This morning I woke up with a terrifying thought: what if we run out of things to hate? My friends assure me India will never run out of hate. I remind them there is someone out there who is threatening to disrupt India’s bazaars of hate by setting up shops peddling love. “Fear not,” they tell me. “We won’t let anyone ruin our hate-fest.” I’m not convinced.
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All of us have grown up on a daily diet of falsehoods about ‘love’. We keep hearing that love unites while hatred divides. Open your eyes. Look around. What do you see? You see families torn apart by young people wanting to marry against their parents’ wishes because they apparently ‘love’ each other. You also see individuals and families, cutting across lines of class, caste, and beverage preference, bonding over a shared hatred of a certain country or community. But we never hear about the unifying properties of hatred. Why not? You know the answer: liberal propaganda, and a toxic culture of political correctness that discourages people from expressing their hate freely.
It’s therefore up to each one of us to not only safeguard and nurture our existing hatreds but also plant new seedlings of polarisation. It’s not as hard as you imagine. You can hate anyone or anything, provided you apply yourself to it. Take me, for instance. Don’t think I am merely preaching hate without walking the talk. I’ve started a new hate story in my life: green water bottles.
Why not progressive pink?
You may wonder what’s hate-worthy about green water bottles. For starters, they are ugly. Secondly, the colour green. I don’t see why water bottles have to be of any colour at all, given that water itself is colourless. If god wanted water to be green, he would have made wildfire, which would have been perfect, as we could have used it to burn down the things we hate, like Cersei did. But water is the opposite of wildfire: it is not green, and it puts out fires. So who are they trying to fool, the green water-bottle-walas?
Haters are tolerant people who have a legitimate reason for their hatred. For instance, I can understand people wanting coloured water-bottles. There are as many colours in the universe as there are jobless youth in India. But why pick green? Why not pink, a properly progressive colour? Or saffron, the colour of the cosmos?
What are they trying to prove with a green water bottle anyway: that they love the environment? Isn’t that green-washing? All the water bottles that ever leaked in my school bag were green. All the ballpoint pens that disappeared on me: green. You can’t trust anything that’s green. And you have a right to hate what you can’t trust. Wouldn’t you hate your car if you can’t trust it to start every time you turn the key?
Rasagulla supremacy
The great thing about hate is that people get it. No matter what the hate object, you’ll always find people to hate with. Like I don’t even have to explain — you already know — perhaps not all, but many of you do, why green is inappropriate as the colour of a storage facility for something as life-giving as water. You know what’s the worst thing about someone carrying a big green water bottle? If they are wearing a white shirt or cap, they look like a Pakistan flag when they drink from it. If that doesn’t offend your sentiment, get yourself arrested under UAPA.
Pseudo-liberals will want to defend the ‘human right’ to use water-bottles of any colour. Some would even argue that god created all colours as equal and therefore one should not discriminate. But if all colours are equal, why is the milk of even the blackest buffalo white? Does my belief that rasagullas are the supreme sweet dish make me a white supremacist? Obviously it doesn’t. It is white that truly embodies the spirit of ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’: it contains within itself all the colours of the universe. In fact, I would like the government to bring in a uniform colour code and make that colour white.
As for green, we need to weed out every sign of it, not just water bottles. Even if it means cutting down a trillion trees, and by the way, I am glad our government is already doing a great job of minimising forests that are green. You may ask: what do we do once we’ve eliminated everything green? Well, I know a lot of people who hate the reds.
The author of this satire is Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
