Things we wish had ended in 2012

Here's a list of things about our leaders, our entertainment and our media, that we hope won't persist into 2013.

Corruption
Coalgate scam, Tatra scam, Antrix-Devas scam, 2G scam, CWG scam, Adarsh scam, Bellary mining scam, Ketan Parekh scam, Telgi stamp paper scam, Satyam scam, Harshad Mehta securities scam, Bofors scam, fodder scam, hawala scam, Cobragate scam.... the list of scams in India is endless, and those named above just happen to be some of the more prominent ones.

While it’s nice and satisfying to pillory politicians for these scams all the time, we usually forget that many of us are complicit in the parallel economy of corruption that exists in India. Corruption is not only about lakhs and crores but also the few hundreds, each one of us, at some point, has slipped under the table to a government servant.

But because we are hopeful, here’s one more wish for the 2013 wishlist: that scams and corruption end next year. But because we also happen to be clear-eyed realists, we can also tell you now that this wish will feature on our 2014 wishlist too.

Bigg Boss/Reality TV
It’s not like reality TV hasn’t been around for a while. It started with Sa Re Ga Ma Pa on Zee TV followed by Indian Idol that stood out among the saas-bahu drivel on channels at the time.

Even as regressive saas-bahu shows made way for even more regressive child-protagonist-driven soaps, reality TV shows — many of them modelled on their American counterparts — caught steam. So we now have an Indian Fear Factor, an Indian Dancing With The Stars (Jhalak Dikhla Ja), and worst of all, an Indian Bigg Brother (Bigg Boss).

Having given illustrious achievers like Rakhi Sawant, Sherlyn Chopra, Ravi Kishan, Raja Chaudhary and Rahul Mahajan a chance to assault your senses at prime time, Bigg Boss hit an all-time low when Dolly Bindra’s violent antics became the topic of national debate. At the beginning of the new year then, we hope to hear one final announcement on the show: “Bigg Boss chahte hain, ki Bigg Boss khatam ho jaye.”

Government hubris
Attack is the best form of defence, they say. And the UPA-II has perfected this art. Regardless of how big the scandal, UPA ministers have attacked anyone who criticises them.

Take the recent protests in Delhi over the rape and death of a 23-year-old woman. Defending his decision to not speak with protesters, home minister Sushilkumar Shinde equates them with Maoists.

Earlier, after the new round of 2G auctions fetched only Rs17,343 crore, telecom minister Kapil Sibal attacked the CAG for announcing that the 2G scam had cost the government Rs1.76 lakh crore. Regardless of the loss, Sibal seemed to miss the more important point — that UPA ministers abused their power by bypassing due process. The government in general seems to misjudge the level of anger against it. It expects people to simply take their word for granted and seeks to undermine even spontaneous public movements. For once, instead of counter-accusations, we wish the members of this government could just swallow their pride and work with people, not against them.

Masterchef India
MasterChef Australia is such a well-produced show that it’s difficult to meet its standards. But it takes something to produce a show that’s as colossally bad as MasterChef India.

The show suffers from the many problems that cooking shows face in general. To begin with, it looks like the chefs are talking to a bunch of kindergarten kids. It’s worse when the contestants behave like them.

In one master class, the chefs open with a question like, “Tell us, which is the most important day in a person’s life?” There are no prizes for guessing what they go on to teach contestants. The cake prepared by expert chefs themselves is positively unappealing. The “birthday party” that follows has lame written all over it.

The contestants are no better. In one episode they are undergoing a blind tasting test — the contestants are then supposed to name all the ingredients that have gone into the dish. Many contestants failed to recognise a classic Thai curry by taste. It’s worse when one of the contestants says, “If I had realised this was a Thai curry, I would have named some ingredients automatically.”

Police highhandedness
Juvenal, a Roman satirist, saw our problems in khaki coming 2,000 years ago when he wrote as a part of his satirical poems: ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ This Latin phrase translates to ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’

The police was in fine form last year. The reaction to the protests over a gang rape in Delhi is only the latest bout of ‘protection’ meted out by the police. Whether they were imposing an undeclared curfew in Srinagar, or detaining over 300 party-goers in Pune; whether they were illegally detaining senior citizens for 36 hours, or raiding businesses on trumped-up charges, the police seem to be running out of real crimes to crack down on.

Maybe that’s because we have turned into a crime-free society overnight? Maybe all actual crimes — you know, murders and rapes and the like — have been completely eradicated, and we didn’t get the memo. If so, what’s a poor policeman to do to earn his daily wage, and dull the existential crisis brought on by peace and harmony? He will have to conduct a raid here, arrest an innocent there, to fill the empty, meaningless hours. That needs to end. We hope that in 2013, we can occupy our poor policemen with more meaningful activity.

Indian chick-lit
Let’s get one thing straight. It’s not like we’re against chick-lit in principle. We’ve read our share of paperback romances and we cheered (ok, sighed wistfully) when Bridget Jones raced across London wearing little more than a sweater and finally locked lips with Mr Darcy. So it isn’t militant feminism that makes us wish Indian chick-lit would disappear. Rather, it’s a matter of taste and a self-defensive need to preserve our sanity.

It is believed cocaine kills brain cells with every usage. We suspect Indian chick-lit, or upchuck-lit as we call it, does the same. Not only is the writing full of trite dialogue and cliches that give us heartburn and brainfreeze simultaneously, the heroes that the women swoon over are so entirely uncharismatic that you have to wonder why anyone wants a piece of such a man. And the deepest cut of all: journalism is a favourite profession of Indian
chick-lit heroines. Just for the record: the tribe of women journalists is way, way cooler than Indian authors imagine them.

On the bright side for chick-lit internationally — Bridget Jones is returning. And this time, our favourite heroine is on Twitter.

Misogynistic netas
If instances of molestation and rape against women weren’t bad enough, there’s been a rash of misogynistic comments uttered by politicians last year. So if Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi called Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar a Rs50-crore girlfriend’, coal minister Shri Prakash Jaiswal referred to how wives lose their charm with age, Congress MP Sanjay Nirupam called TV actress turned BJP leader Smriti Irani a ‘nauch girl’ and finally you have President Pranab Mukherjee’s genius of a son Abhijit referring to women who wear make up as being ‘dented and painted’, setting Twitter on fire in the process.

V is for vengeance
Vaginal whitening and tightening creams, how are we creeped out by thee? Let us count the ways. Was it the ad where a girl announced the arrival of her tighty-whitey to her in-laws by waltzing through the house? Was it the part where the grandmother logs on to your website, all the while the grandfather looks on encouragingly? Was it the part where you took a part of the female anatomy of guaranteed attraction to the opposite sex, and turn that into another site of our racist, porno-certified insecurities? Was it the part where you tried to pass this whole thing off as 'empowering', as though vaginas were an oppressed race? Creating a need that promotes thoughtless homogenisation and superficial discrimination (with a matching solution at Rs2,430 per pack) is nothing new for advertising. But when the manufacturers of these creams and gels tried to convince women that they not only needed to act virginal, they should also feel virginal 'down there', they embodied every misogynistic prick who tries to make a woman feel worse about herself. To these manufacturers we say the same thing we say to these men — get out of our pants.

Maybe it’s a good thing they said what they said, because they have been exposed for the misogynistic and crass men that they are. On the other hand, is it any wonder that systems in this country rarely change? We shudder to think what laws such leaders could possibly pass that will make a difference to the lives of women in the country. Let’s hope in 2013, that if netas have nothing nice to say, they should zip it instead of stuffing both their feet into their mouths.

The macho hero
He beats men to pulp, breaks into a dance, and twirls his moustache. Meet the Tamil/Telugu-film-inspired Hindi movie hero, who is primarily a fighter, then a comedian, and finally a lover. This guy has had to bide his time in the shadows while the lover boy took over in the '90s, making the moolah by serenading women in chiffon sarees and running around trees. However, as romance began to fade, and ideas continued to remain in acute shortage, Hindi filmmakers took the easier route by remaking south Indian action films (Tamil and Telugu ones, mostly). Ghajini led the brigade, and Wanted consolidated the south-styled action hero's place in Bollywood. Then began the Me-toos. Singham, Ready, Rowdy Rathore, Son Of Sardar, Bodyguard, the list has been burgeoning, and given that most have broken box office records, chances are you will have to endure those flying jeeps, and manic stunts for some more time. How much fun would it be if these brainless actioners meet a similar fate as the villains in these stories: a painful death? We pray to Lord Rajinikanth, then, that his poor clones be vanquished.

Shrieking Anchors
This is a wild guess, but it seems earlier last year owners of television channels got together and decided to give TV anchors increments according to the level of their high-pitched voices. This was an incentive for a cost-cutting measure that made the use of expensive sound systems redundant. TV channels have probably saved crores thanks to this shrill act of genius. But this also meant that the shrieks broadcast from TV studios in Delhi and Mumbai could crack the windscreen on alien spacecraft (that probably explains why the world didn't end on December 21). It didn't help that 2012 was a turbulent year with people like Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, former Army Chief VK Singh giving anchors enough to scream about. Even as their vocal cords stretched and accomodated a phantom demand for bad opera singers (or tortured cats), our ears grew numb to their glass-shattering exortations. So, if we had one wish for 2013, it would be this: laryngitis for TV anchors whose names begin with alphabets A to Z. And if that doesn't happen, we can assure you that we will ensure the world ends in 2013.