Mitali Saran - Save the PM, frisk the peacocks

By Dilip -

Remember when there was a plot to assassinate the prime minister but somehow only one pro-government private news channel had the mega-breaking-exclusive-explosive details? What do you mean, which time? Every time those fine PR executives think it’s time to distract from the government’s giant cockups. Anyway, I wish for the PM to remain safe, so I suggest they start frisking the peacocks. I hope you have all seen that painful prime ministerial video featuring peacocks, only some of which were birds, and one of which changed its plumage six times in the course of one minute and forty-seven seconds. 

Peacocks seem to be the only living things around the PM, besides the television crew that choreographs his every unguarded moment, whether it is meditating in a cave, doing yoga, or feeding other peacocks. But threat perception is a serious business, and it’s best not to get complacent. If his Twitter account could be so easily hacked, it’s probably just a matter of time before an anti-national peafowl could endanger his life.

Rhea Chakraborty on 'media trial' after Bollywood star's death. By Geeta Pandey

But I don’t know how the PM would feel about subjecting his feathery friends to a security check, given his enormous feeling for animals. We were recently offered a story by no less than the senior deputy editor of a news magazine, on how the death of two ducks in Gujarat greatly moved Modi. We already knew that the Prime Sevak feels sad when a car runs over a puppy, but this story was also about his love for cattle and sheep and goats. The author of the story tweeted it with the slightly desperate comment, “Shows his empathy”. I can’t imagine why the PM’s media cheerleaders would feel the need to project him as a feeling human. T

hat he already is should be clear from the fact that in his most recent Mann ki Baat monologue to the nation - even though China is pushing into India, even though the GDP has contracted by 24%, even though Covid-19 has gripped the world by the throat and throttled it, even though there’s a jobs crisis, even though so many people have been unjustly imprisoned - the PM’s message to the nation, his innermost thought and desire, was that people looking to get a pet dog really should consider Indian breeds. Maybe this is his version of reviving what business folks are pleased to call the ‘animal spirits’ of the market?

But this assassination plot is, after all, just a strategic obsession of the fevered news channel team. Nobody else buys it. The real news, apparently, broadcast 24/7 by every news media in the country, is l’affaire Sushant Singh Rajput. I haven’t been following this national crisis, but that’s probably because my priorities are so messed up. I’m really negative, and a Chrislamo-commie element bent on destroying India by insistently pointing out that India is being destroyed by the approval and cooperation of far too many Indians who bow to Modi’s disastrous government.

So not that anyone cares, but it is my duty to say that while everyone’s eyeballs are falling out watching Rhea Chakraborty, the coronavirus health emergency has been reduced to yet another digital stack, the Environmental Impact Assessment now ensures that you can decimate forests and rivers as long as you pay some kind of penalty, electoral bonds and stolen elections are still a thing, and nobody has a job. But don’t let me interrupt your hawk-like scrutiny of every tiny fold in the death of a Bollywood actor.

https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/opinion/save-the-pm-frisk-the-peacocks-883167.html


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