You may have seen, heard about, got involved or moral policed public displays of affection. You know, when a couple holds hands, kisses or cuddles in public.
(And somewhere in India a sanskari uncle, a.k.a an Alok Nath, burps real hard everytime someone engages in PDA). PDA is old and totally not sanskari. Of late, India has its own favourite thing to practice and bond over:
Yes, my fellow Indians! PDB is the new thing on the block. Don’t believe me? Some recent incidents will show you how much Indians love PDB – check this out.
An Airtel customer called Pooja Singh refused to be served by a customer service assistant because his name was Shoaib:
And you’d think that Airtel would certainly not pander to such bigoted requests, right? Think again.
They were happy to accommodate with a ‘Gaganjot’. Soon enough HR will send out job advertisements like matrimonial ads saying “Upper caste Hindu male required to take customer service calls at Airtel. Muslims can directly ‘go-to-Pakistan’.”
That day is not far.
Acclaimed chef Atul Kochhar had the guts to say this after Priyanka Chopra merely played a role in a TV show “Quantico” where writers of the show created some fictional Hindu terrorists.
Apparently, he forgot that he was earning his bread and butter working for Muslims, serving Muslim customers, in an Islamic country. Oh, snap! And as the realisation dawned on him, pat came the bigoted apology:
But once out of the quiver, the arrow doesn’t go back.
Of course, the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel in Dubai had to consider this as a serious issue.
Yup, they sacked him. Good riddance.
If trolling Priyanka Chopra wasn’t enough, there is always Sushma Swaraj to harass. Read the whole story here, but the following tweets pretty much sum up the entire incident.
[FACEPALM]
But if you think our Public Displays of Bigotry were confined to just tweets, then you couldn’t be more wrong. No PDB is complete without a full-blown mob lynching.
According to a Deccan Chronicle report, “A man was lynched by a frenzied mob in Uttar Pradesh’s Hapur, around 70 km from Delhi, allegedly over rumours of cow slaughter. The man’s friend was seriously injured. The incident took place at a sugarcane field in Hapur’s Pilakhuwa village on Monday. The victim has been identified as 45-year-old Qasim. The injured Samayuddin, 65, was being treated at a local hospital but he did not survive.”
I can’t even share the picture and video here because of how brutal they are. The old man was begging for some water until his last breath, but the PUBLIC DISPLAY OF BIGOTRY was a higher calling.
Oh damn, and these are just the major incidents from the past week. So, here’s the deal- you can enjoy PDB as long as you live in an isolated world where you’d never have to interact with people of other faiths, cultures, identities and sexual orientations. Which I guess is only possible if you travel to Mars or North Korea, but I’m unsure if Kim Jong would like the latter.
But as long as you want to live on earth and enjoy trade relations with other countries and have professionals from all over the world cure your diseases, the working class from all over the country ride your rickshaws and taxis, eat delicious kebabs and biryanis… you’d have to take your Public Displays of Bigotry down so many notches. Because as American author Chris Crutcher says:
