MELODY CHOCOLATEE DIPLOMACY

 So a newspaper in Norway has published a cartoon with Modi as a snake charmer playing the harp  to entice the oil suppliers, which has naturally irked  many of us Indians. For the Westerners, the image of a snake charmer is synonymous with poor, backward, primitive, superstitious Indians. The colonialists had a field day in lampooning the uncivilised barbarians, who have no business to aspire to the higher table, which is traditionally reserved for the ‘gora saab’. What’s new about this stereotyping of Indians, Peter Sellers’s depiction of an Indian in Hollywood movies, Mind Your Language, the British sitcom, Churchill have all been guilty of the same crime against the one of the oldest civilisations of the world. Some years ago, when India’s Mars mission was hugely successful, the NewYork Times published this highly distasteful cartoon. Obviously this kind of denigration is a sign of envy. Onida TV which some of us old timers would recall had an advertisement going with  the catchline “Neighbour’s Envy Owner’s Pride”. Envy is a sign that there is something special which the other’s desire but are unable to acquire for whatever reasons. 

But getting back to the charm offensive, well you can’t blame Modi if he is a charmer, having charmed his way to not only the Prime Ministership of the world’s largest democracy, but also internationally when he hobnobs with  Trump, Putin, Xi on an equal footing. Whether he uses the age old harp or not, he has got the West Asian Sheikhdoms also eating out of his palm. The fact that he has been able to steer India into highly divergent diplomatic groupings such as SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation), QUAD, BRICS, speaks volumes about Indian diplomacy. I think the oil exporting nations ought to be offended by the cartoon more, as they have been depicted as snakes, who are being wooed that too by a third world snake charmer. After all someone like Trump or Xi also want to control Energy resources, primarily Oil, and if you don’t have the heft like them, then you have to rely on charm offensive only. Sometimes it is the ‘hug’ which works, sometimes the ‘drums’ and now it is ‘Melody’ which seems to have done the trick.

For someone like Modi who hasn’t really led a married kind of life, he certainly has his way with the ladies; the ‘Melody chocolatee’ is proof enough. Meloni-Modi chemistry translating to ‘Melo-Di’, the catchword something which any advertising guy will be proud of.  Something like the Brangelina Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie), closer home Saifina (Saif Ali Khan and Karina Kapoor) or Virushka (Virat Kohli-Anushka Sharma), mind you all of them are or have been couples. This kind of chemistry between heads of state is also something unusual.  Wooing a woman with chocolates is common knowledge, but I bet this is the first time in international diplomacy. Swing diplomacy with Xi was also tried but it failed to deliver the expected results. Shuttle diplomacy was the hallmark of Kissinger, instrumental in the US-China thaw in the early seventies, which has shaped the global affairs and resulted in the  final disintegration of erstwhile USSR. Chocolate diplomacy may not be in the same league but all the same it has got the goat of some of Indian opposition leaders. The taste of the chocolate apart from the fact that it melts in the mouth is that it is trending on the internet with more than two hundred million  hits. “Melody itni chococolatee kaise bani ? Melody khao khud jan jao” ( How did Melody become so chocolatee? Taste it and find out!!)