This year I have only one new year resolution: to think positive, speak positive, stay positive. I am done with peddling fake news, propagating propaganda, and promoting my son Kattabomman by giving him free publicity.
Promoting my dynasty would have made sense if I was a) the president of a political party; b) a Bollywood celebrity; or c) a selfless industrialist whose name ends in an ‘i’. Instead, I am d) none of the above.
I am done with criticism also because it turns you into a negative person. I have leached every ounce of negativity from my system, poured it into a medium-range ballistic missile, and fired it in the direction of Islamabad. I don’t want to spend my life offending the sentiments of every Kuppusamy, Munusamy, and Aiyogyasamy in town. So in 2018, I am going to be relentlessly positive.
A glorious India
Fortunately, that’s easy to do if you’re one of the lucky 130 crore who couldn’t buy a permanent residency in Canada, Australia or New Zealand and hence live in India. I thank my stars every day that I am not one of those poor NRIs trapped in the U.S. or some other First World country where you can’t even dream of attending nature’s call with the same freedom of choice that we take for granted in India. But I do admire these brave NRI souls who, despite paying all their taxes in America, are 56 times more patriotic than their desi cousins.
Thanks to their blessings, things have never looked better for India. For a while it seemed like we were missing the Merrill Lynch for the Merry Lynch. But now, as India strides confidently into 2018, it is obvious even to a Moody’s that we are as unstoppable as a tsunami in a supermarket.
We have a Prime Minister whose approval ratings are not only the highest of any Indian prime minister ever but also higher than that of any other prime minister, president or autocrat on the planet.
Thanks to demonetisation, the potty of corruption and the pee-pee of black money have been wiped clean from the chubby bottom of the Indian economy. Thanks to the successful implementation of GST, the wheels on the economic bus are going round and round, round and round, as a result of which the growth rate is rising like Jack’s beanstalk and tax receipts are dripping over government coffers like baby’s drool. (If you think I am slyly trying to promote Kattabomman by invoking him indirectly through metaphoric subterfuge, shame on you.)
The biggest success story of 2017, set to grow even bigger in 2018, is of course the unbearably voluntary, achingly secure, welfare delivery platform known affectionately among Indians as ‘Aadhaar Mata’. Aadhaar Mata has ensured that India’s poor will never go hungry, delivering their subsidised rations seamlessly and efficiently right into their gullets via biometric optic cables configured to the irises of every beneficiary.
Things look even rosier on the foreign policy front, with India becoming the first country in the world to adopt Vedic encryption. Our encrypted foreign policy has been so difficult to decode that even the world’s canniest brains sitting in Pentagon and Brookings are floundering, unable to detect a pattern or meaning in India’s deceptively stupid moves that obviously conceal a grand design.
Universal healthcare is a reality
But the innovation I am most excited about is the one that will revolutionise public healthcare as we know it: Bal Doctors. Not surprisingly, the idea has come from the only State to have a development model named after it: Gujarat.
My mother always wanted me to become a doctor. My problem is that I love to watch intestines spilling out of a torn belly on Netflix but can’t stand the sight of blood in real life. Not only did I disappoint her by failing to become a doctor, I added insult to injury by becoming a journalist — a breed she considers more worthy of extinction than Periplaneta americana .
To appease her, I promised to make my eldest male progeny a doctor. Thanks to the Gujarat model, this promise is coming true sooner than I expected. I am told there is no lower age limit for ‘Bal Doctors’, and the only eligibility criterion is that the candidate should have cleared nursery.
Kattabomman will turn two this year, and I’ve already identified a playschool whose curriculum includes a one-year integrated diploma course in Ayurveda. Seen in conjunction with the new Bill that proposes to let Ayurvedic doctors prescribe allopathic medicines, it is clear that India has found the panacea for its healthcare woes. By converting millions of children into ‘Bal Doctors’, and all schools into dispensaries, India has, in one stroke, made affordable, universal healthcare a reality for its citizens.
These are truly achhe din indeed. As for me, I can barely wait for Kattabomman to finish preschool so that I can retire and devote myself, like Rajinikanth, to spiritual politics.
