How To Make Your Own Democracy
The Egyptians did it, Iranians are all set for one and the Libyans want to follow suit too.
The desktop approach
Look for a country that has a dictator. Then study its foreign policy. If it’s an ally of the United States, look for another country.
Can’t find one? Buy a world oil production map. Look for former allies of the United States. Plenty of those.
Go out, get drunk and set up a Facebook group for the ouster of the dictator.
Rope in some lasses from LSR, add equal part activist type girls from Xavier’s, women who shop at Fab India and those who are all for the revolution as long as they don’t have to give up the X-box and top off with cute girls from good families looking to act out. Take them to the new country, cut them loose and let them find their own ilk.
Open an account on Hootsuite. You don’t need the premium one, the free one will work just as well. Now integrate your Facebook group, Twitter account etc into this one account. Set the home feed to #revolution, #dictator you want to remove. You are all set. Now with the click of a button you can post the same message to several social networking accounts while keeping a more or less live tab on whenever anyone in the world says anything that includes the word ‘revolution’. Remember to thank god that no one has any cause to talk about Revolutionary Road and get on with it.
Remember Hootsuite might just be a stepping-stone to your underground anti-government mutterings because not even Che could start a revolution alone. But then he didn’t have a premium plan did he? So get a BlackBerry enabled with Twitter and Facebook.
Do what every good profit making, money churning, responsible corporate does – hire interns and promise them a work experience certificate for a social cause.
Identify a town square. Commissioning a revolution in most Indian cities is difficult because of this factor. You need an open place surrounded on all sides with buildings while we only have maidaans. It’s just not the same.
On the day your retweets cross 10,000 and mentions about the revolution and the government’s bad treatment of stray dogs crosses 50,000, fix a date. Don’t tell people other than those on the network about it, especially not the hot girl whose father is a bureaucrat. Not only will she not sleep with you, you will also end up sabotaging the revolution.
Rope in the army. Promise them a softer stand on gays in the army and a higher alcohol quota and boom – there’s your backing.
Look for a massive statue of the dictator, preferably in bronze, as the contrast will make for fabulous television footage and hence great PR.
Then there is the direct approach:
Find what the Western girl calls a ‘defector’, use him to share dodgy information about Weapons of Mass Destruction and then give him a cool name like Curveball that the Americans gave to the Iraqi defector (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi). But make sure you get rid of him at a convenient time. The last thing you want is him giving interviews to British newspapers eight years after the invasion saying he lied about the WMDs.
Okay, so by this point there is a strong possibility that you might want to hit me just like I want to smack the neo-revolutionaries. It’s kind of like an endless chain of smacks.
But let’s just admit that we are a strangely muddled bunch. As we sit down with our Macs, now fully equipped to deal with the big daddy of all monopolies – MS Windows, feverishly tagging and hash tagging our thoughts about the Egyptian protests post a McDonald’s lunch and several shots of Italian coffee just to keep the wit sharp; something somewhere seems to have gone horribly amiss.
We want that man in Egypt to go. He’s a dictator and he must. We can’t remember his last name but he must. It’s a revolution and the Internet is so vital. In fact CNN would have you believe it’s our generation’s answer to the red rotis handed out before the 1857 revolt. And in between all of this, we’ve found the global neo-revolutionary who holds corporate jobs and discusses revolutions over glasses of expensive French brandy.
The fabulous part of course is that we’ve made revolution into a trend and it all seems to tie in very well with the recession. So you might be rich, but it is distasteful to look it and that’s how the neo-bourgeois are born.
India’s case has been particularly strange – The net has made the world smaller, video games and TV series are premiering in India at the same time as the rest of the world and we are increasingly adopting a fabulously stunted way of looking at things. A ‘Communist’ is now meant to denote an anti-growth, anti-government asshole. I have confirmed this with several friends who suddenly started talking about job security in the recession-fuelled pink slip phase and they argue that all Communists are assholes. Why are they assholes I ask? They just are, you are told.
Three years ago ‘Free Tibet’ was the hobby du jour. If you did not discuss that over a Heineken, there was something seriously wrong with you. The Chinese were bad and the Tibetans were good. Why are the Chinese bad and the Tibetans good though? Wouldn’t India meddling in the internal matters of another country mean problems at home in the North East? Don’t you get it? Pat come the reply again – they’re assholes too.
We live in times of Generalisation. The world is rather conveniently classified into the Assholes and the Asshole-nots. Iraq is an asshole, so are Iran and North Korea and Cuba and Venezuela, while Mexico only produces maids and drug peddlers. It’s fun right?
A couple of months ago, while writing a story on how iconic Indian freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh and Subhash Chandra Bose were being serenaded by fashion, we realised they had become our answer to Che Guevara and Jim Morrison. We were told they are icons and Indians need to take pride in their own revolutionaries, so there it was – pop art freedom fighters. But wouldn’t Bhagat Singh or Netaji turn in their graves when they saw their faces on wallets and watches that cost more than the minimum annual wage of India? You bet they would. Then again, they would do so even if Che came around.
Man Fact: Last month Belgium snatched Iraq's record as the country with the world's longest political crisis of recent times. It was something called the Chips Revolution named after their national dish.
From the March 2011 issue of FHM India.
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