'd'), as creeps sprang up like mushrooms in the manure that was the Indian polity. It was as if the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and then of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 had so shaken up politics in India that things fell apart and the center could not hold. Looking back, I think I know how 1960s-era Americans felt, when assassinations roiled their world and eliminated public figures like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The world suddenly seemed endlessly unstable and unpredictable. Only the brazen, the thick-skinned and the absolutely thuggish, could survive and thrive in the 1990s and early 2000s. The good ones kept their heads down and tried to keep going, one foot in front of the other.

It didn't help that during the 1990s America saw the rise of similar manure-y politics as in India (oh, Ken Starr, in how many ways do I despise thy sanctimonious ways?). My friends and I spent our time gnashing our teeth, shaking our heads, arguing with individual rightwing creeps at individual parties, and trying to make feeble jokes at the expense of our Hindutva or Christian fanatic or Muslim fundoo opponents. And we also got good at weathering new shocks, whether from Gujarat or from Baghdad.

But now, our days of mourning are over. Take that, creepy dinner guest and go down to your dark, manure-filled hole with all the other mushrooms.