Saturday, August 02, 2014

Giving idiots their due

There's this dude who goes by the name Dinanath Batra. He's 85 years old, and lives in Delhi. For roughly 84 years and some months, this chap was hardly known to anyone other than his family (and a certain Narendra Modi, but that's not important)

Frustrated by this anonymity Mr. Batra went and raised some shit and got a book that no one had read, pulped - thereby helping the English language reading public in India understand that books that are not read are "pulped" - kinda like mangoes, except that there's no edible use for the pulp in this particular case.

Even now, all this would have just passed by completely uneventfully, in a water-under-the-bridge sort of way, except that this book that he got pulped, was a book called "The Hindus" and that this year is an election year, where a certainly Hindu partisan party won an astounding majority.

Oh, and when the aforementioned Mr. Batra wrote a book (which no one had read, by the way), which has some fascinating material about how the birth of Krishna, was through stem cell research, and the mythological rishis of centuries past, were actually scientist, it also contained a foreword by the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Mr. Narendra Modi.

Perfect recipe for a hullabaloo about nothing in a 24x7x52x137  news channel world.

Long story short, the simple entry of Dinanath Batra leads to 382,000 results on Google. Other than the standard, RSS bot created, Wikipedia entry for the man, 381,999 results are expressing outrage.

God, how I miss Lewis Black!!!


















Why do we need to spend so much time on someone who's irrelevant anyway?? Conversely, is it necessary now to make a fool of yourself, come up with the most ridiculous soundbites just to gain some attention?? Has news really dried out so much, that we need to give cartoons like this our valuable time? DId I miss the memo where it said that all idiots will be given their 15 minutes of fame??

What the f@#$ is going on out here???