‘Standup’ for your rights

NO JOKES PLEASE,WE’RE INDIAN

Ajit Saldanha

Readers of a certain vintage will find the above title vaguely familiar; if you remembered “S*& and British”, go to the top of the class even as you paraphrase your inner Jagger and realise what a drag it is getting old. But stop whining and feeling sorry for yourself: because your name isn’t Munawar Faruqui or for that matter, Kunal Kamra. Both these worthies have been canceled by the powers that be in namma Bengaluru for jokes they haven’t told in a show that wasn’t allowed to take place and if that isn’t Kafkaesque enough, for a sold-out comedy show at the Good Shepherd auditorium to raise funds for a charity espoused by our much revered son of the soil, Puneet Rajkumar. So the new rule book here is to follow the UP model and just ban the show before these offenders get on stage and… offend us?

It’s gotten to the stage where one has to suppress an amusing thought for fear of upsetting one’s fellow passenger on Namma Metro. Given that we live in pretty grim times with variants springing up like parthenium, one would imagine we need a few laughs. But no, Vir Das grows a pair and tells us about Two Indias and the howls of outrage are just deafening. Game on, Vir, just live up to your name, dude and make Mummydaddy proud. But my children have started worrying about me because of late I’ve succumbed to the heady temptation of Dad jokes. Consequently, while others worry about mask protocol, they imagine lurid scenarios where I’m eating forbidden fruit like Faruqui/Kamra/Das and my fellow travelers have summoned the guard. “See saar, I was on the way to Baiyapanahalli, listening bhajans on my i-phone 8 when this fellow sitting next to me started watching one number anti-national loafer, some Kamra person, very fat fellow, dappa avanu, telling all lies about Ambani, our leaders, PM, PMO, FM, aiyyo. He was trying to convert me to this evil empire of stand up. Full aakrama he has done, I am needing one number sakrama.”

To think we were once a free society with Freedom Jams in Cubbon Park, where we ate what we pleased, spoke truth to power, smoked the peace pipe with elders and betters, lived a little, played the blues a little, damn, those really were the days, watch it on Youtube. But today we have progressed and reached a stage when we get our chaddis in a twist about a stand-up comedian trying to eke out a precarious living by attempting the Sisyphean task of making people laugh. A pox on both your houses I say to you, if you really want to keep us safe, pick on someone your size, like the real estate mafia. As Bengaluru chokes on polluted air, shudders at the overpriced monstrosities sold to us as dream homes, copes with third world plumbing, sewage and the overflowing Allalsandra Lake, the one thing we all agree on is that we need some jokers to make sense of this divine comedy. This too shall pass, people. Meanwhile, break out the timepass, pour us one and bring on the clowns.