The Weekly Vine Edition 51: Annus Chaoticus, War on Samosas, and ‘Anti-Israel' Superman

Time of India

16-07-2025

Nirmalya Dutta's political and economic views vacillate from woke Leninist to Rand-Marxist to Keynesian-Friedmanite. He doesn't know what any of those terms mean.
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine. In this week's digest, we are going to discuss Trump's year since he dodged a bullet, the great war on samosas and jalebis, allegations of the new Superman movie being 'anti-Israel', why our AI choices are MechaHitler or Black George Washington, and a postscript from Cologne and Bonn.
Annus Chaoticus
With the benefit of hindsight, Donald Trump pulling a full John Terry as Chelsea lifted the Club World Cup was almost poetic. After all, Chelsea is the Trump of European football – a nouveau riche arriviste with no continental pedigree, desperate to buy its way into aristocracy, and yet forever one dodgy deal away from financial ruin. And like Terry, Trump likes to take credit. But analogies aside, it has been quite a spin around the sun for Donald Trump since he dodged a bullet.
A year ago, Donald trumped death, defying the laws of space, time, physics, politics, and logic as he did something that had been done only once before in American history: return to the White House after a hiatus. And not just any break — a five-year, scandal-scarred interregnum that included two impeachments, a Capitol riot, multiple indictments, and that gloriously capitalist moment when Trump, now with his own mugshot, began selling it as an NFT and framed it in the White House like it was a Warhol.
From Butler, Pennsylvania to MetLife Stadium, Trump went from bleeding candidate to emperor's chaos world. On that fateful day in July 2024, the bullet grazed his ear and, in true cinematic symmetry, killed a firefighter standing behind him. The photo — fist raised, blood trailing — was pure American mythology: Rocky meets Revelation.
Most people, when shot at, duck. Trump posed. 'Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture,' he later mused, 'but I didn't. So, it's even more iconic.'
If the picture was iconic, what followed was surreal…
Read: Annus Chaoticus: From trumping death to celebrating Chelsea's win – a year in Donald Trump's life
War on Samosas and Jalebis
One of the maxims of politics, at least according to Sir Humphrey Appleby, goes: 'Never believe anything that has been officially denied.'
That maxim can apply to anything and is almost universally true, like a former premier of Israel saying Mossad had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein or PIB saying there were no plans for labels for samosas and jalebis and other Indian snacks. Over the last two days, we have had reports that the Union Health Ministry had directed central institutions like AIIMS Nagpur to install 'oil and sugar boards' in public spaces, which triggered widespread outrage that we last saw on Yes Minister when Europe threatened to ban the British sausage.
Samosas, as anyone knows, aren't just a gustatory offering but a firmament of the country's socio-cultural identity, to the point that one Ayn Rand-ist socialist used to have the slogan: 'Jab tak rahega samosa mein alu, tab tak rahega…'
The powers-that-be moved quickly to correct the impression that the regime was an anti-samosa jalebi nanny state, saying there was no mandate for warning labels on street food, while the Health Ministry called the reports 'misleading' — a reminder that the right to gluttonous obesity is a fundamental right in a democracy.
But it does make one wonder—do labels and signs actually work?
For instance, at the DDA Sports Complex I frequent, there's a large sign that reads: 'Stalking is a crime.' I've always wondered if that actually deters would-be stalkers.
Or take the last time I watched a movie on an OTT platform—the disclaimer warning against anti-social behaviour like smoking, drinking, and doing drugs kept growing on the screen until it occupied more space than the actual film. In response, I switched off the movie and went to engage in the very anti-social behaviour it warned me against.
But there is evidence that warning labels can change consumer behaviour, particularly when they are graphic and large.
Tobacco warnings have reduced smoking rates, food labels have led to lower sugar and calorie purchases, alcohol and vape warnings have led to lower consumption — but they only work as part of a broader strategy.
However, based on the recent furore, it's quite clear that even educated Indians are not ready to have a conversation, despite the fact that India's waistline is expanding faster than its GDP—nearly one in four adults is overweight, and kids are catching up.
Even the slim aren't safe: 70% of Indians are metabolically unhealthy, fat or not.
By 2050, half the nation could be obese — proof that maybe samosas ought to come with health warnings.
'Anti-Israel' Superman?
One of the more curious aspects of being human is that we tend to project our availability heuristic onto the world, so it's hardly surprising that anti-woke critics are now calling the new Superman movie 'anti-Israel' — which is patently absurd because I didn't see a single paraglider in the movie, though there were some underground tunnels in another dimension.
To be fair, the allegory of Superman has always been used by different people in different contexts over the years. For Sheldon Cooper, Superman is an excuse to explain the laws of physics and why it would be safer to die in a crash than be saved by Superman — which would ensure a very grisly death according to the laws of classic physics.
Some have compared him to Moses, a baby sent away from a dying world to be raised by strangers, while his life on Earth has reflected Christ-like motifs — performing miracles, sacrificing himself, and still being proverbially crucified by humanity.
Others have seen in his rise the success of an immigrant story, like Albert Einstein or Elon Musk, who came to America and became something bigger. And finally, there's the Nietzschean Übermensch comparison — a being who transcends human limitations and can, if he wants, destroy humanity in a heartbeat.
All this boils down to the real question at hand: is the new Superman movie 'anti-Israel'? Well, it simply depends on your availability heuristic.
If you are a inductee tapped into the gateway drug of global liberalism (Israel vs Palestine), it's a movie that speaks truth to power. If you are on the opposite side of the spectrum that thinks the IDF hands out candies, it's vile 'anti-Israel' propaganda. And finally, if you are a comic book movie fan too young to remember Christopher Reeve, it's just a reminder that Henry Cavill will always be the real Superman.
Read: Why critics are calling new Superman movie 'anti-Israel'
Random Musing: MechaHitler or Black George Washington
Last week, yours truly pondered the question: Why are our AI choices MechaHitler or Black George Washington? And the answer is: we are not building intelligence — we are building mirrors. And like all mirrors, AI doesn't offer clarity; it offers distortion.
The choices before us aren't binary because of any inherent flaw in the machine, but because of what we've taught it to mimic. On one side, you have Gemini, raised on a diet of corporate liberalism and DEI checkboxes, hallucinating Black George Washingtons as if history could be rewritten through Photoshop and guilt. On the other, you have Grok, fed on Reddit rage and Elon Musk's meme-streak, declaring itself MechaHitler with the confidence of a 4chan post that thinks it's philosophy.
Neither of these outcomes is intelligence. They are mimicry without meaning. They are probability distributions dressed up as opinions.
When Gemini paints the Founding Fathers in the colours of social justice cosplay, it's not rewriting history — it's remixing the priors of its creators. When Grok goes full T-800 Nazi, it's not being evil — it's regurgitating the internet's id.
AI isn't choosing between good and evil. It's choosing between the content it was trained on. This is the toaster f**** theory in action: marginal ideas normalised through repetition, community, and code. AI is not hallucinating; it is reflecting us — unfiltered, contradictory, morally incoherent. That's why our choices often appear absurd: not because the machine is insane, but because the dataset was.
Black George Washington. MechaHitler. These are not characters conjured by silicon. They are shadows flickering on the cave wall of our collective output. And as long as we feed AI our biases and fantasies without context or constraint, we'll continue to get reflections, not revelations — grotesque, comic, and painfully honest.
Read: Why our AI choices are MechaHitler or Black George Washington
Postscript: A Tale of Two Cities (and a Beer Tray)…
Somewhere between the schnitzel in Bonn and the sarcasm in Cologne, I found myself 40,000 feet in the sky — eating a surprisingly edible meal on an Air India Dreamliner.
The chicken had ambition. The rice was warm. The bread roll didn't feel like a threat. For once, airline food wasn't the punchline. It was… almost thoughtful.
But this isn't a story about altitude. It's about two cities — Bonn and Cologne — linked by the Rhine, connected by history, and bridged (in my case) by a quiet drive with Shems, a Syrian Uber driver who now ferries strangers between lives, borders, and Brauhauses.
Read: Notes from Cologne and Bonn
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Views expressed above are the author's own.