The Inferno of Manufactured Rage: When Hate Becomes a National Industry

 

A conflagration of lies, rumors, misinformation, and orchestrated hate set a nation ablaze, reducing millions to seething vessels of pent-up fury. The air grew thick with anticipation—not for rain to quench the land, but for an apocalyptic earthquake of hatred meant to reduce neighbors to rubble and rewrite maps with ashes. Citizens became prisoners of their screens, pupils dilated with the promised spectacle of destruction, minds intoxicated by visions of collapsed buildings, rivers of blood, and the symphony of wails from the vanquished.

Then—silence.

The grand theater of annihilation never raised its curtain. Leaders stood before microphones, faces flushed with premature triumph, declaring enemies vanquished—only for the world to see those very enemies dancing in their streets, hoisting their own flags of victory. The rage, denied its sacrificial catharsis, mutated into something uglier. Humiliation became gasoline on the fire. The same media machine that had stoked this fury now watched, dumbstruck, as the mob turned—not toward the imagined enemy, but toward the architects of their disillusionment. The people bayed for blood, not as soldiers on a battlefield, but as a gladiatorial crowd denied its spectacle, their thirst for vengeance outpacing reality itself.

So the factories of fabrication shifted gears. New lies rolled off the assembly line—smaller, meaner, more desperate—tossed like buckets of sand onto a wildfire. But embers had already leapt the fences. Every unanswered question birthed ten more, each sharper than the last, each laced with the venom of betrayal. The nation’s psyche became a pressure cooker, its valves welded shut by round-the-clock propaganda channels, their screens flickering with the same hypnotic rhythm as the blast furnaces of a steel mill—forging not metal, but hatred.

This is the grotesque metamorphosis of my neighbor India. Where once stood a nation celebrated for its pluralism, its entrepreneurial spirit, its ability to synthesize chaos into progress, now stands a funhouse mirror reflecting only the contorted faces of Hindutva’s zealots. The BJP and RSS have weaponized nostalgia, alchemizing it into a corrosive narrative of victimhood and vendetta. Their cultural project? To replace Gandhi’s spinning wheel with the spinning blades of a helicopter dropping saffron flags over Kashmir.

And yet—the ceasefire came. The guns fell silent. But in the digital trenches, the war rages on. YouTube algorithms salivate over fresh conflict, their recommendation engines tuned to the frequency of outrage. Armchair generals livestream their analysis, monetizing misery with hyperbolic thumbnails and sponsor-read disclaimers. The stated goal was the eradication of extremism; the result is its metastasis, a ouroboros of hatred now gnawing at its own tail.

Victory? Defeat? These are relics of a simpler age. In an era where a single deepfake can mobilize mobs and AI-generated voices whisper genocide into a million earbuds, the only relevant metric is survival. Trump’s crass pragmatism—“Let’s stop war and do business”—rings like wisdom in this asylum. But when hearts pump nothing but the adrenaline of wounded pride, when history is rewritten in real-time by WhatsApp forwards, who can hear reason over the tinnitus of nationalism?

I watch. I write. I pray—not to any god, but to the fading instinct of self-preservation in those who still remember: fire needs no passport to cross borders. The winds care nothing for your flags.