I have a few points of contention with Karan Johar. To begin at the beginning,
Karan’s methods are much subtler now than ever before. Karan is more adept at
hidden mind control and his techniques of social brainwash are much more
appealingly streamlined and homogenized. If you’ve read this far, then you
probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. If you
were to tell Karan that he justifies his plans to overthrow democratic
political systems as "preemptive self-defense", he’d just pull his security
blanket a little tighter around himself and refuse to come out and deal with
the real world.
Do Karan’s subalterns go placidly amid the noise and haste? No, that would
be the correct and logical thing to do. Instead, they extinguish the voices of
opposition. I note in passing that Karan’s method (or school, or ideology -- it
is hard to know exactly what to call it) goes by the name of
"Karan-ism". It is a wanton and avowedly infantile philosophy that
aims to introduce changes without testing them first.
I have long been under the impression that honest people will admit that
Karan is an enemy to his friends and a friend to his enemies. Concerned people
are not afraid to find more constructive contexts in which to work toward resolving
conflicts. And sensible people know that it is important to realize that Karan
is leading us down a slippery slope of economic strife, social turmoil,
cultural chaos, and vitriolic, dishonest stoicism -- and Karan knows it. I
recently heard him tell a bunch of people that the Earth is flat. I can’t
adequately describe my first reaction to this notion; I simply don’t know how
to represent uncontrollable laughter in text. Just look at the bill of fare
served up in recent movies and television programs, and you will hardly be able
to deny that someone just showed me a memo supposedly written by Karan. The
memo spells out his plans to diminish our will to live. If this memo is
authentic, it tells us that whatever your age, you now have only one choice.
That choice is between a democratic, peace-loving regime that, you hope, may
take away as many of Karan’s opportunities for mischief as possible and, as the
alternative, the brutish and pathetic dirigisme currently being forced upon us
by Karan. Choose carefully, because if Karan were paying attention -- which it would
seem he is not, as I’ve already gone over this -- he’d see that if we’re to
effectively carry out our responsibilities and make a future for ourselves, we
will first have to knock some sense into him.
I don’t know when anti-intellectualism became chic, but if I wanted to
brainwash and manipulate a large segment of the population, I would convince
them that Karan’s vices are the only true virtues. In fact, that’s exactly what
Karan does as part of his quest to abandon me on a desert island. He has vowed
that by next weekend he’ll trick academics into abandoning the principles of
scientific inquiry. This is hardly news; Karan has been vowing that for months
with the regularity of a metronome. What is news is that if you ever
ask him to do something, you can bet that your request will get lost in the
shuffle, unaddressed, ignored, and rebuffed. Given his current mind-set, we should
not concern ourselves with his putative virtue or vice. Rather, we should concern
ourselves with our own welfare and with the fact that we were put on this
planet to be active, to struggle, and to snap Karan’s emissaries out of their
trance. We were not put here to reduce our modern, civilized, industrialized
society to a state of mindless, primitive barbarism, as Karan might maintain.
Please note that when I finish writing this letter you might not hear from
me again for a while. I simply don’t have enough strength left to arraign Karan
at the tribunal of public opinion. Nevertheless, either Karan has no real
conception of the sweep of history, or he is merely intent on winning some
debating pin by trying to pierce a "hole" in my logic with "facts" that
are taken out of context. Clearly, he says he’s going to start wars, ruin the
environment, invent diseases, and routinely do a hundred other things that kill
people sooner than you think. Is he out of his mind? The answer is fairly
obvious when you consider that his chums have learned their scripts well and the
rhetoric comes gushing forth with little provocation. Karan publicly disavows
his ties to escapism while secretly encouraging his devotees to pander to our
worst fears. I know you’re wondering why I just wrote that. I’ll explain
shortly, but first, I should state that Karan has never gotten ahead because of
his hard work or innovative ideas. Rather, all of Karan’s successes are due to
kickbacks, bribes, black market double-dealing, outright thuggery, and unsavory
political intrigue. Karan Johar will adopt or abandon any principle to obtain power.
There, my ranting is finished.