The Sick Sense

Early this morning I got a call from MNS. Wait, that’s not the Raj Thackeray party. I’m talking about M. Night Shyamalan, the Hollywood film-maker. He was excitedly talking about a sequel to his famous movie ‘The Sixth Sense’. I said I could understand. Some of his recent movies haven’t done all that well so a sequel to that hit may not be a bad idea. “..but Bruce Willis is dead in that movie and the kid is Ok so what’s the sequel going to be about?” I asked him. “No, no this has nothing to do with those guys, this is about Digvijay Singh”! About Digvijay Singh? What in the world would a Hollywood director have to do with a movie about an honest politician like DS, I wondered.

MNS then explained to me that he got the hint from Anna Hazare and added that most of his movies had a bit to do with mental illness and the story of DS was an absolute fit. I asked what help he wanted from me.  “I want a title for the movie that explains the sequel and a tag line” he told me. I mentioned to him lightly that in that case he should make it about Rahul Gandhi since the Sixth Sense had a mother-son duo in the story. MNS quickly dismissed me and said there is a role of a woman, but she plays the boss of DS. He further added that Rahul had acquired the image of a ‘baby’ and his movies are for adults so he had to sacrifice the mother-son theme and settle for the woman boss and the mentally challenged subordinate. “So give me a title and a tag line by the evening” he said. The phone call ended there and left me wondering for hours how all this could have started. And how me a fake journalist can come up with a title and a tag line. But it’s rare that I get a phone call from a friend like MNS so I had promised that I’d work on it. It's hard to work out a title and even harder to beat a tag line like "I see dead people"..

I slowly started to put things together to make sense of what MNS really wanted. I realised that just today Anna Hazare, on being accused of being an RSS plant by DS, had said that DS should be in a mental asylum in Yeravada Jail. My mind went back to all those statements by DS. The mental illness issue made me talk to a psychiatrist to analyse DS from a distance and tell me how I could put things together. He did his job fairly well but I was blown apart by his fees. “Why so much”? I asked him. He explained to me that DS had multiple problems – Schizophrenia, Hallucination, OCD, Violent behaviour, Fixation with footwear…I finally asked him to stop and just send me the bill.  I could get MNS to pay for it anyway, nothing to worry.

I realised that the shrink was right, it all fitted very well. Right from tutoring his protégé to the ‘SIMI=RSS’ statement. Then there were those cases of strange phone calls that DS used to receive from people just before they were about to die. And again there was this schizophrenic instance where he launched a book called ‘26/11 an RSS conspiracy’. On the reports of the Anna Hazare statement recommending mental asylum for DS a news site reported this : “..The media pointed out to Hazare that Singh had raised questions about how his protest site in April had a painting of 'mother India' similar to the one used by the RSS to depict India”. Damn! I realised this guy sees RSS everywhere just like that kid saw dead people in the ‘Sixth Sense’. I was wondering about violent behaviour and just at the moment I found this pic on the net which showed DS kicking the would-be shoe thrower at a Congress presser. That explained a lot.

At least the shoe thing had nothing to do with RSS, I thought. But I realised what an idiot I was. I was wrong, this guy is a dream come true for MNS. I ran into another news report which reported this statement from DS: “The attack was absolutely motivated, planned and inspired by the RSS, VHP and BJP. It symbolised reactionary, communal and fascist ideology. This incident happened because the Sangh Parivar was being exposed after the admission of Aseemanand about the involvement of the RSS in terror activities..”

So everything that psychiatrist told me was true. DS was a man with all kinds of psychological disorders and I didn’t want to waste any more time on this. Last I heard there were unconfirmed reports that DS had received a phone call from MF Husain just before his heart attack to tell him the RSS was attacking him with laser rays from the sky to kill him. Enough is enough, I was thoroughly convinced that this RSS, VHP, BJP combine is the real nightmare for this country. So I called up M. Night Shyamalan in the evening to tell him what I could come up with.

I told MNS how mentally ill this DS was and the only name I could come up with for his sequel was ‘The Sick Sense’! “..And the tag line”? he asked me. “I see saffron people” I told him, OR "I call dead people.."