For Rahul Gandhi

My dear Rahul:

I understand that you are a very sweet boy (in India we call people boys and girls if they are not married or if they are married but act in television serials or films). Now, sweetness has its limits. The reason some of us like Laloo Prasad Yadav is because he minces no words. He did not like what Raj Thackeray was doing, so he called him “mental”.

You, on the other hand, said this: “What Raj Thackeray is doing is wrong; this will divide the country.”

No. If you look long and hard you will see that the country has been divided for many years. If it isn’t the migrant problem there are separatist movements; there are problems of divisions among the rich and poor, rural and urban. How can Raj divide the country when his uncle did not manage to do so? If the northies are prevented from working in Mumbai, the first people who will complain will be the Marathi maanus. They are so accustomed to sitting in Mantralaya and sipping tea from saucers that they will miss the auto rickshaw, taxi wallahs and paan wallahs. The hawaldars will miss their hafta!

You say, “The more walls you raise the more divisions are created; either India or no India.”

This is almost a Bushism. These walls are only curtains set on fire. Just make sure that mummyji does something with Shivrajji and gets him to move some motion, as they say in Parliament speak.

You said, “There’s nothing like North India or West India or South India—it’s only India and this you should remember.”

If you stand for elections will you dump the family constituency and contest from the South or Gujarat? It is easy to mouth these homilies and ask others to follow such honourable ideas. Besides, I do not think identifying yourself with an area is wrong; we have professions and ideologies we identity with. I feel very strongly about being a Mumbaikar. But I relish other places as well. These add to our repertoire. We are fortunate to have so many cultures.

By the way, by your logic there should not be coalition politics too.

Finally, you end, “If you start identifying yourself as a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, the differences will only grow and a Bal Thackeray will exploit it and someone else in another state.”

These exploiters brand you. That is different from identification. Incidentally, do ask your boys in the Congress, and girls too, to stop playing with that Imam Bukhari and other useless people for vote bank reasons.

Does it strike you that you gave this speech in Uttarakhand, which separated from its own due to identity reasons?

Otherwise, all is well that bends well, na?