Election 2014, jist.

How Unreal Can These Elections Get?

Every day they parody the news. They are the authors of a new satirical political novel, but even they wonder if they can better the real nuttiness of our politicians.

It was 8 a.m. last Friday on April 25^th. Sitting in our ramshackle office in New Delhi we were deeply troubled.

We hadn't yet figured out what would be the first article on The Unreal Times that morning. We had been running the news satire website for 36 months, and had recently published our satirical novel Unreal Elections. But every morning brought its sweaty, particular imposter syndrome. Could we really write the best unreal news of the day?

Then, Gtalk went 'ping'! A chat window opened up and with it, a sliver of hope. It was one of our regular columnists, Ashwin Kumar.

Ashwin: Yo
Karthik: Yo
Ashwin: What's our first piece today?
Karthik: Nothing yet…
Ashwin: He he. Check this: "Congress asks Election Commission to hide lotus ponds in Madhya Pradesh from voters."

We leaned back in our seats, relieved. Ashwin had once again delivered a top quality satire theme.

Krishna: Hehe. Sexy theme! Let's do this.
Ashwin: Um, actually, it's a real news report. Here's the link.
Krishna: ...

A lot of people ask us how we differentiate ourselves from rival satire portals. We tell them that our competition isn’t another satire portal, but real life itself. Consider these real news headlines:

“9-month-old Pakistani boy accused of attempted murder, produced in court.”

Or “Mamata’s government mulls replacing red beacon with green ones.”

The first headline would have been a great dig at the chaos in Pakistan’s public life if only it hadn’t been true. And Didi’s distrust and dislike of the communists is legendary. The second headline could have easily been slotted as an unreal article. We responded enthusiastically, with “Mamata Banerjee demands ban on Mars after she’s told that it is called the red planet.” And when we saw "Congress asks Election Commission to hide lotus ponds in Madhya Pradesh from voters," we bravely raised the bar with “Rahul Gandhi petitions EC to change his great grandmom’s name from Kamala Nehru to Panja Nehru.” 

But really, how does an honest satire portal compete with such brilliant satire masquerading as real news?

Unreal Elections, by C.S. Krishna & Karthik Laxman. Penguin IndiaMany readers believe that we make a living cracking jokes about Rahul Gandhi. What they don’t realize is the pressure we come under to one-up Rahul’s own humor quotient whenever he makes a statement. How does one beat his “Jupiter’s escape velocity” remark? Or his interview with Arnab Goswami? Nevertheless, we carry on gamely, striving hard to realize a degree of unreality in our articles that is just above what actually happens these days, but not too fantastic for our readers either.

Our new book Unreal Elections is a satirical, fictitious take on the backroom machinations and intrigue in political parties and media houses leading up to the General Elections: Reeling under severe anti-incumbency and damaging allegations against Robert Vadra, the beleaguered Congress stares at electoral doom. Sonia Gandhi, however, is undeterred. Perhaps she has an ace up her sleeve. With her man Friday, Ahmed Patel, she prepares the reluctant Rahul Gandhi to take over as number two. A thousand kilometers away, Narendra Modi ponders over the various obstacles in his path to the throne of Delhi – an estranged mentor, a hostile media and his own controversial past. With his right hand man, Amit Shah, he then begins to draw the contours of a strategy to capture power at the Center. Unbeknownst to these two warring teams, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat embarks upon a mission to disrupt the best laid plans of the two principal parties. Then there’s the small matter of a masked vigilante…

The key to success in this genre is to calibrate the degree of unreality so that the narration always has the ring of plausibility to it. The balance between exaggerated truth and letting the imagination run wild must be such that the reader ponders to what extent the events depicted in the work mirror reality. That’s when you know, as a writer of political satire, that you have hit the sweet spot. Over the last couple of months, we have kept a very close eye on the broad political trends to figure out the satirical angles they lend themselves to.

For instance, it’s been fun to watch the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party and the subsequent ups and downs in their fortunes. Their relationship with the media has been exciting to watch. First, they were ignored by the media (particularly after Kejriwal’s expose on Ambani). Then they became the darlings of news channels (immediately after the Delhi election results). Now they have this strange love-hate relationship with the media. The way they captured the imagination of the middle class and then lost it in a few weeks reminds us of how quickly things can change in politics.

And how grateful we have been for the manna from heaven that Arvind Kejriwal’s shenanigans have been. His relinquishing power in Delhi, jettisoning his original anti-corruption agenda to take on Narendra Modi and his indignant, self-righteousness have filled our mornings with joy, enabling us to produce articles such as:

1. Arvind Kejriwal’s leaked Gmail inbox in which, among other things, he spams Narendra Modi for an appointment only to get an automated ‘out of office reply’.

2. Mukesh Ambani filing for bankruptcy after all the people Kejriwal has accused of being his agents gang up and demand payments from the Reliance tycoon.

3. Arvind Kejriwal renaming himself Shahzada Kejriwal to attract Narendra Modi’s attention.

4. And in a nod to Arvind Kejriwal’s holier-than-thou attitude, we had the piece about how the Ganga was purified after Arvind Kejriwal took a dip in it while campaigning in Varanasi.

Another thing that is amazing about this election is how it has turned from a vote on UPA’s performance to a referendum on Modi. To have the media constantly debate whether or not there is a Modi wave has been an endless source of amusement for us. Leading to our articles speculating whether the Election Commission ought to have an additional button ‘Is there a Modi wave?’ and reporting that after questioning the existence of Modi wave, Kapil Sibal has questioned the existence of Modi.

We also had rich, juicy material from the contrast between the stories of infighting in the BJP and the Modi wave. We wrote a spate of articles such as “Sushma Swaraj expresses a desire to continue as a Leader of the Opposition even if BJP comes to power”. We pretended that Rajnath Singh had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes after “incessant ladoo exchanges with new BJP recruits”. When the BJP was delaying the release of its manifesto, we announced it was going to release a compilation of “Ab ki baar Modi sarkaar” memes as its manifesto. As good an explanation as any.

We get a high when an article goes viral, and readers respond with comments such as, “You guys made my day”, “This lifted my mood”, “This is why I start my day with The Unreal Times”, or “what is unreal about this?” We also savor those days when our articles are read and retweeted by the famous, who will hopefully be the subject of one of our stories in the future. It all gets a little involved sometimes. The Economist had a cover story announcing that it did not endorse Modi as a prime ministerial candidate. It became a huge talking point and all the news channels gave the article airtime. But who actually reads The Economist in India? Our columnist Ashwin Kumar wrote a piece headlined “Indian who changed his mind after reading The Economist’s denunciation of Narendra Modi traced”. Suddenly all the mainstream media sites were sharing Ashwin’s piece. A journalist from The Economist shared it. Obviously, someone just needed to call the news cycle’s bluff.

Obviously, it is our life’s mission for people to believe our stories are true. One of our articles “[American] Journalist mistakenly interviews Bollywood actor Imran Khan instead of Pakistani cricket legend” was mistaken by some Pakistanis for real news and went viral in Pakistan in September 2011. The article played up stereotypes such as American ignorance of other countries. It was published when Pakistan-America ties were particularly frayed – there had been several terrorist attacks and the Americans were accusing the Pakistanis of not doing enough in the war. What rankled even more for Pakistani was that an ignorant American journalist had mistaken the Bollywood actor Imran Khan, an Indian to boot, for their cricket legend. In many ways, the article provided a cathartic release for several Pakistanis to vent their frustration over perceived American hegemony and insensitivity to Pakistani sensibilities.

Another article, published in December 2011, that saw this phenomenon was “Stunning revelation: West Indies’ cricket captain, Darren Sammy, is a Tam brahm!!!” In the article, we wrote that Darren Sammy was not of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity but a bona fide Tamil Brahmin who had emigrated to St Lucia to pursue a career in cricket rather than study for IIT-JEE. The article went viral within the Tamil Brahmin community, with many expressing pride that the West Indian skipper was one of their own, and what’s more, had not forsaken his culture in a foreign land.

People mistaking our satire for reportage is amazing, but what gives us the greatest high, the craziest high, is when something utterly ridiculous and improbable that we came up with comes true.

Hours before Rahul Gandhi’s famous interview with Arnab Goswami went on air, we had published a photo-story imagining how the interview would pan out. In our unreal interview, Arnab fires questions at Rahul Gandhi, and Rahul fires back answers with aplomb. The indomitable Arnab eventually runs out of questions and is left speechless. Rahul Gandhi then walks out of the Times Now studio and reaches under his neck to pull off his mask, only to reveal that he is Jairam Ramesh masquerading as Rahul for the interview.

By the time the real interview happened, our unreal interview had already gone viral. So later, when people learnt that Jairam Ramesh had indeed been in the same interview room along with Priyanka Gandhi, and had been prompting Rahul Gandhi from behind, our readers tweeted in jest that ‘there’s nothing Unreal about The Unreal Times anymore’.

On a much graver note, we once did a piece headlined “Parliament adjourned indefinitely after MP farts incessantly.” So when a few weeks later, when we saw a Times of India report with the headline “Rajya Sabha adjourned twice over ‘foul’ smell”, we had ourselves a sinister laugh. It’s not for nothing that Pritish Nandy once tweeted, “The Unreal Times must be India’s best newspaper.”

Over the years we have had low, low days when there wasn’t stimulus in the real world for us to spoof. This election season, though, every day has been an event and the low days have been few and far between.

With elections upon us, tempers and emotions have been running high. Objectivity has taken a backseat and people are more partisan. We have been accused in the last two months of being sympathetic to the BJP whenever we have done pieces mocking AAP or the Congress. And when we did some pieces on BJP we’ve been labeled AAPtards (AAP sympathizers) or eNREGA workers (online Congress sympathizers). We are very hopeful that after the elections people will become less partisan and more accommodating.

In the last few weeks, as the rhetoric has heated up and in-depth discussion on issues has been sidelined, the shallowness of public discourse both in the media and in the polity is striking. Television news discussions now have a ring of inevitability: a leader somewhere makes an outrageous statement and that becomes the topic of discussion of the day, invariably degenerating into a raucous tu-tu main-main.

On the other hand, we are kicked that people are so kicked about the elections this time around. We love the incredible awareness levels and the palpable excitement. It’s addictive to get on Twitter everyday and watch the day’s scuffles between various party partisans, attempting to trend their slogans and hashtags, and propagate their point of view. Even Arnab hasn’t been able to resist and attempts to trend a hashtag every other day!