The Smile of Moral Decay

I came across a short clip of a News18 debate recently. A girl from the audience, with a smirk of easy confidence, declared that all the puncture repairers are in the Samajwadi Party — a thinly veiled slur aimed at Muslims. The audience chuckled. The anchor smiled along. No one interrupted. No one flinched.

It was a small moment — trivial on the surface — but like most small things, it revealed something large. A society’s moral temperature is not measured by its laws, but by its laughter. And here, the laughter came easily.

She smiled, told a cheap joke, and the room rewarded her with the lazy, approving laughter of people who mistake cruelty for wit. What she revealed wasn’t cleverness but a staggering lack of imagination — a mind so thin it could only define others by the most convenient stereotype. The girl on the screen did not claim humoir so much as confess to a small, frightened intellect that needs someone to look down on in order to feel tall.

The anchor and audience, meanwhile, took pleasure in polishing that smallness into spectacle. There is something pitiable, even grotesque, about confidence that rests on disdain. If your entire claim to cleverness requires trampling a community, then you are not edgy; you are cowardly.

Fixing a flat tyre is a useful skill — it keeps the world moving. Mocking the people who do honest, necessary work is merely a way of advertising how hollow your values are.

Keep the smiles. Keep the applause. But remember: every culture rots first in its jokes. And when decency finally collapses, it will not be under the weight of great evil, but under the applause of small, comfortable cruelties — moments just like this one.