Dolphins and their anarchist-communist agenda

Dolphins have snow on their boots

A short word on dolphins: cute. A long word on dolphins: Bolsheviks.

Sometime between the two world wars, all 32 varieties of ocean dolphins and 4 types of river dolphins joined their fins together and briefly considered the idea of breaking into a BDSM orgy. But lack of agreement over a safe word made them settle for the next best thing: a solemn resolve to seize the capitalist means of production.

The resolution was near unanimous, save for the killer whales. Technically categorised as dolphins, killer whales arrived only to perform a lengthy skit about satyagraha as a means of conflict resolution. After being sneered at by the dolphin community, killer whales staged a swim out with a rather nonchalant tone.

Beauty pageant smile, playful social attributes, and Olay anti-ageing cream have allowed dolphins to mask their primordial predisposition. These savage creatures have long yearned for a theatrical destruction of the capitalist state, a reasonably violent overthrow of the bourgeoise, and reinstatement of the Berlin Wall.

Wikipedia informs us that “dolphins are known to teach, learn, cooperate, scheme, and grieve”, or as the Communist Party of India calls it, “an election cycle”. Dolphins generally use echolocation to find food and navigate. But they prefer to follow the trail of tears left by the proletariat fleeing the tyranny of private enterprise.

Dolphins do not employ their 100 teeth to chew. They’d rather grind those teeth to supress their rage at the sight of vampire capitalists sucking the blood of the working class and selling it to blood banks at a commission. A certain Stalinist variation called bottlenose dolphins went rogue. They are now the only animals on earth that murder fellow underwater inhabitants for the sheer fun of the kill. Marine biologists have deduced that “dolphins never fully fall asleep”. It’s unfair to expect otherwise since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Their mating routine has been described as a few minutes of courting, a rushed copulation and then the couple breaks away from each other to set off in different directions. They could not be more Left-leaning if they were complaining about attendance requirements while smoking beedis at the JNU campus.

Evolution. It got to them

Scientists could smell something fishy when the binomial nomenclature for dolphins was abruptly downgraded from “anarchist-communists” to “libertarian socialists”. For the first time since the neoliberal onslaught, the dolphin folklore was imagining their heroes as male, bipedal, chewing gum with a liberal arts attitude and gifted with opposable thumbs to hold a bottle of Smirnoff while they looked for a cigarette.

This was in stark contrast to the earlier more conservative portrayal of dolphins as sedentary creatures sitting on park benches in groups of three staring at bypassing strangers with casual hatred. They found fulfilment as they saw the vile greed of capitalism incinerate the pomp of Wall Street during the housing crash of 2008. Dolphins across the world slept that night with a deep sense of contentment.  Many did not see the point in getting up again.

New age dolphinism

A new generation of dolphins have gleefully misled cognitive scientists for years about their political leanings and have proclaimed marine biologists as too dumb to fool. The smarter dolphins go deep in water to joke about it. For far too long, this breed of well-educated and ultra-urban dolphins has borrowed its politics from The New York Timesopinion pieces, late night American comedy shows, and fortune cookie quotes. Euro to rupee exchange rate, Amsterdam, and Uber remained the best manifestations of their political thought.

They had wilfully amassed student debt in solidarity with their American counterparts. They cried themselves to sleep when the American Congress passed corporate tax cuts. They were spotted wearing a bullet proof vest after a mass shooting in the US. They casually boast about not being able to understand the American Electoral College, even though they secretly do. Shame.

It was postulated that these dolphins should be allowed to vote in the American presidential election. Picture an IT guy who is so invested in your corporate career that he insists on checking your computer for a malfunction every 15 minutes. He refills your coffee without invitation and stares at you the entire day while doodling on his notepad. You can get used to him answering your phone every now and then.

Similarly, dolphins were ready to settle for a vote valued at 1/4^th of the regular American vote. But the proposal hit a dead end after it died. Pretending to prefer baseball over cricket, memorising civil war trivia, and abandoning the metric system did not help either.

But this breed of privately schooled dolphins has now decided to redefine what it means to be a dolphin in the second half of the second decade of the 21^st century. They’re finally moving away from the US (where rich and successful Indians live) and turning to their homeland (where rich and successful Nepalis live).

This sharp pivot is attributable to professional headline writers at Inshorts. Sliding notification bars with headlines like “Teen spends Rs 90,000 a month to look like a real-life Barbie”, “Kerala man jumps into zoo to chat with lion” or “Govt committed to double farmers’ income by 2022”, have sucked these dolphins into thinking about what the hell is going on in this country where they actually live.

Invigorated by those headlines and the discovery of a deeply conservative electorate, new age dolphins are organising mass gatherings only to find them instantaneously descending into BDSM orgies. Their safe word “anemone” is written on a sticky note and passed around for other dolphins to see. The other dolphins would rather brave abuse than live with the embarrassment of mispronouncing that word. Killer whales now describe inanimate objects as “spiritual” and want you to enquire about their permanent tattoo.

The new age dolphins do not harbour racial animus or caste prejudices, at least not without lingering guilt. Even though they find it difficult to hold a meaningful conversation with 95 per cent of the population, they are bent on chasing the light at the end of the tunnel. It is a short chase and they will soon find an intern at the Aam Aadmi Party’s office holding a lantern. But the very advance in this direction is a welcome one and laden with probabilities.

Maybe they will drop their meanderings about the impact of the #MeToo movement on the American society and spare a thought for the brave women of Bollywood. #Shetoo?

***Meanwhile, the Indian right was found to be outraged that a female dolphin is called a cow. They were neutral towards a male dolphin being called the bull. They registered their outrage again at the baby dolphin being referred to as a calf. The study was conducted in a controlled environment and no mammals were forced to explain what our national anthem means. ***