Good Morning India
February 14, 2021
What exactly does it take to make our Morning Good? Before you get yourself worked up, just relax. I am not talking about “Achhe Din”, only “Achhi Subha”. A warm cup of tea in the balcony, a hug from your better half, a kiss on the cheeks from your kids, or a good look at the newspaper on a couch can be highly refreshing.
But let me guess, as a responsible Corona warrior, you have already stopped the Newspaper. That’s fine, so that brings us to our mobile set. After checking out the notifications and wishing a few guys you can’t recall from their faces, “Happy Birthday”, you start with the most important job of your day, Scrolling. You are in an absolute rush to gobble up all that happened to the World after you left your phone alone only a few hours ago. Some of us start with Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un while others begin with the Whatsapp Good Morning messages. Masi, Bua, brothers, sisters, and your crushes have all forwarded their customary morning messages. So, expectedly they are good and are enjoying a Good Morning.
This brings us to the two latest scores; one of Corona and the other of IPL, EPL, and all other premium leagues going around the World in empty stadiums. India outscores all other countries in terms of daily infections and we are just behind Uncle Sam and Donald Trump informs the world that PM Modi has praised his valiant efforts against the Pandemic; WHO praises the Pakistan model of containment and China fights with another new virus which makes men infertile. For a brief moment, you are in a dilemma on whether to smile or laugh out loud but realizing the gravity of the situation, you prefer to keep sombre.
Just when you look to change the topic, you find glamorous B-town actresses stare at you from the screens with their infectious smiles. No, they are not alluring you to Bombay, Goa, Paris, or Switzerland, instead, they have been called by Narcotics Control Bureau for a grave offence on Whatsapp. Alarming indeed and this sends you scurrying for checking all your chats in your college days which may contain something similar. But soon you realise the futility of search as all so-called end-to-end encrypted chats are decipherable from cloud storage and mobile clones. Again you are in a dilemma on whether to rejoice the thorough cleansing of the drug mafia or to mourn the loss of privacy of all those naughty chats which you thought were classified information to the outside world.
The banning of Tik Tok has brought in a flurry of similar content on our newsfeed from an unexpected sector. Yes, our electronic media. If you had by any chance missed the previous night’s orgasmic debates on all our TV channels, which go by the name prime-time debates, the snippets are there on your phone news feed. Screaming anchors who look more like ringmasters in suits preside over a terrible cacophony on Nation building. The short snippets in the newsfeed can give serious competition to Tik Tok and finally you decide to laugh out loud.
Enough is enough. The last sip of tea has long gone cold and so have the last bites of breakfast. While you have a bath you try to recollect the single sentence in the news video which made you laugh out loud uncontrollably. Yes, it was the news anchor managing a serious debate on Nation building with a single sentence delivered repeatedly at the top of his voice, “Aap Chup Rahiye”. About 10 panellists trying to put forth their diverging views are silenced by a single sentence “Please Shut Up”.
Yes, maybe it’s better to keep quiet; To keep your voice silent; To silence your Pen. Otherwise, the agencies are anyways waiting round the corner. Maybe whatever is happening around us is for the betterment of the country. Maybe, it’s a Good Morning after all.
