An Open Letter to Bobby Jindal
From the September 2010 issue of GQ India magazine:
Dear Governor Bobby Jindal,
Mind if we call you Piyush? Still can’t get used to the “Bobby” thing.
Hail from the motherland! Your cousins in the old country (that would be us) wanted to drop you a note on your extraordinary adventures in the New World.
We've been reading about you ever since you got elected, in 2007, as the first-ever Indian-American state governor. Wow, you were exciting. You’d been conceived in India, but you popped out on American soil like you’d crash-landed in a spaceship from Krypton. Ka-pow! You were a Rhodes scholar and a graduate of Oxford and Brown. Whoosh! At 24, you were running the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals like a Swiss watch. Zap! At 34, you were elected to Congress with 78 per cent of the vote. Bamm! At 36, you’d won the Louisiana governorship in a landslide.
As governor, you got a reputation for being tough on corruption and self-indulgent politicians. Hey, we started to think, we could use some of that. Maybe Piyush’s mum and dad should have done us a favour and stayed home.
People called you the Republican Obama; said you should have been McCain's running mate in 2008. One day, you could be President ofthe United States. You were young, cool and dynamic – and you were brown, baby.
And then you started to seem a bit weird.
It’s hard to pin down exactly when Bizarro Bobby first appeared. Was it February 2009, during the speech you gave in response to President Obama’s budget that was supposed to launch you as a Republican leader? You know, that speech in which you told Americans seven times that they could do anything (except hope a Republican federal government would spend money fixing the economy or deal successfully with a natural disaster).
Americans took part of your message to heart - they could do anything (except give your speech more than a 15 per cent approval rating). We admit, discovering that your oratorial skills make George W Bush sound eloquent was a bit of a blow. Even fellow conservatives called you “animatronic", “uninspired” and “cheesy”.
But we reckon some of your weirdness came more from other areas, like your belief that creationism should be taught in science class, that abortion should be illegal, that they should build a giant fence along the border to keep out the Mexicans, or, as you just signed into law a couple of months ago, that people in Louisiana should have the right to take guns into church.
We haven’t checked the Book of Matthew, Piyush, but we’re pretty sure it doesn’t say: “Whoever smites thee on thy right cheek, turn to him and blow the motherf***er’s brains out.”
But perhaps the weirdness goes back much further. Let’s face it: When a four-year-old child decides to call himself Bobby after a character he’s seen in a Seventies American sitcom called The Brady Bunch, it’s Cute. When he's still doing it at the age of 39, it’s weird.
Remember that if-only-you’d-stayed-in-India idea? In retrospect, we’d be happy to have bought the tickets.
God Bless America,
GQ India
Dear Governor Bobby Jindal,
Mind if we call you Piyush? Still can’t get used to the “Bobby” thing.
Hail from the motherland! Your cousins in the old country (that would be us) wanted to drop you a note on your extraordinary adventures in the New World.
We've been reading about you ever since you got elected, in 2007, as the first-ever Indian-American state governor. Wow, you were exciting. You’d been conceived in India, but you popped out on American soil like you’d crash-landed in a spaceship from Krypton. Ka-pow! You were a Rhodes scholar and a graduate of Oxford and Brown. Whoosh! At 24, you were running the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals like a Swiss watch. Zap! At 34, you were elected to Congress with 78 per cent of the vote. Bamm! At 36, you’d won the Louisiana governorship in a landslide.
As governor, you got a reputation for being tough on corruption and self-indulgent politicians. Hey, we started to think, we could use some of that. Maybe Piyush’s mum and dad should have done us a favour and stayed home.
People called you the Republican Obama; said you should have been McCain's running mate in 2008. One day, you could be President ofthe United States. You were young, cool and dynamic – and you were brown, baby.
And then you started to seem a bit weird.
It’s hard to pin down exactly when Bizarro Bobby first appeared. Was it February 2009, during the speech you gave in response to President Obama’s budget that was supposed to launch you as a Republican leader? You know, that speech in which you told Americans seven times that they could do anything (except hope a Republican federal government would spend money fixing the economy or deal successfully with a natural disaster).
Americans took part of your message to heart - they could do anything (except give your speech more than a 15 per cent approval rating). We admit, discovering that your oratorial skills make George W Bush sound eloquent was a bit of a blow. Even fellow conservatives called you “animatronic", “uninspired” and “cheesy”.
But we reckon some of your weirdness came more from other areas, like your belief that creationism should be taught in science class, that abortion should be illegal, that they should build a giant fence along the border to keep out the Mexicans, or, as you just signed into law a couple of months ago, that people in Louisiana should have the right to take guns into church.
We haven’t checked the Book of Matthew, Piyush, but we’re pretty sure it doesn’t say: “Whoever smites thee on thy right cheek, turn to him and blow the motherf***er’s brains out.”
But perhaps the weirdness goes back much further. Let’s face it: When a four-year-old child decides to call himself Bobby after a character he’s seen in a Seventies American sitcom called The Brady Bunch, it’s Cute. When he's still doing it at the age of 39, it’s weird.
Remember that if-only-you’d-stayed-in-India idea? In retrospect, we’d be happy to have bought the tickets.
God Bless America,
GQ India
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