Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose. The New Year is full of old stuff

History is just the same pizza with different toppings

Wise old people are always saying things like, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, which is French for ‘Remember the Bastille?  —Love, The Yellow Vests’. History repeats itself—same pizza, different toppings. 

For instance, the polar vortex is back! Wasn’t it just here, in 2014? This week the US midwest found itself cryogenically suspended in temperatures of -28ºF (-33ºC), with wind chill up to -70ºF (-56ºC). If you find it hard to relate to those numbers, news reports tell you to think of it as colder than the top of Mt Everest, colder than Antarctica, and even colder than some places on the surface of Mars, though this is still several degrees warmer than relations between Republicans and Democrats. Just like in 2014, the internet is going mental with videos of people tossing boiling water into the air to watch it transforms instantly into mist, just like their heating budgets. Old problem, new year.

Here in India there was a stir over the Hindu Mahasabha, a right wing Hindu organisation that is founded on the belief that MK Gandhi can just never be dead enough. While the rest of the country honoured the Father of the Nation on his death anniversary as usual, the Hindu Mahasabha decided to re-assassinate him, complete with special effects blood dripping from the effigy. They find it depressing that Gandhi’s ideas continue to resonate; re-shooting him re-dead lifted their spirits so much that they declared it a new January 30th tradition. One of this week’s killers garlanded a photograph of Gandhi’s (first) murderer, Nathuram Godse, before picking up her saffron robes and hightailing it into the night as the police sirens got closer. Wait, where have we seen sketchy god-botherers running from the law dressed in women’s clothing before? Old problem, new year.

The biggest thing of all is that a stellar young reporter at this newspaper got his hands on a government report that the government had chosen to release by burying it at midnight in an unmarked grave. It says that unemployment stood at a 45-year high in 2017-18, in the aftermath of the great sucking-out sound that has come to be known as demonetisation. This must be dispiriting for Mr Modi’s government, which says that India grew at 8.2% during demonetisation when the economy stopped in its tracks and everyone was falling about in despair. Can you imagine the rate at which we could be growing if people actually had work? The Prime Minister has repeatedly advised us not to be so negative. Be positive! It is negative thinking wot causes problems like unemployment. Is the pakoda really half-empty, or—here’s the genius—is it half-full? This is known as the great Indian hope trick. One journalist nearly rent the fabric of time and space with his positive thinking when he tweeted that high unemployment numbers are an encouraging sign that more people are looking for work, which means that more people are convinced that there is work, even if it’s lousy work. If only more people thought like this! 

It all reminds one powerfully of a 2004 National Democratic Alliance election campaign called India Shining, which came to an abrupt end because of all the negative nellies among the electorate. If I were the BJP, I would take a few hours out of campaigning to revise the history of that campaign with the cadres, in a workshop titled The Shining: Sometimes Horror Is Just Horror. 
 

Old problem, new year. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. 

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer 

mitali.saran@gmail.com