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Mamata Banerjee is a riot. But her allegations are borderline plausible. Tells you a lot about the CPI(M), eh?

(Via @geetharamc.)

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I’ve just finished reading The Bridge, David Remnick’s magisterial account of Barack Obama’s rise in American politics. It has a nice little bit on how Obama was once invited, along with other legislators, to a dollar-ante poker game.

Everybody involved in the game says that Obama was a cautious player, folding hand after hand, waiting for his moment to bluff or go big on a good hand. The game was never high-stakes—to win or lose a hundred dollars was a dramatic night. Obama’s caution, hidden behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, could be maddening. One Republican, Bill Brady of Bloomington, told Obama, “You’re a socialist with everybody’s money but your own.”

This leads me to speculate on what kind of poker players other politicians would have made. Bill Clinton, I imagine, would have been like Daniel Negreanu, great at reading people, aggressive, garrulous at the table. Obama, oddly enough, sounds like Doyle Brunson, solid and old-school. Hillary Clinton would be like Phil Hellmuth, also cautious and solid, and capable of losing it when some fool sucked out on her. Among Indians, Manmohan Singh would be like Dan Harrington, careful about starting hands, precise about post-flop calculations, fearless once a decision had been made. (Actually, that’s true of most good players.) Sonia Gandhi, well, she wouldn’t play poker herself, but would stake someone else to do it.

The likes of John McCain, Sarah Palin and Prakash Karat would probably be really bad poker players. McCain would be prone to going on tilt after a bad beat, and Palin and Karat would be delusionally attached to any hands they chose to enter a pot with, regardless of the texture of the flop. Hey, I’d love to play poker with them. I would so take all of Palin’s money!

Earlier: The Beautiful Game of Poker

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At least the guy is being honest. Where do you get that in Politics?

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This is the 13th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on July 22.

We’re a weird species that takes itself far too seriously, and it is my theory that if a true picture of the human race is to be found in journalism, it will emerge in the odd news sections of most papers and news sites. In today’s column, rather than focus on a serious world-changing topic that requires your immediate intervention, let’s look at some of the odd news from around the planet.

Reuters’ ‘Oddly Enough’ section is a reliable source of laughs—and revelation. Take this story headlined ‘Chinese police beat official’s wife by mistake’. Here’s what happened: the lady in question tried to enter the building where her husband, “a provincial law enforcement officer,” works. The cops outside, “assigned to guard the office building and ‘subdue’ petitioners”, thought that she was a petitioner and set about subduing her. According to a local report, “a strong wave of fists rained down on her for more than 16 minutes.” She ended up in hospital with “a concussion, and damaged brain and nerve tissues.”

The report says that “ranking police officers apologized profusely”, and a Communist Party chief explained, “This incident is a total misunderstanding. Our police officers never realized that they beat the wife of a senior leader.” Beating anyone else, of course, is totally okay.

Now, that’s a story in the weird news section. But I don’t think it’s weird at all. I think it’s good journalism that goes to the heart of the society it reports on, and illustrates the system of governance and the role of power. Also, it has resonance beyond China.

Another weird headline from the same section: ‘Bridge game fights “led man to murder wife."’ This story is about a 52-year-old man who stabbed his wife to death following arguments that were ostensibly about her bridge-playing capabilities. He and his wife apparently played much social bridge together, and a fellow player said that he had “started drinking heavily which led to ‘vicious’ criticism of his wife’s prowess at bridge and a deterioration in his own game.” Once, in the middle of a card game, he “shouted at his wife and threatened to throw her off the balcony.” Eventually, he killed her.

At one level, this is just a weird story. At another, it’s a portrait of a relationship that is fairly typical—marriages of this sort are common, and I’m sure every reader of this column knows a couple where the woman is forced into a submissive role by an insecure, demanding prick of a husband. That this one involved arguments about bridge and ended in a stabbing make it unusual—but apart from that, it’s commonplace.

Another headline from the same section: ‘Romantic comedies affecting off-screen love lives.’ It seems that “a poll of 1,000 Australians found almost half said rom-coms with their inevitable happy endings have ruined their view of an ideal relationship.” An Aussie ‘relationship counsellor’ has said, “It seems our love of rom-coms is turning us into a nation of ‘happy-ever-after addicts.’ Yet the warm and fuzzy feeling they provide can adversely influence our view of real relationships.”

The tyranny of the imaginary over the real is reflected not just by romantic comedies, but also by porn. Women have long complained that men get idealised notions of sex and female bodies by watching porn, and that regular women can’t match up. (It’s probably truer that porn can act as a substitute for real-world intimacy rather than a benchmark for it.) This works both ways, of course, as few men have organs quite as extravagantly elongated as some male porn stars do, but women seem to prefer romantic comedies to porn, and I suspect they expect more from their men with regard to romance than sex. (The ideal man is gifted at both, but is either gay or married.)

You can go look up such weird news in that Reuters section, or websites such as Fark.com, or even in all our local newspapers, which are full of them. They reveal human nature as well as the state of our society far better than all the serious news out there about politics and economics and so on. For example, in our Indian papers today, we can read about the female Congress MLA breaking flowerpots in the Bihar Legislative Council and having to be dragged out. We can read about Sachin Tendulkar’s blood being distributed along with a special edition of his biography. Or about how “bugs and roaches” set off a “passenger revolt” at a train terminus. All of this is weird, yes—and all of this is us. This is how we are.

Previously on Viewfinder

The Beautiful Game of Poker

Beauty and the Art of Winning

Football and a Comic Marriage

Beware of the Cronies

Indian Liberals and Colour Pictures

We are All Gamblers

Homeopathic Faith

Give Me 10,000 Hours

Match ka Mujrim

The Man with the Maruti 800

Internet Hindus and Madrasa Muslims

The Hazards of Writing a Column

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This is so human.

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It’s a bit disconcerting that newspapers should report stuff like this—and that people would want to read it. What is it about other people’s dirty linen that we can’t stop staring. Bhala iski kameez…

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Interesting?

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