India: Sense, sensibilities and no humour

‘There is more logic in humour than in anything else. Because, you see, humour is truth,’ noted Danish comedian Victor Borge. He had it on point. Often, a comedian’s joke cloaks a dose of reality, its inflection point is when it hits home. In India, where free speech itself is being lampooned, it can also bring jail time. Societies that peel the layers are progressive; those that even laugh at themselves and their leaders are golden. Sense of humour becomes shaky when citizens bury their present in digging up a centuries-old past.

Actor Amitabh Bachchan, in his heyday, was the angry young man of Bollywood. That era is being played out for real within India’s political class and on the country’s streets, where people are like characters from Orwell’s 1984 – dour and grim alongside a heightened state of resentment.