Shailaza's Blog

Tag: #Trumptropy #Trump #Karma #NewWorldOrder #IranWar #India

  • Duryodhana Meets Trump

    I fell asleep during the Mahabharat and dreamt that Duryodhana woke up in 2026. He went looking for someone who understood him. He did not have to look far.

    One rule for this dream
    Before the dream begins, a rule. Every line Duryodhana speaks here is mine. Every word Trump speaks here, he has actually said, on the record. I tried to invent better lines for him. I could not.
    The palace of illusions
    In my dream, Duryodhana woke up in a room so full of gold that for a moment he thought he was back in Hastinapur. It was Mar-a-Lago.
    He walked in carefully. The last time he entered a dazzling palace, it was the Maya Sabha, the hall of illusions the Pandavas built at Indraprastha. He mistook a floor for a pool and a pool for a floor, fell into the water, and was laughed at. In the version every Indian grandmother tells, it was Draupadi who laughed. He never forgave it. Out of that one laugh came the dice game, the insult to Draupadi, thirteen years of exile and eighteen days of war.
    At the end of the hall stood a man in a very long red tie.
    “I alone can fix it,” said the man.
    Duryodhana liked him at once. “They laughed at me in a palace once,” he said.
    Here the journalist in me must add a footnote. In 2011, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Barack Obama made fun of Trump for several minutes while he sat in the audience. Many commentators have since traced his political career to that night.  Trump has denied it. Duryodhana, I suspect, would not have believed the denial either. Some men forget a war. Nobody forgets a laugh.
    The dice
    “They say I cheated at dice,” Duryodhana grumbled. “My uncle Shakuni threw them. Is that my fault?”
    The man in the red tie nodded. This was a subject he knew well. “The election was rigged.”
    Duryodhana was impressed. In his day, you rigged the dice and then you won. This man had lost, said the dice were rigged, and then won the next game anyway. “Even Shakuni,” Duryodhana said, “never thought of that.”
    Hastinapur and Sons
    They moved on to family, as men of business always do.
    Duryodhana ran Hastinapur the way every old family firm in Johari Bazaar is run: the blind father at the counter, a hundred sons in the godown, and the uncle in charge of strategy.
    Trump’s firm is smaller, but far more international. His sons run the business and a crypto venture. And this September, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, flew to Moscow with the envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss peace with Vladimir Putin.  Kushner’s investment firm, it should be said, has taken some two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
    Duryodhana was moved. “Our ‘damaad’ (son-in-law) was Jayadratha,” he said. “We gave him one job, and he tried to kidnap the Pandavas’ wife. Yours negotiates wars? You are a lucky man.”

    The silent elders
    The two men had one more thing in common: a court full of wise old men who said nothing. When Draupadi was dragged into the Kaurava court, Bhishma, Drona and Kripa sat with their eyes lowered. In the popular telling, Bhishma later explained that he had pledged his loyalty to the throne. It is the saddest excuse in our epics, and the most modern.
    This year, when allies were taxed for their friendships and a national theatre was held hostage for a nameplate, most of the world’s elders lowered their eyes too. One called him Daddy. The rest counted their trade surpluses. In 2026, the loyalty is simply priced in dollars.
    Concepts of a plan
    “How do you win your wars?” Duryodhana asked.
    Here I must explain, because Trump answered with his campaign record. He had promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours”. The war has now outlived that promise by more than six hundred days.
    “Kurukshetra took eighteen,” said Duryodhana, a little smugly.
    Trump replied with the words he used in March 2025: “I was being a little bit sarcastic.”
    “In Hastinapur,” said Duryodhana, “we called that diplomacy. And what is your plan now?”
    “I have concepts of a plan.”
    Duryodhana brightened. “So did I. I once built the Pandavas a house of lac. It had concepts of a fire.”
    The most beautiful word
    Then came the question every man asks another over whisky. What is your favourite word?
    Trump did not hesitate. Tariff, he has said, is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”.
    Duryodhana’s favourite word was shorter. It was ‘no’. When Lord Krishna came to Hastinapur as a peace envoy and asked him to give the Pandavas just five villages, Duryodhana replied that he would not give them even as much land as the point of a needle could hold. Two men, two favourite words. One taxes everything. The other refused to share anything. Between them, they would have made a very efficient finance ministry.
    The man of peace
    “Then why,” asked Duryodhana, “do they call you a man of peace?”
    Trump offered the line from the night he won in November 2024: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
    In my dream, I leaned over and whispered a date to Duryodhana: 28 February 2026. The day America and Israel attacked Iran. He did not understand the calendar, but he understood the tone.
    Then Trump, a little wounded, added what he posted in June 2025: “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize … no matter what I do.”
    Duryodhana was sympathetic. Nobody gave him a peace prize either. But to be fair, he never asked for one before the war.
    A flute at the door
    Then, as always happens when men like these get too comfortable, there was the sound of a flute.
    Krishna walked in, the same envoy who had once walked into the Kaurava court, and he made the same kind of offer. A small concession. A way out. No war. This time he was talking about Iran.
    Duryodhana folded his arms and gave his needle answer again, from habit.
    Trump gave the answer he gave the United Nations on 22 September: “I have a big decision to make: Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild … or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly?”
    Trump waved towards the buffet.
    Krishna did not move. “I eat a man’s food only if he is dear to me, or if I am starving. Ask him.”
    “Hastinapur,” Duryodhana muttered. “Chhappan bhog, fifty-six dishes. And he went off to eat saag at Vidura’s house.”
    On the wall behind the buffet hung a framed photograph: a stadium in Houston, fifty thousand people, two men waving hand in hand. Beside it hung another, from Motera stadium in Ahmedabad, where more than a lakh had gathered. On the side table lay a glossy brochure: Trump Tower Mumbai. Trump Tower Pune. Gurugram. Kolkata. Three more cities had ‘coming soon’ stickers on them.
    Duryodhana whistled. “That is a lot of hospitality. What did he get back?”
    The door opened. A general in a Pakistani uniform walked in carrying a large gift-wrapped box with a golden bow. The tag said: ‘Nobel Peace Prize. Recommended.’ He placed it beside the buffet, filled his plate and left very happy.
    Trump looked at the door, waiting for the next guest. Nobody came from Delhi.
    Then the phone rang. It was Delhi. I could not hear the words, but I read the newspapers, so I could guess. Thank you for calling. We stopped the war ourselves. No, there will be no nomination.
    Duryodhana was scandalised. “After the stadiums? After the towers? Ungrateful!”
    “Some compliments cost nothing,” said Krishna. “That one would have cost Delhi fifty years of saying, ‘This is between us and Pakistan.’”
    He looked at the untouched buffet. “Some banquets you walk past.”
    Krishna smiled. It was the same smile he had smiled in Hastinapur, just before Duryodhana tried to have him arrested and Krishna revealed the whole universe inside himself. The court trembled. Duryodhana looked at the cosmos and saw only a magic trick.
    Trump looked at Krishna and told him what he had told Axios in September: “Anything could happen with me.”
    “That,” said Krishna gently, “is what Duryodhana thought too.”
    The question I could not answer
    Krishna left without another word, the way he had once walked out of the Kaurava court. Trump went off to discuss his ballroom. Then the gold room dissolved, the way rooms do in dreams, and I was back on my own sofa in Jaipur. Duryodhana was sitting beside me.
    “If he had been me,” he asked, “what would he have done?”
    I have watched Trump for ten years. I knew exactly what he would have done.
    At the Maya Sabha, he too would have fallen into the pool. Then he would have called it the biggest splash in history and announced a swimming championship in his name.
    When Krishna asked for five villages, he would have said yes, then put a 50 per cent tariff on all five.
    When Krishna came as peace envoy, he would have called him a great guy, taken a photograph, and posted that the war was over before it had begun.
    He would never have fought for eighteen days. He would have fought for twelve, announced a ceasefire on Truth Social, and named the war himself.
    And he would never have hidden in a lake, as Duryodhana did on the last day of Kurukshetra. He would have stood up, fist in the air, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
    Duryodhana thought about it. “So he would have lost too.”
    “Yes,” I said. “But nobody would ever have been able to prove it.”
    Duryodhan turned to the news from the Gulf: burning tankers, a blockade, a strait no wider than the road from Jaipur to Chomu.
    “Tell me one thing,” he said. “In this war, which side are the Pandavas?”
    I have been looking all year. I will tell you tomorrow what I found, and whether another Mahabharat is due.


    To be continued

  • Trumptropy

    Part 1: The Laws of Trumptropy

    Scientists have a word for disorder that keeps growing no matter what you do: entropy. Indians have a word for the bill that always arrives: karma. The world in 2026 needs a new word for disorder that grows every time one man picks up his phone, and whose bill never seems to reach him. I propose Trumptropy. And yes, it reached my kitchen first.

    A little science first
    In science, entropy is, roughly, a measure of disorder. The second law of thermodynamics says that in an isolated system, one that exchanges nothing with the world outside, entropy never decreases. Things fall apart; they never tidy themselves up. Every Indian mother already knows this law. She has seen a teenager’s room.
    Note the word isolated. A refrigerator can keep its interior cold and orderly, but only by pushing heat into the kitchen. Order needs exchange. Cut a system off from the world, and nothing can tidy it. Remember that the next time a country slaps tariffs on its friends.
    The physicist Ludwig Boltzmann wrote a formula for it, and it is carved on his tombstone in Vienna: S = k log W. Put simply, the more possible states a system can be in, the greater its disorder.
    Which brings me to a man whose every sentence can be in a great many possible states. I propose a new unit of measurement: Trumptropy, the amount of disorder that one statement from the President of the United States adds to the world. By Boltzmann’s logic, it grows with the number of things he could mean. On a good day, that number is very large indeed.
    And a little karma
    In India, we are raised on a second law of our own: whatever you sow, you shall reap. It works reliably for ordinary people. Skip the gym, and your knees will remind you. Be rude to the maid, and she will not come on Monday.
    But for some people, karma appears to have opted for EMIs.  Trump has lost an election, been impeached twice and been convicted on 34 counts. He survived an assassin’s bullet and turned it into a fist-pump photograph. And yet here he is at 80, richer than ever, sulking over a theatre’s nameplate.
    Perhaps he simply read the Gita upside down. Lord Krishna told Arjuna that we have a right to our actions, never to their fruits.  Trump seems to believe he has a right only to the fruits, preferably a Nobel Prize with his name engraved on it.
    So here is the puzzle of 2026. Entropy is working overtime. Karma seems to be on leave.
    Where Trumptropy lands
    This year I discovered that world politics happens in the kitchen.
    On 28 February, America and Israel attacked Iran. Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, a strip of sea only about 35 kilometres wide at its narrowest, roughly the distance from Jaipur to Chomu. Nearly 90 per cent of the cooking gas India imports sails through it. When the ships stopped, the gas agencies filled with queues and the gap between bookings went up from 21 days to 25. Hostels served lemon water instead of chai. For a nation that runs on chai, that is a national emergency.
    In the seventies, Shashi Kapoor silenced Amitabh Bachchan with ‘Mere paas maa hai’ (I have mother). In March 2026, the proudest line in any Indian home was ‘Mere paas gas hai’ (I have gas).
    I did what Indian women have always done in a crisis. I found a ‘jugaad’ (a workaround) and bought an induction cooker. It was meant to be a stand-by. Months later, I use it more than the gas. My cylinder depends on a ship crossing a sea at war. My induction cooker depends on electricity made mostly at home. Without meaning to, I had done in my kitchen what whole nations are now scrambling to do. I had stopped depending on one road.
    In 1973, after another war involving Israel, Arab producers cut oil supplies and prices quadrupled. Papa tells me that in those days they simply went everywhere on cycles. I have always believed history moves in cycles. In 1973, so did my father.
    So where does all this disorder come from? After careful study, I have identified its laws.
    The Zeroth Law: friends of friends are not friends
    In physics, if A is in balance with C, and B is in balance with C, then A and B are in balance with each other.
    In Trumptropy, India is Trump’s friend. Pakistan is Trump’s friend. India and Pakistan are still not friends.
    Trump has claimed, countless times, that he stopped last year’s war between India and Pakistan. India has replied, just as many times, that he did not. Pakistan nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and this April it hosted his peace talks with Iran in Islamabad. The talks failed. The next day, America announced a naval blockade of Iran. But the photographs were lovely.


    The First Law: conservation of name
    In physics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It only changes form.
    In Trumptropy, Trump’s name can neither be created nor destroyed. It only moves from one building to another.
    In July, Palm Beach International Airport in Florida became President Donald J. Trump International Airport. In August, even its three-letter code changed, to DJT. In December, the US Institute of Peace became the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. Within three months, America was bombing Iran. Nobody can say the man lacks range.
    Then came the Kennedy Center, America’s national theatre, renamed the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center. Please note the order. Kennedy was assassinated in office, and he still had to take the second seat. A court ordered the name removed, and in June the letters came down. On 15 September, after a judge refused to let them go back up, Trump said the building would stay shut, unrepaired, unless his name returned. The law holds. The name did not disappear. It simply moved into a sulk.
    I live in Jaipur, a city named after its founder, Sawai Jai Singh, so I am in no position to lecture anyone about names. I will only point out that Jai Singh built the Jantar Mantar to study the stars.  Trump is building a ballroom.
    The Second Law: disorder always increases
    In Trumptropy, disorder increases with every post on Truth Social. Take the great Russian oil serial, which I have followed more faithfully than any saas-bahu show.
    Episode 1 (last August): America is furious that India buys Russian oil. Half of the 50 per cent tariff on our goods is marked ‘for Russian oil’. The saas has spoken: ‘Beta, you will not go to your mother’s house.’
    Episode 2 (February): A deal. Tariffs come down, and India, we are told, will stop buying Russian oil. The bahu touches the saas’s feet. The background music swells.
    Episode 3 (6 March): The Gulf catches fire, and the saas has a new idea. America grants India 30 days to buy the Russian cargoes already stuck at sea. ‘Beta, why don’t you ask your mother to send some achaar (pickle)?’
    Episode 4 (the next day): The bahu politely reminds everyone that she never needed permission to visit her mother’s house in the first place. Dramatic zoom. Three reaction shots. Commercial break.
    Ekta Kapoor could not have written it better. Her serials, at least, follow a script.
    If you are confused, congratulations.  You have understood foreign policy.
    The Third Law: the deadline that never arrives
    In physics, absolute zero can never be reached. In Trumptropy, neither can a deadline. As it approaches zero, it is extended.
    Trump’s favourite unit of time is ‘two weeks’. He promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours; those hours have now lasted more than six hundred days. And in June last year, when he said he would decide on striking Iran within two weeks, he struck in two days. The only thing more dangerous than a Trump deadline is a Trump deadline that arrives early.
    Every Indian knows this law. It is the plumber who says ‘kal aa jaunga’ (I will come tomorrow).
    The Fourth Law: the conservation of flattery
    Atoms cannot be flattered. World leaders, it turns out, can. In Trumptropy, praise is inversely proportional to tariffs.
    NATO’s chief called him “Daddy”. Qatar offered him a luxury jumbo jet. Pakistan nominated him for the Nobel. And in June, Hyderabad named a road near the US Consulate ‘Donald Trump Avenue’, and Trump thanked India for it. Flattery is the cheapest insurance policy ever sold. The premium is one compliment a month.
    The exception is China. It did not flatter. It hit back with tariffs and squeezed the rare earths America’s factories need. It got a truce anyway, and this month Xi Jinping ended his White House visit with tea. Some call this pattern TACO: ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’. Not always. But often enough to make the rest of the world wonder why it bothered with the compliments.
    Measuring the unmeasurable
    So how much Trumptropy is there in the world today? At the United Nations on 22 September, Trump said: “I have a big decision to make: Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild … or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly?” In the same speech, he complained that Iran was stalling “to see how I do in the midterm election”, explained at some length that he was not running, and then said the election “doesn’t even enter my mind.” One speech, two realities. Boltzmann would need a bigger tombstone.
    That night, Papa was watching an old Mahabharat rerun, and I dozed off beside him somewhere between the dice game and the war. I dreamt that a man with a mace, a crown and a very long grievance woke up in 2026, switched on the news, and recognised a brother.
    The last time a family business refused to share even five villages, it ended in a war that swallowed almost every kingdom from Gandhar in today’s Afghanistan to Pragjyotisha in today’s Assam. Is another Mahabharat due? Tomorrow, I will let Duryodhana meet Trump, and we will find out.

    To be continued…