We are a gullible people, aren’t we?
Not because we are unintelligent. Far from it. Indians can run global companies, head international banks, become scientists, doctors, engineers and professors all over the world. But strangely, when it comes to politics and public life, we often become willing victims of bluff.
Maybe because deep down inside us sits a small insecurity. A constant need to feel important. A hunger to believe that the world is finally standing up and saluting us.
And so the performance begins.
A video clip appears on television. Our leader walks into a room full of world leaders. He leans towards one of them and mutters something. The other leader smiles politely. The clip stops there. Immediately WhatsApp universities erupt with excitement.
“Look how boldly he spoke!”
“See the fear in the foreign leader’s eyes!”
“India has arrived!”
Nobody asks the obvious question: “What exactly did he say?”
For all we know he may have asked where the washroom was.
But we do not want facts.
We want drama.
We want chest thumping.
We want edited heroism with background music.
I once saw a priest after being on television proudly telling his congregation how he had shouted back at a television anchor during a debate.
The clip shown to his people ended with his angry outburst.
His parishioners applauded wildly. What was not shown was the next thirty seconds in which the anchor calmly dismantled his arguments and left the good priest blinking helplessly at the camera.
But why show that part?
Truth nowadays is edited like film trailers.
Only the explosions are shown.
Never the flop ending.
And we, sitting with our cups of tea and plates of bhajiyas, swallow everything happily.
Perhaps this is why propaganda works so easily. We do not verify. We forward. We do not analyse. We applaud.
We do not ask questions because questions disturb our emotional comfort.
Even on social media, half the country behaves like unpaid marketing agents for politicians. Somebody posts a fake quote supposedly said by Einstein praising India, and within minutes thousands proudly share it without checking whether Einstein ever said such a thing or even knew the fellow being praised.
Bluffing the nation has become an art form.
Sometimes we bluff by showing a buffoon talking gibberish, like our diplomat in Norway while supposedly answering a question, posed by a journalist, and our eager forwarders showing it as an achievement.
But the bigger tragedy is this: the bluff succeeds only because we are willing audiences.
The magician survives because the crowd desperately wants magic to be real.
And somewhere between edited videos, screaming television debates and patriotic background music, we have stopped asking the simplest and most intelligent question in the world:
“Is this actually true?”
Because the rest of the world laughs at our gullibility..!
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Robert Clements is a newspaper columnist and writes a daily column, which has graced the pages of over 60 newspapers and magazines, from a daily column in the Khaleej Times, Dubai, the Morning Star, London, and in nearly every state in India, from The Statesman in Kolkata, to the Kashmir Times in Kashmir to the Trinity Mirror in Chennai.
We are gullible. We are easily distracted. My daschund has better presence of mind. He does not run after any distraction, including a bone thrown into the room, when he is determined he is not entering his room. We run way faster than that after a thrown bread, leave alone a bone. Of course we need AI, since natural intelligence seems to be failing humankind quite badly!
Well said, “we swallow everything happily.” and act like “unpaid marketing agents to all the bluff.
On the dot.
Honestly it feels less like political debate now and more like collective emotional maintenance.
That’s what’s fascinating to me about modern politics now. Governments don’t even need hardcore propaganda all the time anymore. The public does most of the work voluntarily through forwarding, defending, exaggerating and attacking anyone who questions the story.
A lot of it also comes from people needing certainty and belonging. Once politics becomes part of identity, criticizing a leader feels personal to supporters, almost like attacking their tribe or worldview itself. So even obvious contradictions get protected because the narrative matters more than the actual event.
We have become a laughing stock of the world.
Yes Bernice. Thank you.