UP, UP, and away Rahul Gandhi goes

A little over a year ago, I had written a column titled ‘O Rahul, where art thou?’ 

That week, the prime minister had cut a sorry figure in a live question and answer session with television editors. The media wanted hope in the times of corruption and all the PM was offering were bureaucratic promises albeit of the sincere and the I-have-the-nation’s-best-interest kind. Why did the government not play the climax of Dil To Pagal Hai for the editors, I wondered, where Madhuri Dixit brings to life what is now firmly placed in the Bollywood buff’s mind as the ‘Rahul monologue’? The piece begins with Rahul, ends with Rahul, and is a public relations WMD for anyone — person or organisation — who wants to unleash an unsuspecting but hopeful Rahul on an unsuspecting but hopeful nation. I ended the piece by saying that Rahul Gandhi has become so boring now that even my mother’s neighbourhood saheli looks the other way when I use him to dodge marriage-related questions. “Phir to ho gayi shaadi,” she said when I told her I would get married only after Rahul Gandhi gets married.

Rahul Gandhi in my opinion was symptomatic of a malaise an entire generation, my generation, is afflicted with: protracted adolescence, best identified with its social stereotype of the 35-year-old emotionally confused but professionally highly successful single urban Indian male. Like a student forever preparing for the civil services entrance examination but refusing to sit for the actual test, Rahul Gandhi’s refusal to do something active in Indian politics was 10 times more annoying to me than hearing the PM call water vater (va as in vast) in media briefings, which is why I think I wrote the angry piece.

I am writing about Rahul Gandhi again because my opinion about him has changed. Politics and journalism, especially opinion writing, share the deficiencies of love in the sense that they tend lose their charm once caprice loses the element of surprise, and enlightenment is no longer embarrassing.

Like love and opinion writing, politics too has its tough times.
As a man, some of the toughest moments I have lived have had something to do with a woman I am dating and a man who’s either had too much to drink or is conducting himself like an animal out of sheer instinct. Men who have had similar experiences would agree that the moment lasts as long as any moment would but its memory stays on till the very end of the relationship; a fight on the road with a woman by one’s side is like a dirty river that stains any man who steps into it; sometimes the peaceful ones end up with bloodier, bitter stains. If a man fights and wins, he is a bully; if a man fights and loses, he is a stupid man who picks fights he can’t win; if a man doesn’t pick a fight and chooses to run away, he is an escapist who cannot help but escape from one situation to the other; if a man doesn’t pick a fight, and stays put, and gets beaten up a bit, he is a wimp (because even the most peaceful of people shake a leg or two in the name of self defence) who is dumb enough to excite drunk Delhi boys when there is no one around to defend his girlfriend.

A group of four or five men stare and pass a comment as I come out of an all-night convenience store with my girlfriend at around 3 am. I don’t know what to do; I have about three-fourth of a second to choose: valour or vanity, fight or flight, Gandhi or van Damme?

Either way, fight or no fight, we, the woman and I, end up arguing to the point of fighting as soon as there is enough privacy to allow emotional kickboxing. If you are violent, she wants to check your pockets for your diplomatic skills and if you are not, she wants to dig deeper for your manhood. Calling the police is never an option, especially in Delhi (because you will first have to prove that your girlfriend is not a prostitute, which in most cases is a sensitive issue and leads to further choices and dead ends and fights and a never-ending search for a manliness that is there and not there at the same time) yet most girls start shouting, ‘Police! Police!’ as soon as the men pick up a fight. However hard a man may think and howsoever wisely he may choose, he is not leaving the fight without the key traits that will define him for the rest of the relationship. We may like it or not, but when it comes to men and women, character is defined by the choices they make and the unfortunate truth we must all live with is that either which way, fight or no fight, there is no way we are going to end up not suffering.

As far as I can tell, a wise man makes the flight-or-fight decision depending not on whether he can win the fight but by carefully taking stock of his factual inventories and logical faculties, by relying entirely on his ability to argue. A wise man looks into the future to the moment when the current moment of crisis would be past and the man and the woman would be free to speculate, judge, declaim, defend, deny and decimate the man’s theory on why he did what he did. So if a man can lose a fight and win the argument later, he is in for lesser suffering than the man who wins the fight but loses the argument. The same applies for peaceful situations, which in my opinion are the worst because even the most so-called peaceful and non-violent sort of women, the ones who are most likely to decry violence, will not forget that their man did not fight for them.

By winning the argument, a wise man significantly lessens his misery; he is a fighter and a loser but someone who can stand up for what he believes in. Girls like such men, I am told, though I can never be sure.

I think Rahul Gandhi is a wise man. He has lost the fight but won the argument. He and Indian democracy are not breaking up any time soon.

Mayank Tewari is a writer