Dilip D’Souza does not read The Examined Life. In the course of not reading my blog, he runs across a comment by me on my blog saying that I cheered the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
The Babri Masjid, if you recollect, was demolished in 1992. At the risk certainty of giving away my age, I was 17 years old at that time. The comment itself makes it clear that I have reconsidered my view since. A person who, at the age of 40, admired a psycopathic mass-murderer should not be throwing stones at people aged 17, especially since stones can’t do time travel yet. A sane man would have, on reflection, passed by the chance to pick up the stone. But we are talking of Dilip D’Souza. So out comes a post. I am apparently an “economist” and a libertarian who was “delighted” by the demolition of the Masjid. The characterization delights me, as I am not really a trained economist. I just did a couple of courses as part of my MBA. And I had written “cheered”, not “delighted”, but it is close enough.
Having done this of course, the problem is to get back plausible deniability. Dilip needs to get back to not reading my blog. The SOP so far is to claim that though he does not read the blog, one of my posse of admirers (or detractors) sent the link to him. But this time, it is a slightly different. This time, he adds a postscript. Apparently, the economist/libertarian has written to him and remains delighted that the Babri Masjid was demolished. Ingenious, isn’t it? If I protest that I did not in fact write to him, it will turn out that it was someone else, not me. In March 2009, an epidemic broke out among economist libertarians wherein they all confessed their teenage delight when the Babri Masjid was demolished to whoever was within reach. If I don’t protest, the insinuation that I remain delighted with the demolition of the Masjid stays. If only Dilip D’Souza were smarter, he would have been a valuable asset in India’s psychops.
Reading his article on Che Guevara I am confused why does’t he like Modi. Didn’t he do with conviction whatever he was supposed to do ?
BTW have disabled gravatar ?
Nope. I haven’t done anything at all. Neither enabled it nor disabled it. No idea if it came with the default installation and if so what happened to it.
Hey, i don’t think Dilip was referring to you
No, of course not. See the postscript? There the economist-libertarian is referring to a “conversation” which I will interpret as an actual physical conversation. That can’t be referring to me, because, you know, he is in Mumbai and I am in Hyderabad and we have no occasion to talk on the phone. So, it must be someone else.
Now of course, when you are having a conversation and someone tells you something shocking, say “I used to admire Hitler when I was 5 years old.” what would you do? If you are a normal person, you’d ask: “Do you still do so now?” If you are Dilip, you go and blog about it. That is exactly how you have conversations if you are Agent D’Souza.
Here is my embarrassing confession, I never liked Hitler.