Raat Chaandni Main Aur Tu: Hello Mister How Do You Do?

Close-up of Russian/South African artist Vladimir Tretchikoff's 1950 portrait "Chinese Lady".

Raat Chaandni Main aur Tu: Hello Mister How Do You Do?


Mera naam chin-chin-chu
Chin-chin-chu baba chin-chin-chu
Raat chaandni main aur tu
Hello, mister, how do you do?
Baaba..baaba

From Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo in film Howrah Bridge (1958).



It is mid-summer hot and coincidentally at the apogee of the political mating season. If anything goes, one knows not where, just blame it on the Bossa Nova, even if it is a South American dance little known in these parts outside of the Brazilian Embassy. But there is a further condition. For uninhibited goings on without regret, it must be danced in the moonlight. Moonlight is the magic ingredient; no matter what -- from the crescent of a sharp new moon or the maddening yellow orb of the enormous Harvest Moon. Or even in the less demanding generic of the delectable Chin Chin Chu’s Chaandni Raat.

It’s all in the universal need to requisition a bit of the intoxicating “light of the silvery moon” to enable our tries. Moonlight is the soft eiderdown of romance, the inducement to the intended mingling, of the resulting “loctite connexion” as much as that of the fabulous chance encounter. Yes, despite the risk in these times of deadly social diseases, the pitfalls of power, money, infamy and oblivion.

So Fear can go sit in its place on the bench alongside Timidity and God Bless them both but Instinct will out. But let us be ready to throw out the sacks, stun-worthy with manna, like a Great Train Robbery for the Gods, not at thieves however masterful, but at the oracular geeks with the temerity to figure out the tipping point. And the tipping point now clearly indicates an NDA formulation. There are more Congress haters than Sri Ram baiters. The dam of pseudo-secularism is breached and there is nothing to salvage except tattered half-truths and orphaned sycophants still mumbling their lines like so many distraught automatons.

Yes really! But when exactly did the little statements turn credible, preference turn to inclination, inclination turn into trend that’s trendy enough to juggernaut into conquest, rout and triumph!

Fact is, it takes a bit of lunacy to turn the tide, crack the lie, and gradually, the walls come tumbling down. Get these things right and you can bridge chasms no matter how many cases are filed against you, the jails you may have to visit, and the plethora of names you may be called.

What you have to do is take those cantilevered inductive leaps across unlikely conjunctions. Do it fearlessly and you can land on the side of victory. And not just in order to win but to bring great beneficent outcomes to all who follow your lead. They will all gain safe passage, free of threat and constant bullying, on the side of the righteous, of people comfortable in their skins and proud of their country. And safe from harm, from the tooth and claw of roiling monsters frothing poisonous with the bile of defeat.

Something, in fact, like the iconic Howrah Bridge, that spans the foaming Hooghly with 705 meters of cantilever without once resorting to an intermediate support. It might seem to some, despite its solid reality, like a bridge too far, but there it is, standing firm over the grand swell since it was opened to traffic in 1943.

But over the month of voting in phases, there has been too much facile talk of “secularism” and “communalism” bandying back and forth like unbridgeable divides. These have been formulaic and partisan propagandising in the name of analysis.

But despite everything, including the apathetic showing of the chatterati at the voting booths, precious little is being said about the needs of a country in great need of a paradigm shift away from the old smoke and mirrors. The apparent impracticality of the thinking classes is astounding. They seem satisfied to vent, however irresponsibly, and leave it at that. Where is the great glue of national resolve to take us to our salvation? Or indeed protect us from the machinations of a hostile environment? Or allow us to meet our undoubtedly great potential? Who will forge a strong new steel out of this tumult? And who will forgive the abdication of the elite?

But patriotism has seemingly been allocated to the armed forces who are required to do the needful on our behalf. As for anyone else trying to talk plainly of the national as opposed to factional interest, it is as if a great wave of environmental doubt sweeps over him. The air is certainly thicker with cynicism and the chatter of blind men than it is with pollution.

So the blessed Indian electorate, the actual voting poor, some half of the eligible, will, willy-nilly be the arbiter. It will cause the formation of the next government through the bypass of urban unreason. But the blessed public deserves better for their effort through heat and threat and will therefore get its due.

Will it do so by mutely compelling their elected representatives to leap over their present constraints, involuntarily forced to come together as the very bridges they stand on burn-out below them. Could be. Could well be. In this play of apparently unintended consequences that is how it works out sometimes.

And because the players are numerous, in parties and independents both, the government that goes to the 15th Lok Sabha is now grown typical to form.

Like the several governments before it, this one too will spawn the future of this country, labelled meaninglessly as wobbly or stable, but begat polygamously in the Biblical sense, not by neat sets of modest parents copulating in their private darkness, but fathered out in the open, in the soft allure and shadows of the chaandni raat, perhaps as in the courtyards and temple verandahs of old.

It is not a barren exercise of group lust. This government, like the ones in recent memory, will be put together very democratically, by the many, for the indubitable benefit of the many. One can’t fault that.

Robert D Kaplan, a Senior Fellow at the Center for a new American Security in Washington DC wrote in the April issue of The Atlantic, “Indeed the very Hindu pantheon, with its many gods rather than one works towards the realisation that compelling truths are what enable freedom”. As in religion, so in politics. Satyamev Jayate!


(1,055 words)

12th May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee


Toned-down version in The Pioneer on 15th May 2009 as the OP-Ed Leader named "Tipping towards NDA", online at www.dailypioneer.com and is archived under Columnists