Stories and Lies

My 4 year old likes to hear stories that involve her stuffed toys going to school. It’s fun for her only if they do dumb and/or outrageous things in those stories. Every now and then, I’ll tell her the stuffed toys went to school, studied, listened to their teachers and came back like good boys. That’ll make her very angry: what kind of useless story is that, she’ll ask? I am guessing she’d agree with these lines from Grey’s Anatomy:
“Smooth rides make for boring stories. A little calamity? That’s worth talking about.”
Noah Berlatsky lists a few not-so-little calamities that make for great stories:
“The robots revolt and kill us all. Religious fanatics take over and treat women as chattel. A vicious dictatorship is instituted that kills children for sport. The planet runs out of food, water, fuel, or all of them, and civilization tears itself apart. The aliens invade, the meteor hits, the zombies arise, the rapture raptures.”
On the other hand, there is also that hugely popular self-described “show about nothing”, Seinfeld…

At least those are just stories. Not so is the case of what Sadanand Dhume calls the Modi Derangement Syndrome:
“It describes the inability to discuss anything related to the prime minister in less than apocalyptic terms…(Some) claimed that the then Gujarat chief minister had “presided over the genocide of millions”…His critics have produced a steady drumbeat of stories that suggest that India has taken a sharp authoritarian turn. (With her gift for understatement, Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy prefers “totalitarian”.) In this dystopian tale of jackboots on the Ganga, the fragile flower of India’s democracy is in the process of being stomped into pulp.”
Contrast that with reality, says Dhume:
“(Modi’s) power is constrained in ways that would be unimaginable to a genuinely authoritarian figure such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or even Turkey’s Recep Erdogan…Can anyone imagine Putin losing a battle to make it marginally less hard to acquire land for industry and infrastructure?”

In his book, Serendepities, Umberto Eco wrote:
“The story was too fascinating to be derailed by fact.”
Modi’s detractors certainly subscribe to that view…except they apply it to reality! They would do well to remember what Michael Bassey Johnson said:
“You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.”

At least, my 4 year old only asks for her stories to be removed from reality and exciting. The like of Arundhati Roy, on the other hand, are liars.

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