NaMo tea, NaMo Nehru jackets: Now Modi lends his name to bricks!

Bow out Yash Raj Films, because Narendra Modi is here. And we are not even talking about drama, or melodrama. While you might have thought that you have covered every inanimate thing (except air sickness bags maybe) with your Dhoom:3 promotional merchandise, stop celebrating! Because after coming up with a NaMo tea, NaMo pepper spray and heck, even a NaMo Nehru jacket, NaMo fans have now decided to go back to the basics. So now Narendra Modi’s name is also on bricks! According to a report in The Indian Express, BJP workers got custom made bricks with the word ‘Modi’ embossed on them to lay the foundation for a community centre in Chandigarh to be built by the Congress-led municipality. Mayor HC Kalyan immediately said that the bricks will be pulled out since there was no official sanction for carrying out such a thing. The Indian Express reports: “Fifty bricks etched with the name of the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate were used at the function in Sector 15, at a site where the corporation has declared an existing structure unusable and approved funds for a new building. The site is in a ward represented by the BJP’s Saurabh Joshi.” [caption id=“attachment_1328525” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Narendra Modi. Reuters.[/caption] Congress minister Pawan Kumar Bansal too saw red and called the BJP supporters’ move ‘against democracy’. While this might be a minor incident and will be forgotten soon after the said BJP supporters and Modi fans have got their few minutes of publicity, it is true that Modi might have unleashed a monster in the way of his hardcore worshippers, a monster he doesn’t know how to control himself. If his Twitter fans - some of who are nameless, faceless entities who hurl the most repulsive abuses at anyone who dares criticise the Gujarat CM - were not enough, he has fans concocting fake videos in his praise. Case in point, a few months back, Amitabh Bachchan was miffed at being featured in a video where the creator edited the original footage to make it seem like Bachchan was a die hard supporter of the Gujarat CM. And now over-enthusiastic BJP supporters decided to ignore protocol to create bricks with Modi’s name on them. With the advent and success of AAP, it has become evident that BJP’s youth outreach needs a serious overhaul. And the BJP is also evidently taking the same seriously - given that they have now decided to launch a massive programme to recruit youth ambassadors. However, gimmicky, pompous gestures like these will only help in pushing the  voters away, reinforcing all the apprehensions that they have about the audaciousness of old school politics in India. Most rational citizens want an able leader heading the government, not some sort of demi good whose name is embossed on bricks, walls, plates and shrines. Modi himself hasn’t done anything to exult himself to those proportions, his fans are better off putting a lid on their extreme enthusiasm. It’ll do him more harm than good.