Mein Kampa Cola

“Consciousness is but a chain of metaphor”
From Discovered Scribbles (Ed. by Bachchoo)

Friends, Indians, countrymen, lend me your ears. At last Indian irony and our national sense of humour has come of age. As an operative in British TV for many years —  and many years ago — I was constantly offered the suspect proposition that one didn’t laugh with Indians, but only at them. At the time Indians and South Asian immigrants to Britain in general were sensitive about “race” and putting situation comedies or sketch shows featuring Asian characters on the telly would always be accused of “stereotyping” and of “racism”.
New communities, immigrants, do tend to take time to adjust to the mores of a country and while they stumble into the language and fill the vacuum of employment and enterprise, taking jobs and manning counters that the native population has abandoned, they tend to produce stereotypes.
Think of the hundreds of sketches of Mr Patel, the British corner store owner, spending his days behind the sales counter for all the world as though he were in a live puppet show.
A measure of the maturity of a community’s or even a nation’s humour would be its ability to cast fresh light on some reality, as an artist’s eye informs or transforms the act of seeing. Finally, the gift of humorous insight into another’s foibles emerges as satire.
For Indian humour to undergo such a change, we would have to leave behind the laugh generated by someone slipping on a banana skin or by the fat lady in an outrageous sari wobbling her cheeks. I think it was Mel Brooks who said, “If I bite my tongue, that’s tragedy. If you fall into a manhole and break your neck, that’s comedy”.
It was certainly Mel Brooks who produced the Broadway and film hit The Producers. The story, as older readers will recall, was about a couple of hustlers who set out to scam old ladies and foolish investors by getting them to buy shares in a stage musical called Springtime for Hitler which they calculate is the nadir of taste and therefore bound to fail. The failure and closure of the production would mean that the producers could trouser the share money and disappear. They produce the musical with songs extolling Adolf Hitler and, in accordance with Ramsammy’s Third Law, which states that a spanner’s natural home is in the works, the play is an instant and runaway Broadway hit. It is so bad that it’s good. (Ramsammy’s Fourth Law states: On an infinite circular race track, the loser is a winner.)
Now along comes our own film director Rakesh Ranjan Kumar who bedazzles the world with an announcement that he is making a Bollywood film called Dear Friend Hitler. Mr Kumar didn’t stop with the simple announcement. He proceeded to tell the foreign media that he aimed to “capture the personality of Adolf Hitler. As a leader he was successful. I want to show why did he lose as a human being? What were the problems, what were the issues, what were his intentions?”
Never since reading the brave romantic works of Shobhaa De who does such sterling service for the unfortunates with reading difficulties, or listening to the interviews and views of that great actress Shilpa Shetty, have I encountered such a bold satirical assault on Western values and history.
It is with supreme wit that Mr Kumar sees Hitler as a man with problems, issues and intentions. The rest of the world has been under the delusion that Hitler, rather than suffering from problems, caused a lot of other people problems. As for issues and intentions, I was under the delusion as were many people of my acquaintance that there exist records of a war, concentration camps, genocide, racial purity doctrines and a lot else. But as Ramsammy’s Fifth Law says, why dwell on the negative?
Think about it.
Never since some Indian spiritual conman fleeced a lot of confused foreigners by confecting truisms, has one of our own played such a convincing trick on the world. Of course, I have seen through it. Mr Kumar can’t make a fool of me, even though he has expanded the story to include the casting of the film. An accomplished actor called Anupam Kher is, in Mr Kumar’s telling, going to grow a square caterpillar on his lip and play the loving Adolf. I wonder if Mr Kher knows that his name is being used for this humorous purpose.
The actor who plays Eva Braun, a beautiful lady named Neha Dhupia, is obviously in on the joke, because the UK newspapers quoted her saying she has “researched widely to prepare for the role”.
“How do you marry the most hated man in the world? I think it’s by taking each day at a time”, says Ms Dhupia.
It’s an astounding insight. A day at a time? Wow! Perhaps even hour by hour? Or minute by minute? I can see what she means. One must cultivate the frame of mind which thinks “now shall we have tandoori Bratwurst for dinner tonight or shall I just bung a chicken in the gas oven?”
Actors must prepare and the talented and intellectual Ms Dhupia must have come to this conclusion having read the Bollywood Hitler’s great work, Mein Kampa Cola.
One disappointing aspect of this Grand Plan is that Mr Kumar has, no doubt as a tease, announced that there will be no songs and dances in the projected film. In the end I am sure he won’t be able to resist a little number whose choreography can be based on the goosestep of the Storm Troopers. And what about catchy little numbers with country shepherdesses in short skirts in the Alps dancing to the tune of
“Hol–lo-caust, Ho-lo-caust,
Yeh hein Super Hit!
Hitlerian Pyar ki kahani
What a load of shhh—oe polish!”

I don’t suppose on the basis of this small sample Mr Kumar will commission me to write the rest of the lyrics and really make this epic love story rock.