Disclaimer: All names, characters and incidents mentioned in this column, however believable, are entirely satirical. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, organisations and products is intended or should be inferred
Nvidia makes history as the first corporation to become the world’s most valuable company without an overreliance on child labour. Founded by Jensen Huang (born in China and raised in Taiwan, but made in the US) before 90 per cent of America had heard of Taiwan, Nvidia’s rapid rise could well convert The Pentagon’s “strategic ambiguity” towards China’s favourite island into “capitalist conviction”. Over in India, self-made entrepreneurs over 50 who had invested in Nvidia stocks last year on hearing about its world-class chips are dismayed to find that not a single packet of Nvidia is available at local grocery stores.
Meanwhile, a joint survey of the planet’s top-performing Chief Egotistic Officers (CEOs) by “The Big Four” (of workism) identifies the five most profitable things (in no particular order) that a CEO can do for their company — be a man, ensure considerable year-on-year growth in Zoom calls, coin at least three verbs and five adjectives every quarter, be reposted by Elon Musk (or at least Anand Mahindra), and spend more time on the treadmill than in bed.
Elsewhere, Bill Gates tells Nikhil Kamath (on the latter’s YouTube show called Rich Talk) that the biggest hope for underprivileged Indians to get rich is to be reborn.
Wondering what else happened as you got ghosted on LinkedIn’s “Catch Up” feature? Here’s presenting the top stories from the week that should have been.
June 17
Kartik Aaryan refuses to respond to critics who feel that the best scenes of ‘Chandu Champion’ are ones where he does not speak TT archives
- Kartik Aaryan shares that his only regret about Chandu Champion, where critics have hailed his performance as his least unwatchable yet, is how he did not get the chance “to do a 10-minute monologue on weight loss”.
- HBO issues a swift apology to its subscribers after accidentally releasing the first episode of season two of House of the Dragon at 0.5x speed.
June 18
Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un have bonded so much that they have started sending reels to each other from their Finsta accounts TT archives
- Vladimir Putin meets Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang to shoot the first part of a new documentary called Us Against the World. For this, the world’s two most popular autocrats (as per their own internal surveys) will spend quality time together, including fishing, reading The Communist Manifesto aloud, and playing Twenty Questions on the subject of each other’s nuclear arsenal.
- The US’s most credentialed critic, also known as Noam Chomsky, is reportedly on the mend in Brazil, having already started work on a 5,000-word article titled “A Hermeneutic Response to My Obituaries”.
June 19
Hundreds of academics, writers and political activities have signed an open letter saying that there should be no restrictions on what Arundhati Roy can write in prison TT archives
- In an op-ed featured by 127 different Western media publications, Arundhati Roy says that she is “looking forward to prison”, since being a full-time lecturer for the International Echochamber of Debonair Dissidents (IEDD) has left her with no time to write her next book.
- With Joe Biden no longer able to differentiate between taxes and tariffs and Donald Trump vowing to remove both, The Congress of Incorrigible Capitalists (CIC), comprising most of the richest men in corporate America, has released the following statement: “We hereby put all our weight behind the Republican party for the upcoming presidential elections, as we sincerely believe that Mr Biden is a bigger threat to capitalism than Mr Trump is to democracy.”
June 20
‘Riot’ and ‘Nehru’ are among the latest words that have been proscribed from featuring in any NCERT textbook TT archives
- NCERT textbooks, long accused of a reductionist documentation of history, are being revamped to include QR codes that lead to in-depth conversations on India’s past by BeerBiceps.
- In light of the accident of the Kanchenjunga Express, the families of the victims have been promised compensation in the form of free travel for life on Vande Bharat trains.
June 21
David and Victoria Beckham have been accused of “mercenary tendencies” that lead them to charge their non-celebrity friends for a hug TT archives
- The House of Beckham, a bombshell of a biography of two business partners who also happen to be life partners, reveals that an inebriated David Beckham once told Victoria Beckham that he would trade all his affairs in a heartbeat to be able to receive a knighthood.
- With public transport in Germany proving to be much more adventurous than the on-field action, UEFA announces free drinks for fans who can reach stadiums in time for kick-off during Euro 2024.