Sagarika Ghosh.Celebrity anchor. Ebullient demagogue. Neologist. Of the many ways in which she has enriched the political lexicon of the twenty-first century, nothing perhaps will be considered as significant as her coining of the term “Internet Hindus”, a generic epithet for those denizens of the Internet world who she believes assail her whenever she writes anything about Muslims, Pakistan or Modi.
It is not difficult to identify the “Internet Hindu”. Many of them, in fact, have appropriated proudly the pejorative label. For those that don’t identify themselves as such in their monikers themselves , there are other visual cues that reveal their Internet Hindu genus, like the preponderance of orange/saffron in their online avatar pages (like Twitter profile) or the use of Hindu religious imagery as abstract pictorial representations of their digital identities (Twitter DPs). Other distinguishing features include, but are not limited to, having highly connected social graphs, an intensely uncritical devotion to Modi, Subramanium Swamy and anyone who is taking on the Congress at the current time (an enemy’s enemy being a friend), consequent concerted swarm-like persistent engagement with those who criticize the exalted few (the intensity being a monotonically increasing function of how big a celebrity the person with the heretical opinion is) , and the ascription of conspiratorial intent (all contrarian opinion is mandatorily funded by Arabs and/or Sonia Gandhi) to all those who disagree, as if only they have the inalienable and exclusive right to speak from conviction while everyone else is compensated for their opinion.
Ridley Scott made a bloody good movie once. It’s name was “Alien”. Scary cat-face. A terrifying ship-horn. A sense of impending doom. Claustrophobia. Excellent use of light. And of silence. Icky jumping cauliflowers that eat faces. Organic dildos that penetrate. But from inside. More gooey stuff splattering in two minutes than two hours of a Japanese bukkake video.
