Swimming in sleaze. Enjoy

A compendium of buzzwords from a week that has left us with our ears buzzing, our eyes popping out of their sockets and our mouths agape...

SLEAZE: A new wonder source of energy, that has the potential of lighting up the entire country like a giant birthday cake and generally electrifying the nation. The Capital of the Republic, this city of 12 million, which has Parliament House, the Red Fort, the Qutub Minar and 7, Race Course, within its precincts, has just discovered that it is actually perched on vast reserves of a blackish, muddy, oozy, murky, mucky, sticky, yucky substance known in popular parlance as sleaze.

If Texas is lucky to have discovered oil in its backyard, Delhi must be similarly gratified to know that you only have to throw a stone in its vicinity to hit a genuine sleazeball. Today, Delhi can boast of hundreds of such individuals, within government and out of it, all of whom are working overtime to produce genuine sleaze with a high alcoholic content. I have it on excellent official authority that the Delhi government is now seriously considering ways to utilise this wonder substance — known to be economical, eco-friendly and ergonomical — as an alternative source of transportation fuel.

The only problem, however, is that the stuff stinks to high heaven and once it is deployed residents would be advised to move around with their handkerchiefs held firmly to their noses. The stench can hit you like a sledgehammer and would appear to be a combination of a dead rat that has been allowed to marinate in sewer water for eight days and rotten eggs whipped together.

TEHELKA: ‘Tehelka’ means ‘‘great excitement’’ in Hindi. It is also the name of a dotcom company that is capable of great dotcom-motion. The organisation’s express agenda, it appears, is to administer shock treatment to the nation every few months or so, by unspooling very graphic video footage of the Republic’s underbelly. Nobody really knows how many kilometres of video footage Tehelka really has but it is my informed guess that they have captured through their spycams every single living being in the 1,483 square kilometres of the National Capital Region, eating, drinking, talking, walking and reproducing.

The moment Tehelka unspools another instalment of its shadowy footage, it has the immediate effect of sending 30 per cent of the Capital’s residents — those with more delicate constitutions and weak nervous systems — into a swoon. Another 30 percent of residents — those who happen to figure in the revelations — run for cover. The rest — some 40 percent of the populace — end up endlessly nattering about whether Tehelka was right or wrong about doing what it did.

Meanwhile, Tehelka’s managing editor also appears before TV looking very aggrieved and immediately sets about explaining how means justify ends and ends justify means, and how means justify means, and, above all, how ends justify ends, until listeners are in a perfect tizzy and can no longer distinguish one end of the argument from the other end. It may however slowly begin to dawn on them that Tehelka’s ends are only a way to ensure Tehelka’s means. In other words, Tehelka needs its bottoms to shore up its bottomline.

MORALITY: Until this week, morality was generally considered to be a code of ethics that govern all human behaviour, that instinctive sense people have of what is right and what is wrong. But actually, as someone put it, morals and moralising are two different things and are always found in two entirely different sets of people — i.e., the Moralisers can never be the Moral.

Therefore Bangaru Laxman, who neatly pelicanned down one lakh cash on candid camera, now screams blue murder about Tehelka’s lack of morality, and Tehelka — which did not hesitate to use methods that would make Don Corleone squirm — waxes eloquent about the immorality of politicians. The Samata Party wants Tehelka arrested for its lack of morality, and Tehelka wants the Samata Party arrested for its lack of morality, and the Congress would want everyone arrested for lack of morality because that is the only way it can come to power.

DEFENCE REQUIREMENTS: We have thus far regarded defence requirements as important sounding items like laser-powered submarines and advanced jet trainers, not to mention snowshoes and night vision binoculars, that are required to safeguard the country.

However, from the events of the last week, it would seem that defence requirements are mostly about the bodily requirements of some defence officials who are evidently very partial to the comforts of five-star hotels, who find generous helpings of Royal Stag whiskey irresistible and who regard women as little more than just a collection of assorted body parts.

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