9 by 9: Love, marriage & Arnab in COVID
And why Narendra Modi has turned the whole country into a "girls' hostel"
1 by 9: Patni, patni aur bro
Delhi lawyer Raghav Awasthi’s Twitter bio doesn’t say “RSS thinker” but the self-proclaimed “social justice warrior, activist, feminist, TV panelist, amateur film critic, history buff & gym junkie” has good reason to be “sick of hypocritical 'value systems'.”
It was this innocuous tweet that started it all.
One thing led to another and somebody called Isha Sharma asked the onetime “RSS thinker”, who has been the quasi BJP face on NDTV, “Congratulations, and what happened to first legally wedded wife?”
Turns out Isha Sharma was the first wife, a fact corroborated by a common friend.
Naturally, Awasthi had to block her, and then explain himself.
All very normal stuff between estranged husband and wife, maybe, except that the “RSS thinker” had been pontificating on justice for Muslim women two years ago.
That said, despite his RSS links, Raghav Awasthi has defended Hartosh Singh Bal of The Caravan magazine pro bono, represented mojo head Barkha Dutt against Kapil Sibal, and was in Goa defending a German in a drugs case.
Last heard, Isha Sharma was looking for help to tell her story.
2 by 9: If it bleeds, it leads
Covid has given Rahul Gandhi his “second-most retweeted tweet”.
This, below, which showed that India had introduced the lockdown too early and begun unlocking as the numbers were climbing.
The “pappu” tweet came at 6.24 pm on 5 June. It has since spun away 30K more times. But the brain wave for his “team” most likely came from @20ncounting who had tweeted this about 21 hours earlier, and even showed how to get the numbers.
3 by 9: Home is where the hurt is
COVID has exposed the monstrous divide between India and Bharat. The urban, literate, middle-class comfortably socially distanced at home with wifi while the poor, illiterate, hungry lower class walk thousands of kilometres.
PLUs have little to lose. But what when it happens to People Like Us?
The journalist Kunal Purohit chronicles a chilling personal story.
The Kannada media and transport baron Vijay Sankeshwar, the ex-BJP MP who advises keeping cut onions and using neem sanitisers to keep Coronavirus at bay, now says smearing nostrils with ghee or coconut oil tonight will also help.
4 by 9: Jashodaben Chimanlal
Narendra Modi’s marital status was revealed only before the 2014 elections when he had to fill in the columns in his nomination papers, during which he also produced a computerised marks card of his 1978 MA in political science (entire course).
But lying in the face is an art you only perfect over a period of time.
5 by 9: Puppy’s jhappi
Modern media is not a paper tiger, it’s a one-trick pony.
@Kroordarshan has a list of the themes of 50 “debates” on Arnab Goswami’s non-fiction general entertainment channel, Republic Bharat.
But don’t believe us, see it yourself.
7 by 9: Art of Reverse Engineering
“Mitron TV”? Not quite “national” in its origin despite The Times of India championing it as a TikTok killer.
The swadeshi “Remove China App”? Chucked out of Google Play Store even at the height of the ‘Boycott Chinese products” call.
But the flame of nationalism shall not be stubbed out.
The RSS mouthpiece Organiser—-”the oldest nationalist weekly of Bharat”—is now touting the latest product from baba bazaar: a social networking app, no less, from Sri to the power of two, of the Art of Living.
7 by 9: Who are you?
8 by 9: The wave theory
Siddharth Singh, an energy, mobility and climate policy expert, with a book on the great smog of India has a fun question. The answer is in his thread.
9 by 9: Saturday night ‘dead’
Who doesn’t feel the quiet tonight? Or any other night these days?
Even a law grad and ex-LAMP fellow who is “not a night owl” does.
But it wasn’t all quiet on the branded trains carrying poor migrant workers.
Finally, why not spend a few minutes listening to the calm, soothing voice of one of the world’s great newspaper editors, Alan Rusbridger, who led The Guardian during Wikileaks. And who also plays the piano and clarinet.
And show some love for The Net Paper, the world’s first social media newspaper.