Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine. The Vine was on leave last week because it’s important to unplug from the Matrix from time to time and perceive the real nature of the physical universe as opposed to the metaphysical nature of the cyber universe we dwell in. Of course, the real reason is that it was one’s wedding anniversary week, so one went to a beautiful resort to keep the peace. Everyone who has gone through the proverbial nuptial fire knows that the difference between ‘marital’ and ‘martial’ is simply the placement of the letter ‘t’, which must hold its position to maintain the peace.
Jokes apart, in this week’s edition we take stock of the poll dance, explain why a gunman at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner epitomises Americana, explore why no one is reading your tweets, and finally discuss the trials and travails of trying to enter a lounge in an Indian airport.
Poll Daddy
Most ideas—good (beheadings, bread-free diets) or bad (republicanism, fraternity, equality)—can be traced to the French Revolution, and perhaps the one that has stuck the most is democracy. Now readers of the Vine know what one has often argued: that democracy is flawed in various ways, that it is suitable for ancient Greek city-states and not sprawling countries with diverse voters, where, when the wrong person gets the votes, it is labelled populist or majoritarian—even though the point of democracy is to secure a majority of votes. And sometimes the system is so flawed that it leads its voters to believe that a debt-ridden former reality star is the best person to hold the nuclear football and was chosen by God.
It is true that the system can often reward those who are close to Mammon or have the gift of the gab, but it remains the least evil and best form of governance, much like a hamburger is the best form of a sandwich. Some folks, who often fall for the small sample size fallacy and tend to romanticise places like Singapore, argue that a benevolent dictatorship is a superior form of governance, but they often forget that, in most of the real world, any benevolent dictator ceases to be benevolent and becomes more of a dictator with the passage of time.
The true proof in the pudding of democracy’s success is the fact that even the most authoritarian states like North Korea, Russia, or China have to pretend to have elections, even if there is only one candidate or party to vote for. Now most global indices—whose flawed methodologies would make even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems beg for mercy—often like to call Indian ‘democracy’ flawed, which is seriously problematic given that, since Independence, India is one of the few nations in the world with universal suffrage.
Even in America, thanks to Jim Crow laws, Black Americans could be prevented from voting up until the 1960s. In India, on the other hand, every individual—rich or poor, homeless or otherwise—could vote irrespective of their class, caste, gender, or any other variable.
I do not know who is going to win elections in the five states. I do know that exit polls will be mocked and derided by those who find themselves on the wrong side of them, but they are a necessary evil that keeps poor journalists, psephologists, and other largely unemployable people engaged for an evening. It is one of the sideshows of Indian democracy, which is, warts and all, great. Why do I say that?
Last year, my mother was bedridden thanks to a spinal fracture which made it hard for her to lift her head, let alone walk. Now, a year later, thanks to some remarkable work by doctors and the miracles of modern medicine, she went and voted in this year’s elections in West Bengal. This was the first time she had voted since 1967, and she said everything was smooth, including attendants who helped her with her wheelchair so she could cast her vote.
In a world where we often hear about how hard the voting process is, India’s election machinery is a daily reminder of how much effort the various arms of this great democracy put in to ensure that even its most underprivileged voter has the option to exercise their franchise. No democracy index in the world can truly capture that remarkable achievement. So irrespective of who wins in the five states that go to vote, the true winner—to borrow a line from an irreverent cricket commentator—is democracy.
Shots Fired
America might be the shining city on the top of the hill, where speech is free and the soda refills are infinite, but it does have its fair share of peculiarities that are reflected in the acrimonious issues that divide the nation, like abortion, gun control, gender theory, and whether Diet Coke is better than Coke Zero. The inanity was perfectly captured in an SNL skit titled Washington’s Dream, in which America’s founding father explains that the real reason Americans needed freedom from the British was not to ensure liberty, but to implement their own measurement system and grammar.
Jean-Paul Sartre once said: “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you,” and America, with its freedom from Britain and other colonial powers, developed its own peculiarities, one of which is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a night where the press and the White House ostensibly bury their differences over a few shots. Normally, those shots are jokes, like Obama’s anger translator or Reagan dialling in after an assassination attempt, but this year they came from the barrel of a deranged gunman who had managed to waltz past security.
Tweets Unread
When Elon Musk was up in arms with Donald Trump, when he memorably mocked Trump for being on the Epstein files before deleting his tweets, he briefly consulted Curtis Yarvin, a former computer engineer turned political blogger who often argues for replacing American democracy with a CEO-style monarchy or an American Caesar. Yarvin might not be particularly well known outside MAGA circles, but his work is often cited by members of Team Trump and has influenced figures such as Musk and JD Vance.
Yarvin has a reputation for saying exactly what he thinks, regardless of who it offends.
Despite being close to Musk, he has no hesitation in criticising him, as he did recently when he mocked the version of Twitter that has emerged under Musk. Sharing a post about the platform’s engagement algorithm, he wrote: “Elon paying $47B for Twitter was like a Yanomamo Indian in the Amazon trading a sack of gold dust for an AK-47. He has a sense of its awesome power. He doesn’t know how to load it, how to fire it, or what end the bullet comes out of. But he has the coolest war club in the tribe.”
The post he was referring to was not a casual complaint about low likes, nor the usual algorithmic folklore that surfaces whenever someone’s reach dips. It came from an X user called BLΛC, an artist who said he had spent four years on the platform, built more than 60,000 followers, posted every day with discipline, and then watched his reach fall by more than 40% over three months without changing anything about his work.
Postscript by Prasad Sanyal: The Great Indian Lounge
There was a time when an airport lounge did not need to announce itself. It simply existed like a well-read person in a noisy room. You entered, lowered your voice without being told to, and sat in the quiet confidence that the world, for a brief hour, would behave.
This past weekend at Indira Gandhi International Airport’s Terminal 2, the world had other plans. The line outside the lounge stretched long enough to provoke thought. Not anger but thought, because queues in India are rarely about waiting; they are about philosophy, about the delicate negotiation between patience and opportunity, about the unspoken belief that if there is a system, it exists primarily to be outwitted and skipped.
Post Postscript
Word of the Week: Assassin
The word assassin traces back to the medieval Nizari Ismailis, a Shia sect based at Alamut Castle between the 11th and 13th centuries, known for targeted political killings. It entered Europe via Arabic ḥashshāshīn, becoming Latin assassini and then French assassin. Chroniclers like Marco Polo popularised the idea that it meant “hashish users,” but historians see this as propaganda. Some scholars suggest it came from Asāsiyyūn, meaning “those faithful to the foundation.” Over time, the nuance vanished. What remained was the meaning: a person who carries out deliberate, targeted killing.
Book of the Week: Angels & Demons
If you didn’t need the origin story of the word assassin, you are probably familiar with the Dan Brown novel Angels & Demons, which, in my opinion, is a far better book than The Da Vinci Code.
Set largely in Rome, the novel follows Robert Langdon as he is pulled into a race against time involving the Illuminati, antimatter, and a trail of symbols hidden across some of the most iconic sites in Vatican City. It is part thriller, part history lesson, and part guided tour, written with the pace of a man who has no intention of letting you sleep.
What makes Angels & Demons work is not just its plot, which borders on the absurd in parts, but its ability to make esoteric subjects feel urgent. Particle physics, secret societies, Renaissance art, and papal politics are all thrown into the same cauldron and stirred with just enough conviction that you are willing to suspend disbelief.
The book thrives on tension: science versus religion, faith versus empiricism, secrecy versus revelation. Brown does not resolve these tensions as much as he dramatises them, turning what could have been a dry philosophical debate into a page-turner.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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