Some two decades ago, when I oversaw the features sections of a newspaper, four representatives of a Chennai restaurant sought an appointment with me. The delegation — owners, manager and the chef — were agitated about the extremely negative review by our food critic, a quick-witted young woman with a preternatural gift for words.
As I heard them out, it became apparent that their problem was not so much that she didn’t like the food, but the manner in which she expressed it. One of the offending lines, if I recall correctly, related to her description of their steak, which apparently tasted like an old hawai chappal that was left out for too long in the sun.My attempts to gently explain that simile and hyperbole were legitimate tools in some journalistic contexts failed to assuage their hurt. I remember one of them, a woman, telling me: “It would have been fine if she thought our steak was overcooked and rubbery, but was it necessary for her to compare it to a worn-out chappal?”
The memory of this interaction came flooding back during the CJP-led youth protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. I couldn’t help thinking that the mimicry, the satire and the humorous memes about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah must have hurt, even traumatised, the BJP leadership much more than the political broadsides, the blunt onslaughts, and even the most profane gaalis. While Modi forgave the ‘misguided’ students who frontally abused him and his mother, one couldn’t help thinking that the mockery cut too deep to be simply laughed away.
