Welcome to the story , Pulp Fiction Made in India, a cinematic allusion in the making where the fine line between non-fiction and fiction is the hypen. Is it truth or parody , reality or virtual?
The story is set in India’s current saffron wave that has gripped India’s nationalistic political setting with the recent electoral win of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The story unravels as we read….
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A perfect stage for a Hindi pulp script emerges with Modi, super hero and protagonist , India’s first leader born after India’s Independence from the British. The story has all the pulp as it fulfills the poor man’s dream of a poor, Hindi speaking boy who lacked privilege and resented the evildoing’s of powerful family dynasties and
dependence upon colonial apron strings. Modi grows up to successfully climb out of poverty and rule the country.
Coming from the roots of a humble Hindu background, Modi is the son of a tea seller. He starts his political roots early in his life as a teenager by joining the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) , a militant and ideological breeding ground for “Hindutva”, a brand of Hindu nationalism which believes being Indian is being
Hindu and excludes other minorities in the definition of a Hindu state or nation.. The RSS happens to be the parent and underlying philosophical lining for the BJP, the winning party in the 2014 Indian national election, with Modi as Prime Minister.
This is the kind of pulp fiction motivating and appealing to especially those who see India as primarily Hindi speaking with extreme right wing Hinduism as a way of thought and action. It is the dime novel of Hindi penny dreadfuls, those that want to see censorship of the bad guys such as academic Donigers and literary
Rushdies of the world, along with Hindu liberalism, and any others considered as “outsiders” or “foreigners of the pure Hindu state . In this ideal right wing state of India there would be a Big Brother watch on religious conversions to a non Hindu religion and no toleration of past intellectual discussions and acceptance of any aspect of a so called western interpretation of India. The pulp of history is about to be recycled.
But will the plot of Pulp Fiction Made in India sell? Yes it will sell to those that want to daydream and pass time at railway stations and bus stands. It will appeal to the rickshaw walla because Modi plans to increase tourism and when the rickshaw walla thinks he plays an integral role in the fictitious plot of nation building, the pulp fiction is worth every paisa spend.
Yes the plot of Pulp Fiction Made in India will sell because Modi is the hero portrayed as the barefoot, down to earth, religious politician of the masses. For Modi poverty is not a tourist destination but a place where he has walked the line. Portrayed as the ordinary street smart guy who now at 64 years of age makes his way to
the top, the people’s politician , most likely beating Obama with 5 million followers on Twitter and 18.8 million Facebook likes .
This pragmatic motivational superhero plans to reign India through E-governance and make India into a super strong digital economy . While 65 percent of the population is under the age of 35 years and with millions of Indians having mobile phones and no bank accounts, Modi knows that by holding the surrogate powers from the Hindu Gods, he has the strategy and controls the reins to the power of digital faith, a digital economy and a digital vote. Fear, illiteracy and superstition will now be able to transform onto the screens of virtual reality in the Devanagari script with the availability of Dot Bharat domains.
Yes for Modi E-Governance will be easy governance . He appeals to Bollywood , is favoured by India’s business leaders, he is the hero taking matters in his power because he has been asked by Lord Shiva to fulfill his destiny of building a strong , clean, poverty free India. The super hero is depicted in Pulp Fiction Made in
India as having a charismatic bachelor appeal to women in spite of having a wife tucked away in some village. He had an arranged child marriage and married his bride at 18 . He has been estranged from his wife ever since their wedding,. This makes his appeal even stronger as his duty to his country super cedes all others. His
private life remains a mystery only to increase his appeal to all genders.
The duty of this hero as a national leader is called upon him by Lord Shiva. As the superhero, Modi convinces his followers that there is a lot of work that God has put him on this earth to complete. With all this work ahead of him and with the blessing of Lord Shiva, the Hindu God of Destruction and Transformation, Modi
prepares with the top priority and promise of cleaning the Ganges and making it pure.
The nature of backyard politics with Hindu – Muslim tensions and with Modi still wearing the blood stains from the 2002 accusations of failing to stop riots in Gujarat that killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims continues to haunt the world. This prompted the U.S. to deny Modi from getting a U.S visa in spite of strong lobbying efforts by many American citizens of Hindu heritage. The bloodstains of Modi’s past gangster kingpin style of backyard politics only adds to the mystery as to how Modi’s bloc captivated winning a majority of seats in the state of Uttar Pradesh which is known not only as India’s most populous state, but also having more Muslims than any other state.
As the plot of Pulp Fiction Made in India unravels, the list of dirty work is laid out as the task of bringing cleanliness, providing separate toilets for girls in all schools in the country , stopping female foeticide, stopping rapes of young girls and women and stopping gang violence among men. Modi promises he is up for this ambitious superhuman task .Modi the superhero a spiritual believer of God as the center of life , listens to Hindu hymns and as his followers present him with garlands of marigolds and join him in Hindu prayers, the magic occurs. With 2 shakes of a lamb’s tail the plot of Pulp Fiction Made in India climaxes as Modi transforms India like a magical storm.
He transforms India like an allusion to Andy Warhol’s famous remark, “in the future , everyone will be world – famous for 15 minutes” . Modi’s “15 minutes of fame” transforms India in literally 2 shakes of a lamb’s tail. In that crucial 15 minutes, Modi does his pragmatic twist. He questions everything that Hinduism has painfully built and asks to stop the millennia-old caste based social hierarchy .Yes stop just for a short while until the country gets the foreign investment to bring India’s manufacturing sector to the point of zero imports and all exports.
The superhero transformation begins and lasts for 15 minutes . Modi the hypnotist, modi the psychologist, Modi the clever strategic pragmatist, Modi the motivator, Modi the super man-god asks the people to halt the poisons of casteism, communalism, regionalism, discrimination on social and economic basis, for they are obstacles
to the way forward. Modi resolves the issues by appealing to the illiterate and the literate to place this goal deep in their hearts and take a moratorium on all such activities for ten years, That’s all. Just 10 years. That will give enough time to get the money from foreign investment and get the manufacturing sector
rolling. So his appeal broadcasts loud and clear. “make in India, Come make in India” he calls out to the world, “Be it plastics or cars or satellites or agricultural products, come make in India”
Modi now in power plays a tough balancing act and continues to camouflage which side of the fence he sits on. As Modi nurtures spokesmen such as Surinder Jain of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in banning Muslims and Christians from all Hindu festivals especially from the 2014 celebration of Navratri, Hindu right wing activists follow for the first time to demand identity cards from non -Hindus to keep them out of these festivities. Yet in Ahmedabad, A Gujarat-based non Hindu cleric Maulana Mehdi Hasan is arrested under Section 295(A) of IPC for saying ‘Navratri’ as “a festival of demons”.
Well. Modi’s 15 minutes of fame is up. Now you will have to bring your own imagination into play. Visualize the rest of the nail biting, twisty turn chapters of Pulp Fiction Made in India where super hero Modi, with the garam masala mix of a spiritual -gangster- politician pits himself in just 2 shakes of a lamb’s tail against corruption, westernization, terrorism , black-marketing , gang rapes , dowry deaths and dowry extortion among Christians, Muslims, and Hindus, religious conversions to Christianity, Hindu-Muslim conflicts, fears and superstitions, Peringottukara black magic and big bucks, drugs and guns, inter religion love marriages, female foeticides, human rights and manual scavenging, violent attacks to untouchables, and much, much more action packed drama. As Modi laments the truth that the real identity of India had not reached the world, well, till then, “Come Make in India”.