Karnataka floor test or Royal English wedding? Well, both actually

Mitali Saran cleverly switches between sound and visuals to track two events aired simultaneously

Last weekend featured two big events: the Karnataka legislative assembly floor test of the freshly-minted Yeddyurappa government, a political nail biter in which the BJP and the Congress-JDS alliance were somehow both going to win at math; and the royal wedding, in which Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were going to make goo-goo eyes at each other and spark a lot of emotional tweets about Priyanka Chopra’s outfit. The first was guaranteed to be a total circus, and so was the second, and I didn’t want to miss either. Unfortunately they were happening at exactly the same time.

When fate says no, technology says yes. I decided to toggle between windows online, while listening to both. When things hotted up in Karnataka’s Vidhana Soudha I went to that visual, but with the audio from Windsor Castle in my ears; and when there was action in Windsor Castle I watched that, while listening to the Vidhana Soudha.

H D Kumaraswamy during the oath taking ceremony

It totally worked, sort of. MP Anand Singh was sworn in wearing a resplendent yellow dress and hat, Mayawati delivered a sermon that raised the roof on St George’s Chapel and almost caused an expression on Queen Elizabeth’s face, Harry choked up while reading out his resignation speech to the bride, the JDS-Congress alliance sang ‘Stand By Me’, and B S Yeddyurappa gathered up his veil and stomped off to the Governor’s house in a horse-drawn carriage. By the end my hair was standing on end but, as the poet said, all’s well that ends well. I was able to be there for both politics and romance as they got their happy ending. Take that, schedule clash.

Unscheduled clashes are far more serious. No sooner had the this synapse destroying weekend ended than Tamil Nadu police began to shoot at people protesting, for the fourth continuous month, against the sickness-inducing pollution caused by the Sterlite mining company. They shot them, good readers. In the chest. Could the preceding royal pomp in Britain have confused Tamil Nadu police into believing that the Raj was alive and well, and they, its agents?

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

Not that living in the past is unusual these days. This weekend marks the 4th anniversary of the National Democratic Alliance government, and while I’m not their wildest supporter, I must give credit where credit is due. They said that they would do in five years what the Congress couldn’t in 70, and they have—an unthinkable amount in a mere 48 months, especially in terms of taking the country back more than 852 months, to a time when ordinary people had to organise against an overbearing, snoopy, insecure government with its divide and rule tactics.

It’s too exhausting to go over the sordid laundry list of the NDA’s misdemeanours. Let’s just say that slogans like ‘Mera desh badal raha hai’ now come with a free soundtrack of hollow laughter in one’s head. How dark have things gotten in the land? So dark, dear fellow citizens, that hitherto sneery, crowing government mouthpieces are now having to conduct social media campaigns to try to keep even right wing Hindu voters from pressing ‘NOTA’ in the next general election. It just goes to show that even when you’re going backwards, things evolve.

Anyway, this weekend marks the official start of the countdown to 2019, with nothing seeming as it once seemed. The next general election promises to be super exciting. I really hope it doesn’t clash with a re-run of Friends, but if it does, I know how to fix things so that it’ll even be funny.

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com