Sanctimonia Binocs, Bhubaneswar, 23 August 2025
Hark, ye long-suffering and increasingly sleepless citizens of Sanctimonia! Our king, a man who believes that a thousand posters can solve a thousand problems, has made a triumphant return. The capital’s walls, once a canvas of mundane life, are now plastered with his image, all of them praising the Super King for his “generous support” of the new ring roads and the much-hyped metro rail project.
Expectant of a grand reaction from the Jester—perhaps a comedic monologue or a sarcastic song—the king went to his home. But to his dismay, he found the Jester’s house had been transformed into a fortress, a bastion of sibling loyalty designed to protect the ailing humorist from any and all distractions. The Jester, it seems, has found a more effective way to deal with the king’s grandstanding than a witty retort: silence and a fortified door.
Meanwhile, a different kind of drama is unfolding on the streets. The capital’s stray dogs, once the boisterous companions of the netizens, are going hungry. The citizens, preoccupied with their own worries, are not feeding them properly, and the dogs, in their desperation, have started barking all night, disturbing the precious sleep of the very people who have neglected them.
In a rare moment of competence, the police, who have been in a perpetual tizzy, have managed to arrest the hit-and-run drivers from the Super King’s capital. This glimmer of hope, however, is quickly overshadowed by the king’s latest, most baffling “solution.” Worried about the rise of self-immolations, he has ordered the best fire-fighting simulator for the fire brigade. Because in Sanctimonia, a virtual solution is always preferred to a real one.
Amidst this spectacle of absurdity, the netizens are left to mourn a different kind of tragedy. New deaths are occurring, not from fires, but from accidents caused by social media influencers who are so engrossed in their mobile phones that they are oblivious to the world around them. The irony, of course, is that in a kingdom where life is now cheaper than a fire-fighting simulator, the Law Minister has found time to decree that mothers will have a separate, sacred area to feed their babies in the holy temple of the Holy Triad.
Meanwhile, Brutus, ever the meticulous plotter, is still looking for his “load stone,” a mythical sharpening tool for his dagger. His plotting, it seems, is a slow and deliberate affair, a process that will likely take longer than a Sanctimonian urban project. The netizens, caught between a silent jester, a hungry army of dogs, and a king who thinks simulators solve real-world problems, can only look up to the Holy Triad and pray for a sanity that seems to have long since abandoned the kingdom.
