Prince Rahul obliged India with a TV interview after 10 years. Apparently, age did not dim his instinctive ability to respond to questions that nobody in India was asking. Rahul was mocked relentlessly for this on social media, and other unpaid media. However, we conjecture
- that maybe, just maybe, that his team worked with the PR firm Dentsu to shape a 'hedgehog strategy' customized for the princely genius.
- that the 500 crores were not spent in vain. That after Dentsu confirmed that the prince's sole trick (that in itself was surprising, given his ill-endowed gene pool) was an ability to remember and reproduce up to 4 statements, the plan was simply to get this message across regardless of the questions.
- that in any case, the UPA is so far down the opinion polls that there is no way but up for them, and they had nothing to lose. This was the right time.
- that the soap-watching, mentally colonized India would simply look at the buzz words in TV news channel tickers the next day (thanks to VIKAS PANDITA
RTI: 69 times, System: 76, Empower: 25, Women: 19
Next, here is a simple word-cloud I created using the text from the interview transcript. If people only saw these words without context, and ignore the total nonsense that links these words and the actual questions asked, it looks pretty reasonable. A serious guy talking about people, system, riots, and country. wah.
Public Response
We hypothesize that the job of the primary paid / anti-social media partners was not to actually host the actual interview (Arnab was the sacrificial goat), but to simply filter the these buzzwords from the gibberish by de-contextualizing the answers from the questions, and spoon-feed it to India as shown above. Then, for added safety, you have the English-speaking sepoys ever ready to intellectualize even such gibberish and add the right amount of sanctimoniousness to justify this diabolical plan of hoodwinking the public. As they say, once you've lost your dignity, there's nothing to lose. In fact, if one were to re-watch the interviews without looking at the questions at all, and just the answers, Rahul indeed does a plausible job. And we that was always the plan from day-1, and it was apparent with a few minutes of the start of the interview. The only problem with voting in a bright chap like Rahul Gandhi along with a UPA-3 is this:
just one example. If a Pakistan were to take advantage of this situation to declare war on India and attack Kashmir, Mr. PM may launch an invasion to annex the Andamans. Or he may file RTIs, or launch a Rajiv Yojana to empower women that his dynasty impoverished. In real life, useful answers are tied to the question. inextricably.
What I will take away from this decision of the prince and his courtiers to make a mockery of Arnab (rather than the more loyal anchors of NDTV/CNN-IBN) is the sheer cynicism, sense of entitlement and vanity, and the utter disregard for a long-suffering public that is required to even contemplate such adharma. And of course the paid media that participates willingly in this sham.
Sane Indians responded thus:
1. Recognized Rahul's incredulously poor intelligence and laughed their heads off
2. Fact-checking web-sites scrutinized the many unsubstantiated claims in his interview and exposed him for the incorrigible liar that he was in that interview.
3. Others recognized the kid-glove treatment given to Rahul and presented the interview conducted in an alternative universe.
4. Then we have the excellent site "Ask Rahul Anything" (http://engagedino.com/askrg) that is going viral, which allows you to ask Rahul any question you want.
The Missing Questions
We managed to identify ten questions to Rahul's answers that were previously float aimlessly, orphaned without any questions to go along, using the 'Ask Rahul Anything' website. Our analysis absolves Rahul of all crimes: we show that in fact our questions result in no unsubstantiated claims, we questioned all answers briefly, honestly, and to the point, on a wide range of topics:
1. Futility of Modi's smart cities (brightest bulb - 1)
2. The brightest bulb in the dynasty - 2
3. The economic race with China
4. 1:1 debate with Narendra Modi
5. The specific women he will empower
6. Moving from undesirable pSecularism to undesirable secularism
7. The original interview: interview or a date
8. The brightest bulb in the dynasty -3
9. How Manmohan became PM
10. National security
