The year of #outrage

The past year has been an excellent one for outrage. Barely a week went by without calling us to action about some injustice or the other. It was hard work.

Facebook statuses had to be composed on the fly while trying not to use the same words as the day before (‘disgusting’, ‘annoying’ and ‘unbelievable’ were much in demand), and on Twitter, RTs, MTs and plain Ts jostled for their 140 character worth of fury. Since all these issues were grave, nothing less than the death sentence was considered sufficient punishment. While things continue to rage in social media (today’s issue being Palash Sen’s sexism during the Mood Indigo concert in IIT-Bombay), here is a look back at things that made us froth on our keyboards in 2013.

# Caste and corruption: It is more or less a given now that the year’s first outrage comes from the Jaipur Literature Festival. Salman Rushdie stole the thunder last year and although the armed assassins who had departed from Mumbai never arrived in Jaipur, it provided us enough anger to get our blood circulation going. This year, Ashis Nandy bravely stepped in. Just when it was looking like JLF would end without controversy and result in much heartbreak, the good sociologist announced that SCs/STs and OBCs were likely to be the most corrupt people in India. It set the ball rolling. Arnab Goswami got his first real opportunity to thunder “the nation wants to know” on TV. #Death to sociologists

# Sreesanth’s shopping: By the time that died down, the second round of the annual scandal generator rolled in. IPL. Sreesanth and some other players too insignificant to be named were found guilty of match-fixing. The Kerala boy spent lakhs of ill-gotten money on Diesel Jeans and BlackBerry phones. Greed, corruption, cricket, consumerism — all got their turn on Twitter for a full three weeks. (This was, incidentally, the only good news BlackBerry had this year.) #Death to cheerleaders (which is where all IPL outrages eventually settle)

# Rambo : By the middle of the year, things began really hotting up. The first big-stake outrage was on Modi’s Uttarakhand rescue efforts. Mathematical puzzles abounded. How do you put 15,000 people in 50 Innovas and helicopters? Stories about Hanuman were invoked, but online imagination eventually settled on Rambo. The exact answers to these problems are yet to be published online; another outrage quickly followed so the calculators were abandoned and economic text-books opened. In the meantime, #Death to Innovas

# Sen vs Bhagwati : Two economists, two books, models based on development in two states. No one really knew what they were talking about but it was enough to say Kerala model or Gujarat model. Eventually both Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati were pleased; neither of them anticipated economists would ever get so much attention. And Sen managed to hold on to his Bharat Ratna. Until the next book launch. #Death to development

# Puppygate : Narendra Modi told Reuters that it would pain him if a car ran over a puppy. This made everyone froth at the mouth like adult dogs. In a show of considerable restraint, Pappu, which is how social media addresses Rahul Gandhi, didn’t make any comment about road-wrecked canines, even though he was only one letter away from ‘puppy’. #Death to all puppies #painful

# Chasmed : As if we didn’t have enough trouble in the country already, an American girl came visiting and under a pseudonym, Rose Chasm, posted on CNN that she was traumatised by Indian men. After being stared at, groped and photographed without consent on the streets in India, Rose went back to America and had to seek medical help to deal with the excessive lust of the natives. The Indian man, who was already at the bottom of the attractiveness pile, fell even further. #Death to all Indian men

(In the middle of all this, Shah Rukh Khan may or may not have got a gender determination test for his new baby who was delivered by caesarean section from a surrogate. Despite the challenges of writing about this in 140 characters, much hysteria ensued. #Death to randomly capitalised names)

# Potency test : It had thus far been an exhausting year of outrage, but it was about to get worse. Asaram Bapu passed his potency test with distinction. Newspapers told us that the test was “manually done” and social media told us how. None of this was mitigated by the unearthing of a YouTube video in which the graceful godman and the former prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, swirled around like two delirious Radhas who had just spotted their Krishna. #Death to all stimulation #It’s high time

# Concertrage : Zubin Mehta and the Bavarian state orchestra played Beethoven in Shalimar Gardens at Srinagar. And the internet went up in flames. No one was sure what the idea was behind the concert. Everyone knew it failed. #Good thing Beethoven is already dead

# Rupeeram Rajan : First the rupee sank. Then like an Adonis with the currency clutched in his raised hand rose Raghuram Rajan. Much shrieking and swooning followed. Shobhaa De went bo(i)nk. Lesser Indian men scrambled to get him out of there. “Check his passport, he is not Indian!” they tweeted in collective outrage. Anyway, the rupee stands forgotten. Every few weeks, Rajan comes on TV under the guise of announcing a credit policy and smiles his dimpled smile and leaves us all happy. #Death to ugliness in RBI #Full disclosure – this writer is a fangirl

# Snoopgate : While the rest of the country was fixating on Raghuram Rajan, it seems the Gujarat government had its eyes on another individual. This was the third Modi outrage online.

The story is that sometimes when fathers ask their friends to keep an eye on their daughters, the entire State intelligence machinery is called into action. The movie rights for the saga of Saheb and Madhuri are up for grabs. But the hashtag Snoopgate rocked it for nearly 10 days. #Death to intelligence

# Build-up By November we were up to an outrage a day. Tarun Tejpal and a Tehelka employee boarded an elevator in Goa. Stuff happened. When the original letter of accusation written by the sexually assaulted employee and Tejpal’s loquacious letter of laceration leaked, it was the moment social media was building up to all year.

Within 10 days, Tejpal was in custody in Goa, Shoma Chaudhury, the managing editor, had to step down and also use an industrial strength thinner to remove the handiwork of BJP worker Vijay Jolly from the nameplate outside her house. Tehelka might or might not survive. Goa might or might not Think again. Destruction everywhere, victory for all! #Death to elevators

# 377 : Still there was no rest for the weary. The Supreme Court re-criminalised gay sex and the baying broods had to swiftly change hashtags and continue to pour venom. What is natural? What is not? Have we gone back 180 years? Or is it 130? #Death by rainbows

# Phantom : And for a brief while between the previous two outrages, a phantom driver seemed to have driven an Aston Martin in Mumbai. That it crashed into an Audi seems proven.

But since that didn’t invoke much outrage, the internet threw in the prospect that two people died in the crash. They hadn’t. It was most inconvenient that facts came in the way of a good outrage. #Death to social media

Oh wait!