Reality Bites: The Bungling Parivar Bros Circus

India has not had a government since 2014, it has had the Bungling Parivar Bros Circus instead—a circus without a managing committee, mind you! Citizens have not only witnessed a never-ending series of reckless acts that have inspired shrieks of horror, but have often been driven to a willingness to place their heads in a lion’s jaw to end the nightmare once and for all.

Sometimes the Diyar Leader is a bearded lady in a saree, sometimes a chest-thumping chimpanzee, a chowkidar, a weirdo with Lawrence of Arabia headgear, a virologist, a taunting roadside Romeo, a dodgy baba in a fraudulent 5-star cave, a whiny victim of assassination plots, and oh anything but a passable prime minister!

His ministers never are what they are meant to be. Take External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, for example. He started off by being an event manager, offering one bus ride, plus one samosa and one dhokla free (with zesty chutney!) for attendance at rallies on foreign soil.

Then he morphed into an election campaign manager with Howdy Modi in Texas and Namaste Trump in Gujarat. Every now and then he exhibits a Grimm act with his counterparts across the world: the tantrum-throwing dwarf Rumpelstiltskin.

But now he has surpassed all his earlier roles. He will go down in history not as a foreign minister but as a (tan tan tara!) new age beauty contestant.

Wearing a perky pink jacket (possibly borrowed from some posh palace-turned-hotel wait staff in Jaipur), and his own crumpled grey trousers at the Bimstec summit in Columbo, he clambered upon a stage, preened, and said, like a contender for the Mr World Himbo title, “We can’t take world peace for granted.”

If he had not said this, the world would never ever have known it, right? It will go down in the book of the world’s most memorable quotes by RSS-BJP “thinkers”. Among them are other Bungling Parivar Bros Circus nuggets, like: Cow dung cures cancer, Bhabiji’s papad cures covid, etc.

The Double Engine Sarcus is the main act at the Bungling Parivar Bros Circus. This consists of the Diyar Leader and his sidekick on a bicycle made for two. Citizens are meant to stand up and cheer as they cycle around aimlessly (and recklessly), and those wearing black will be flung into dungeons under UAPA.

With rumours of a tiny rift between the Diyar Leader and his sidekick, we hope this boring act may get a little interesting, with the sidekick trying to take the cycle in the opposite direction. Expect nothing drastic though, just light comedy.

All that will happen is that the Diyar Leader will get off periodically and box the sidekick on the ear, and they will trundle off in the same direction again. They know each other’s dirty secrets, so the same direction is the only direction.

The other star acts are called Persecution Games. There are several variations on the theme. In the communal version, mobs of uneducated orange people descend from the stage into crowds of citizens and attack non-Hindus (particularly Muslims) to rousing cheers from highly educated orange people.

The ‘Stop critics from leaving India’ act is the latest where false charges are slapped on people at airports, just as they’re all set to leave for seminars/holidays/etc. The technical term for this is Operation KLPD. In recent days, we have seen Rana Ayyub and Aakar Patel fight and win against all odds.

The third most popular act involves smearing metaphorical cow dung on political rivals before throwing them in jail. The fewer rivals the Diyar Leader has, the longer he can torture us, no? Also, if there’s no competition left, who needs a keeper of secrets? He can shove his sidekick off the bicycle and order a seriously fancy and expensive one for himself alone, hurrah.

There are ten superb bicycles to choose from, including an Aston Martin Factor Cycle or a Lamborghini Cervelo, but I bet the Diyar Leader will choose the most expensive one of all, the shiny 24K Gold Extreme Mountain Bike, which costs $1million (₹7,59,65,000.00). Don’t flinch. We’ve splurged much more on the Diyar Leader before. However, if he’s bled us dry by then, rest assured the main sponsors of the Bungling Parivar Bros Circus, Mukasha Ambanivich and Gigoritam Adanivich will cough up.

(Any resemblance to real people or events is a coincidence)