What is the absolute worst thing you have ever smelled? I’ll give you my top three. Once when I was a curious little boy, I put a dead mosquito inside a Vicks Inhaler and sniffed it four days later. The smell was so evil that I permanently scrapped all plans of repeating the experiment with a dead elephant.
And then there was the time when I walked through a narrow alley in Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi. It was packed with sweet stalls on the left side, where massive cauldrons of oil sat frothing and hissing ten feet away from the opposite wall - which happened to be an open-air public urination hot spot. So when the pungent vapors of stale [and fresh] ammonia collided with the syrupy jalebi fumes on a stifling 44 C [111 F] August afternoon, the result was a semi-toxic superstorm of stench.
The top spot on my list goes to a packet of Tofu that I bought from WalMart recently and forgot to put inside the fridge. When I entered my apartment again 36 hours later, it smelled like someone had stashed a decaying corpse in my kitchen. I even imagined smelling the contents of the deceased John Doe’s bowels, which would have been released at the moment of death due to anal sphincter relaxation.
Anatomically accurate poop jokes aside, here’s my point - despite having lived in India for approximately 82.14285% of my life and having, therefore, had plenty of time to smell something fouler than Old Delhi, I awarded the top spot on the stench countdown to America. As a result, I end up being the insufferable NRI who starts off with “When I was in the US…” even if I’m talking about unpleasant odors.
If you had known me from my childhood days, you would have seen this coming. When my parents let the unstoppable force of American cable television into our living room, I was stunned to discover that sometimes, even American people cried. In my little mind, the concept of crying was somehow incompatible with America, as though sadness was some kind of exclusively third-world affliction – like Cholera, for instance. Or Madras-eye. No, really. Just try saying “Madras-eye” in your best American accent. It will sound absurd.
Shit happens. Even in America.
In any case, after living for 5 years in this magnificent realm and learning first-hand about facts like the sales success of the Chrysler PT Cruiser – a car that looks like a blind rodent born in a Chernobyl sewer, I no longer think the US of A is a Utopia inhabited by an objectively superior civilization. And the final nail in the coffin for my naïveté was hammered firmly in place by the 2012 Presidential election – specifically the Republican Party.
The Chrysler PT Cruiser – Now in Limited Edition Rabies Red
If you kept track of the election even casually, you know about Mitt Romney’s secret “47% of Americans” speech, constant lies about President Obama’s policies and blatant contradictions about his own. You probably also heard about Republican politicians who stated that women don't get pregnant from "legitimate rape", whatever that means.
If you were aware of all these facts, you probably didn’t expect the Romney/Ryan campaign to win this election. But guess who was being told to expect a landslide victory right until the moment the results were announced? The entire Republican voter base. Or in other words, viewers of the Fox News Channel. Check this out:
By perpetually peddling propaganda on the “Fair
and Balanced” Fox News Channel, the Republican Party has successfully
brainwashed a large fraction of the American middle-class on a number of
serious issues beyond the election results. That’s what really worries me – the
extent and the effectiveness of this massive misinformation movement.
According to a recent poll, 49% of Mitt Romney supporters believe there is NO solid evidence of global warming and only 18% of them agree it is real and human activity is responsible. [Meanwhile, according to a different poll, do you know what fraction of Republican voters believe that people can be possessed by demons? 68%. No joke, look it up.]
The very last, facepalm-inducing straw for me here is that the only Republican Presidential candidate who “believed” in “man-made” climate change was Jon Huntsman. Did you say “Jon Who?” Exactly. That’s how deep he got buried, thanks mostly to his “opinion”.
Do you realize how fucked up this is? Manipulating the voter base into submission by promoting ignorance, hypocrisy, greed and intolerance masquerading as religious family values is absolutely inexcusable. In any country. But on top of all that, to also completely deny climate change when you want to become the President of the second largest CO2 emitter in the world, it is unbelievably irresponsible and dangerous - on a global scale. This is why, even as someone who cannot vote here, I started paying attention to the elections. Because I don’t have to be an American or even live in America to be potentially affected by America’s policies on climate change. Because if America doesn’t work towards reducing its CO2 emissions, many other countries won’t try to reduce theirs either. Because if you ask the Republicans about the ongoing droughts, the forest fires, the acidification of oceans, the thunderflood sandstorm-quakes and the icepollen vortex-landslides, they’ll attribute it all to God - Unleashing His Just Wrath upon us for being mean to Carbon, presumably.
Alright, that’s my rant. I never thought I would write about politics back when I was in India. But American politicians outclassed their Indian counterparts by aggravating me enough to overcome my usual apathy. The end result is the addition of another conversation topic with my fellow desis which will make me go “That’s nothing. When I was in America…”
Happily, many political commentators think the Republican Party in its present form is dead. They believe the Party has to reinvent itself in order to become relevant again – like a beautiful flower growing out of the mortal remains of the red, white and blue elephant that keeled over and trumpeted its last on the evening of Nov 6, 2012. However, if this reinvention doesn’t happen, which I think is pretty likely, my childhood curiosity will be more than satisfied because I will find out what an undead elephant smells like – after putrefying for four years. I will keep a Vicks Inhaler handy.
RIP GOP
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