The week that should have been

Welcome to 2024, the year that India goes from Bharat to Ram Rajya. The year when idols finally trump ideals and the secular stops being sacred. To mark this momentous transition, India’s biggest advocate of ram-ming things down the nation’s throat declares a second Diwali for later in January. Irrespective of religion, caste, creed or community, every Indian will have to observe this occasion by clicking a selfie with a diya and linking it to their Aadhaar card and bank account. Select Indians (chosen from their online behaviour) will be allowed to add a filter to their selfies that substitutes their face with the face of our modern Ram.

Meanwhile, the court that ought to have been a temple pronounces that the market regulator can continue its investigation into Hindenburg Group’s allegations against the Adani Group as long as it has no plans to end the investigation. Should the market regulator reach a definitive conclusion at any point, the court will itself take over the matter and decide a suitable punishment for Hindenburg for “encroaching into and maligning India’s national interests”.

Elsewhere, Narayana Murthy throws a “productivity party” (where everyone celebrates by answering emails) at Infosys on realising that he and his employees can work for an extra 24 hours in 2024.

Wondering what else happened as you wished your partying hours could be billed to HR as “annual recharge expenses”? Here’s presenting the top stories from the week that should have been.

January 1

• Mahua Moitra confesses to snooping on her ex-partner to check if he was meeting, flirting with or touching other dogs (not named Henry).

• The central government has opened a nationwide search to identify the culprits who robbed scores of selfie booths featuring the Prime Minister from India’s railway stations and positioned them across the violence-stricken parts of Manipur.

January 2

• Rabindranath Tagore’s Banglar Mati narrowly beats Khela Hobe to become the state song of West Bengal on the same day that the state government announces the creation of a Kabiguru department (consisting solely of Bratya Basu for now). The new department will assess over 20,000 rowaks in Kolkata and prepare a report on the contemporary relevance of Tagore.

• A survey by Swipe and Gripe reveals the top five reasons why Indians check their smartphones — to resend OTPs, to view the WhatsApp last seen status of their partners/clients, to forward emails when their laptop is taken over by their sibling(s), to stalk their nephew’s wife’s brother’s sister, and to check discounts on Zomato and Swiggy before ordering on Blinkit.

January 3

• Birmingham City sack Wayne Rooney as club manager after the former England international prohibits cameras from entering the club’s dressing room for a Netflix documentary.

• Margrethe II, the queen of Denmark for more than five decades, abdicates her throne and renounces her royalty to avail old-age care provided by the Danish government to ordinary citizens.

January 4

• The Economist names Palestine as its “Country of the Year” to “remind our readers that it remains a country”. In a new category, the magazine anoints Meta (ahead of Amazon) as “Corporate State of the Year”.

• Muhammad Yunus, an 83-year-old Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and Nobel laureate, has been sentenced to prison for six months for “his audacity to systematically create more jobs for the poor than the government”.

January 5

• Ananya Panday admits to experiencing “Instagram syndrome (previously known as imposter syndrome)” after critics praise her portrayal of herself in Kho Gaye Hum Kahan.

• The RSS criticises the Indian Save Resources Organisation (ISRO) for launching a mission to study black holes when “we have already known for millennia that black holes are simply a part of Lord Krishna’s dental cavity”.