To Modi, with love

The American writer, journalist and general curmudgeon H L Mencken once defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." After watching a recent pro-Modi propaganda music video made by Pahlaj Nihalani, who also happens to be the Chairperson of the Central Board of Film Certification of India, I confess to feeling a similar bout of sadism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be enjoying Nihalani's nationalist agitprop.

One would assume that almost every aspect of the video would militate against this eventuality. To begin with, it was, in essence, a political advertisement screened during the interval of a movie proper – the latest Salman Khan-starrer Prem Ratan Dhan Payo – in India's commercial movie theatres. Apart from the loud, garish aesthetics of the music video itself, we see the misleading use of several images and footage, which were neither related to Modi nor to India. What self-respecting human being, one thought, would ever take the video seriously?