Decent Enough?

Nothing—not an IT worker’s ditty, not a politician’s memoirs, not a film song’s lyrics, not an educationist’s speech, not a dance party, not even the new airport’s menu, nothing—is beyond the ken of these supra-constitutional elements wearing red-and-yellow scarves. They pick targets at whim and mount vigilante attacks, vandalising public and private property. To the e-coli of exclusionism coursing through e-city, add communalism, casteism and corruption, and you are looking not at a glass that is half-empty but hitting rock bottom.

In a role reversal few could have imagined, the intelligentsia has watched benignly as the head of the state’s literary body talked of breaking bones a la Raj Thackeray while a "reformed" underworld don has entered the fray to fetch classical status to Kannada. And a rabidly chauvinistic media has been happy pouring oil into the parochial pyre when not fanning the flames. A.J. Liebling wrote that a city could be judged by the taste of its water and the quality of its newspapers. As the Cauvery flows quietly until the elections, via Hogenakkal, Bangalore it would seem is ill-served on both counts.