To war!!! (all for Shilpa)

These are grim times we live in. With the threat of nuclear war looming large over us and the Western and Eastern world very polarized, it is a time to hold your loved ones that bit closer, reminiscence about your life and be convinced that you should have shot your irritating neighbour’s barking dog when you had the chance. If you as usual, have stayed cocooned from the world with the pitiful excuse of work and bettering society, then you my friend have been living in a fool’s world, for a storm has been brewing and it involved a lissome lass from our country who traveled across two seas to be paid to be called a Pakistani and a dog.

Yes, it is to the Shilpa Shetty controversy that I refer. The one involving a foul mouthed woman, a lot of other people, some cameras, and a big house all of which apparently somehow makes up a television show that no one seems to want to watch until a diplomatic issue is created.

Imagine the corridors of the Westminster Abbey on a cold and frosty night, when even the spies grudge themselves a night’s sleep albeit with a bit of guilt. And then they switched on the television where the P-word is put out into the universe and the somewhat weepy Shilpa is called no less than a dog.

Suddenly, phones rang across the UK and the globe, with thousands of Indians calling each other to tell each other that they had seen Shilpa, their own Shilpa, the one who came to see them only when she released a movie that no one wanted to see, being racially insulted. I am sure for a very brief instant the English government feared that the Indians were finally taking over after making them dependent on their now famous curry.

I mean look at it. The mallus have the Gelf, the gujjus have the UH, the sardars have the Kaneda and Africa is to busy fighting with itself and is unlikely to do anything about anything anyway. So I can understand the stab of fear the west felt when they heard of the incident and promptly went into damage control mode by telling us that there was no racism except among common people.

But now as we stand facing each other across two continents, nuclear weapons at the ready, we must wonder, what can we really do? In the words of a villain of a movie starring the incredibly fast Jet Li, “There is a time for diplomacy and there is a time for action…The diplomacy is over.” After that he begins shooting, and Jet Li does his kung fu stuff, and since none of us can do either I say, at least let’s do away with diplomacy. The Brits had the chance and they blew it. Now it’s our turn.

Let us start by calling a British celebrity onto our very own version of the show and put him/her in the same room as our own guys and see how he does. Then when the Brits call to say that they don’t like being called Americans, we can give them the Gabbar Singh laugh. I further say, lets give them a dose of their own medicine by doing the same things that they do. Let us also breed tabloids that publish bilge, breed an attitude of absolute conformism when it comes to foreign policy, be racist to anyone darker than white and have irrelevant national celebrities. The frightening part is, we have done that.