Take back those words
You know how evolution is all about single cells dividing and dividing again, into ever more complex and wondrous life forms? After 2014, Indian mainstream media totally bucked that trend. With honourable exceptions, it simplified itself into two blobs: propaganda, and amplifiers of propaganda. Teleprompter Uncle, and Radio Rwanda. We have witnessed our own blobbification, a regressive dive into limbic emotions.
I stopped watching television news back in 2017, when Republic TV launched as a self-professed “nationalist” channel. By then we were deep into blobbitude. So many words go unexamined, here in Blobland. Artificially inseminated with vengeful grievance, they get thrown around indiscriminately—nationalist, anti-national, national security, nation first, armed forces, unity, Hindu, strength, pride, honour, tradition, sacred, sentiment, leader, respect, love jihad, insult, cabal, Leftist, JNU, tukde-tukde gang, traitor. Blob carriers of blob emotions. They have become vectors of an epidemic of emotional reductionism, a constant malignant rain designed to poison foundational democratic notions: individual rights and freedoms, civil protest, and political opposition—i.e. politics.
Obvs, because the BJP-RSS is trying to create a post-politics nation with unquestioned authority. To do that you have to dominate the media (check), and then equate these foundational ideas with criminality and/or treason (check). And to achieve homeostasis in the system, you need to intimidate everyone with arrest, violence, and threat of violence (check). That’s why Amit Shah is Home Minister (checkmate). He has a terrific track record (check it yourself).
To nation-build in Blobland, you must check your brains at the door and/or become an actor. Teleprompter Uncle is an actor—a ham, and completely hopeless at improv, but if you emote blobbily enough, you can win and inflame blob-forward hearts. BlobTV anchors are actors, bad ones, all stilted delivery and voices pitched higher than K2. It’s spectacle, not news; poor theatre, not debate. Connote the hell out of everything, never actually define anything. The idea is to get enough people on board with the crazy talk, that it frustrates or drowns out conversation, or scares people into silence. Mostly, it has worked.
The blobbiest of ideas is a combine: BJP government=India. But mostly, blob ideas divide into strictly blobby binaries. Nationalist or foreign agent. Armed forces loyalist or Pakistani. BJP government or traitor. Hindu or threat to Hindus. Devi or randi. With us, or against us. And—since we are governed by the national amygdala—fawning or violent.
Not that nuance has died entirely. Media, individuals, and corporations find stacks of it when faced with governmental wrongdoing or stupidity. In those situations, people excel at finding layered complexities. Privileged people, people with a voice and brains, have been too fearful and self-serving and compromised to see or say anything clearly. Those people are champions of nuance. They will find themselves a feeble, sinking nuance and nurse it back to health until it is strong enough to pin them against a wall at gunpoint. The older, richer, and more caste-privileged you are, the more nuance you’re likely to find in injustice and unconstitutionality. Any critique you have is likely to be mild as aloe vera.
Gen Z didn’t grow up on media-dispensed garbage, which looks very much like a hippo taking a dump (the media garbage, not Gen Z). That’s probably how they hung on to their brains (Gen Z, not the hippos). So after years of adults crawling when they’ve been asked to bend, suddenly we have all these spectacularly calm, articulate, issue-focused, funny young people using their brains and their faculties and de-blobbed words, telling the truth, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Watch Abhijit Dipke, Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das, Ratna Singh, Neha Bora, and others on television debates and in interviews. Watch the cockroaches and the little Alphas. They slash through the smoke-and-mirrors. They refuse to be baited. They insist on nuance. They have the facts, the words, the focus, the confidence, and the self-esteem to stand up for themselves. And they have the most refreshing clarity on which questions need asking, and which are worth answering. They come presuming their own democratic rights. They also have that crucial weapon: follow-through. They back each other up, they aren’t backing down, and they aren’t going back.
What a relief to have someone put their finger on exactly what has been erased from Blobland: accountability. What a relief that they are demanding it, with the confidence of non-blobbed minds. In other words, Gen Z has re-injected politics into the public mind. There’s plenty of reason to treat this blobbish regime as dangerous, not only because of its deception and violence, but because of the strangler vine of laws it has wrapped around the country. But the student movements of 2026 are giving ordinary Indians the hope that they might live to see a de-blobbified India.
All it takes is telling the truth en masse. Truth-telling was becoming vestigial in pimped-out, sold-out, hate-filled, violent, corrupt, sycophantic, dishonest New India. It seems, against all odds, to be coming back to life.
It was, after all, a child, that finally yelled that the emperor had no clothes.
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After the truth-shower 