How do you define a role model? The most straightforward definition would be this: A person that people admire and look up to as an example to be imitated, a person who shapes our thoughts and influences our opinions.
The nature of what our role models speak interacts with our nature of cognition to make us think and believe what they think and believe. So, when they write a book, or give interviews on TV, or simply tweet, we let their words shape our thoughts and our view of the world. We start looking at the most important things in life and around us from their perspective. We admire how they react and speak about the major happenings that take place – be it political, cultural, environmental, or social in nature.
If you acknowledge the role that role models play in a society, you’d also agree that society needs only the role models who are rational, honest, and full of integrity.
Now you may have looked up to that guy on TV all your life, but when you flipped the cylinder upside down to check the other end, you discovered something you didn’t want to. What’s that? Well, here’s a list of 5 doyens from their respective fields that might put things in perspective.
Kangana Ranaut
If there is a thing called “Biggest betrayals in history”, I’d propose Kangana Ranaut’s name (with my tongue firmly placed in my cheek!)
A rebel in the truest sense of the word, the most rebellious thing Kangana Ranaut has ever done is turning her back on the people who made her into this God of female empowerment – the people on the Left side of the political ideology. After intellectuals abandoned all logic and exhibited blatant sexism towards men in their bid to glorify Kangana as the messiah of gender equality, she went on to reveal herself as a staunch right-winger. But what shattered the hearts on the Left was when, like a classic sanghi, Kangana started to distribute the anti-national certificates.
Let that irony settle into your minds.
Nobody is crying foul because the basic premise of her glorification by left wing feminists was, and will remain, flawed. Apparently, the only qualifier for you being a strong woman is if you can do all the things that are typically associated with men, regardless of the warped nature of those things. Do you use profanity, stalk men, send them explicit emails, morph their pictures to make it look like you had an affair, have the nerves of refusing to produce your phone and laptop as evidence for investigating authorities on the excuse that they fell in water and were anyway your “private devices”, go on the different media channels and defame the family of the person accusing you of perverted behaviour, label a man, who claims that you physically and emotionally harassed him and mixed your period blood in his food, an opportunist? Well, you have made it. The intellectuals of our country consider you the greatest icon of feminism the world has ever known.
Not just that, you will also get bonus points if you do the following:
Come home drunk and wasted with not a care about how that may make your family feel; men do that so why shouldn’t you, or – this is my favourite- start womanspreading because, well, men manspread; so if you can do that as well as men do, you are a powerful women. Because, f*** biology.
About nepotism
So, Miss Kangana has a problem with a producer and director Karan Johar deciding who he should cast in his movies, but when asked why did she decide to chop off the roles of actors in Manikarnika, her response was that she is the director of the movie, so that’s her call.
Let that hypocrisy settle into your minds.
Swara Bhaskar
Unarguably among the finest actors of this generation, Swara Bhaskar, when she speaks, can drive you mad with her awfully tone-deaf, dumb, and primitive thinking.
Swara Bhaskar is a classic example, a perfect representative of her comrades who have been brought up on the leftist drivel – peddle propagandist lies dressed up in nuanced, polished and conveniently random rhetoric and win hearts and minds of people who are still stuck with that west-worshipping syndrome – if it was said in flawless, rich, and Oxfordian English, it must be true.
There is a long list of Swara Bhaskar’s misdemeanours, and they are beginning to grow on us. So whether it is Bhaskar’s rant over Padmavat (wherein she stood up for the movie up until the point it was accused of demeaning a historic Hindu figure but then lost her mind on discovering the movie instead glorified Rajputs and presented its leading Muslim characters as villains) or her coming up with ill-informed rebuttals to right-wing intellectuals every single time they criticise Rahul Gandhi, Kejriwal, Congress, or praise Modi, or even her exploitation of the #MeToo campaign when she revealed how she too was physically violated by a man but only realized so after the #MeToo campaign started, Ms. Bhaskar continues to propagate her misleading agenda, and if you do so much as call her out, you are a troll or simply a Bhakt.
Arvind Kejriwal
What can be said about the man who turned into a cult over a span of just over 2 years. Many years ago, I had used a line from the movie Moneyball to draw an analogy; it went like this, “There are honest politicians, then there are deceitful politicians, then there is 50 feet of crap, and then there is Arvind Kejriwal.” This man has single-handedly taken the political discourse of this country to unfathomable depths of deceit, lies and opportunism.
Anything I say or write here will only look like a statement coming from a right-winger. So whether I point out his sudden change of heart – declaring Congress a cancer for the nation and then going all the way to seek alliance with the same set of people – or his asking school kids to plead their parents to vote for AAP, or even protesting on the streets of Delhi to protect his minister who labelled some African women as prostitutes just because they invited male friends over to their place.
Now I cannot, and will not even attempt to, change a supporter’s mind. So I place the obligation for researching on Kejriwal’s cheap politics on you.
Barkha Dutt
Barkha Dutt is a role model to millions of educated people across the country and beyond; people who love the idea of having as a role model a strong and independent woman in a largely patriarchal society of India. Just that, there is more to Barkha Dutt than that.
Before reading further, I suggest you do some research on her Pakistan-abetting role during the ’99 Kargil War, terrorist-abetting role in the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11/08, her involvement in the Radia Tapes scandal, her blatant and successful attempts to blow the cover of Indian army in 2016 or rather on multiple occasions, or, my favorite, one of her recent videos where she can be seen making no attempts to hide her allegiance to Congress or, in particular, Rahul Gandhi.
But the most interesting and daring journalistic feat that Barkha Dutt pulled off was when she donned the hat of a whistleblower and exposed some dirty secrets of NDTV.
Yogi Adityanath
This man doesn’t even care to pretend he is secular. In a lot of ways, Yogi Adityanath is like those leftist scholars who won’t even make an attempt to hide their allegiance to Congress or AAP or all things anti-Modi. From his clear endorsement of gau-rakshaks who kill people to save cows, to his sheer disdain of all things Islamic, to the support he extended to people who threatened to kill Bhanasli during the Padmavat row, to his mission of renaming all the streets and gullies that were named after Muslim rulers and scholars hundreds of years ago – presenting a random, warped-up logic – Yogi is a nightmare to the secular identity of India.
The fact that he is hardworking and cares about development doesn’t make any of it right. Am I scared to include his name on the list and write all that I have written about him? Yes.
And that’s about it
If you are offended by the article and have a rebuttal, do me a favor and don’t start rambling about why there are more women than men in the list and further going on to label me a woman-hater. I know you have a penchant for drama.
For any other grievances, be my guest.
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