Some (moderately) informed predictions about events to come this year

Every New Year Day, I wake up to two things: a hangover, and a hair of the dog that I toast to the great Bejan Daruwalla. Both the first day of a new year and salutations to the departed astrologer force me willy-nilly to think of past actions and their probable consequences. Obviously, not my own past actions, but of others.

While economists have been predicting V-shaped, W-shaped, Y-front post-Covid economic recoveries, and psephologists start putting other people’s money where their studio microphones are by anticipating a BJP, or Trinamool Congress, or CPI(M), or Congress, or DMK victory, I try and make my own predictions, informed or otherwise, about various things far more entertaining than making New Year resolutions.


I Saw the Sign

Daruwalla, ‘You look at the various planets: Venus has charm, Mercury gives the power to convince, Neptune is the planet of chemicals, and Pluto is the planet of the atom.’ For a professional navel-gazer, the planet of interest for me has to be Uranus, no offence meant. But while as a bona fide, top-class astrologer Daruwalla prefixed his predictions with ‘Ganesha Speaks’, as a humble daruwalla trying to negotiate with the sunlight of the first day of 2021, I’d like to prefix a few predictions with ‘Karthik Speaks’, simply because he seems like the most likely among the gods to carry off a gajrawearing, louche look without upsetting the dharmic types.

So here goes my predictions for 2021 as I channel my inner Karthik:

• The nationwide Covid vaccination programme — that should be called Operation Tika-Toka just to spite the Chinese and their perfidious apps — will see a country not known for its discipline queue up patiently, throwing their usual chaos to the winds. Under the able guidance of Ayushman Bharat CEO Indu Bhushan, who will change his opinion that GoI should not spend a pai on Operation Tika-Toka after he realises that he confused ‘herd mentality’ with ‘herd immunity’, India will be Covid-mukt by 2023. And India will become a superpower.
• China will officially cede not only parts of Ladakh, the whole of Arunachal Pradesh, and bits and bobs of Huawei to India because of the latter’s efficacy as a UN Security Council member for 2021-22, but it will also offer Tibet to New Delhi — an offer that India will reject because of its firm beliefs in Free Tibet as well as in free trade agreements (FTAs) for which it has only the district of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh to offer in exchange. And India will become a superpower.
• Agitating and grumpy farmers will finally realise their fallacy and realise that prosperity lies in most of them moving to the pharmaceutical sector. With another section moving to the ‘see you later’ taxi aggregator and over-the-top streaming content production industries, India’s bloated agricultural labour force of 41.49% of its total employment according to December 2020 World Bank figures, will reach optimum conditions and double their (those remaining as farmers) income. And India will become a superpower.
• The state law against conversions in inter-faith marriages in Uttar Pradesh, and proposed similar laws in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Haryana, will garner huge support from Muslim leaders in non-BJP states after Muslim parents insist that Hindu girls are kept away — by law as well as existing community vigil — from their shahi tukda sons. That would make BJP state leaders accuse Muslim leaders of accusing Hindu young men of ‘not being good enough for their daughters’. In the process, not only will anti-‘love jihad’ laws be thrown in the dustbin, but inter-faith marriage between Hindu girls and Muslim boys will be encouraged by BJP, in the face of minority opposition. And India will become a superpower.

All That He Wants

After the 2019 box office flop (Rs 8 crore budget, Rs 1.7 crore worldwide returns), the Omung Kumar-directed ‘PM Narendra Modi’, actor Vivek Oberoi will become 2021 biggest Bollywood star, as the eponymous hero in Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. In appreciation, the newly elected West Bengal government will declare the film tax-free and facilitate Oberoi’s co-ownership of IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR). And India will become a superpower.

‘Karthik Speaks’ only when spoken to — which is on January 1. My guess is better than yours, but even the great Daruwalla, you must remember, got it wrong when he predicted in the second week of April 2020 that ‘after May 21, this disease is expected to go away with Lord Ganesha’s blessing’. But hang on, whenever ‘Covid will go’, it will be after May 21, 2020! And India will become a superpower.

Happy New Year, dear reader, while Isoak up the future one day at a time.