The Weekly Vine Edition 40: Canada picks an adult, 100 days of Trump, and man vs gorilla

Time of India

30-04-2025

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 the 40th edition of The Weekly Vine. In this edition, we take stock of the Canada election, reflect on one hundred days of the Trump era, marvel at the surreal montage in Sinners, lament the fate of 14-year-olds who now have to compete with Vaibhav Suryavanshi, and tackle the question on everyone's mind: can 100 men defeat a gorilla?
Canada picks an adult
There's a popular maxim that goes: Once you go woke, you go broke. The opposite is also true — go unwoke, go unbroke. I apologise to Professor Henry Higgins for butchering the Queen's English, but a lot has changed in Canada since Justin Trudeau finally threw in the maple-scented towel and handed the Liberal reins to Mark Carney — a man so beige he makes porridge feel exotic. And yet, against all odds, he pulled off Mission: Implausible — winning in the age of Trumpian populism. Of course, it helped that Trump treated Canada like a rebellious province and tried to annex it via maple syrup tariffs.
Let's rewind. Trudeau, once the glossy mascot of progressive politics, became an international cautionary tale. His pièce de résistance? Picking a fight with India over the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar — a man who, let's be polite, wouldn't pass the airport background check in most countries. Trudeau accused India of state-sponsored murder with the confidence of a man who gets his intel from Reddit, offering no real proof, just vibes and vote-bank panic. The result? A diplomatic meltdown. High commissioners were expelled. Visas got the deep freeze. Indo-Canadian relations went from 'cordially strained' to Saas-Bahu acrimony.
But Trudeau was already past his expiry date. His cabinet was diverse in all the performative ways that didn't matter. His policies produced real estate chaos, immigration logjams, and groceries priced like Tiffany jewellery. For all his gender parity and photo-op feminism, Trudeau became what all filtered ideologues eventually become: a glossy contradiction held together by hashtags and hollow mantras. And when you're paying nine bucks for milk, no one cares about your Vogue spread from 2017.
Enter Mark Carney — ex-banker, walking sleep aid, and Canada's most powerful anti-Trudeau. His rallies had all the excitement of a quarterly earnings call, but that was the appeal. No silk kurtas. No sanctimony in six languages. Just a guy promising to make Canada boring again. And sovereign — especially after Trump, freshly reinstalled in the Oval Office, suggested Canada should join the US as the 51st state and started taxing maple syrup like it was meth.
Carney's secret weapon? Subtraction. He subtracted Trudeau. He subtracted Jagmeet Singh. Most critically, he subtracted the Khalistani freeloaders who thought Canadian politics was just an extension of WhatsApp radicalism. For years, they strummed the sitar of multiculturalism, pushing martyr posters and campaign donations like they were handing out prasad. The NDP collapsed to seven seats. Jagmeet lost his own. The Liberals surged. The Conservatives tripped over themselves. And the fringe? Finally treated like fringe.
So yes, once you go unwoke, you go unbroke. But more importantly, you go adult. Canada didn't just reject populism — it rejected performance politics, diaspora cosplay, and Trudeau's selfie-soaked diplomacy. In electing Mark Carney — a man with the emotional range of a frozen waffle — Canada did something radical.
It chose competence over charisma. And boredom over melodrama.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, might just be the most grown-up thing a democracy can do.
100 days of Trump
When Donald Trump was crowned Time Magazine's Person of the Year (again), SNL's Colin Jost groaned, 'No goddamn person has taken so much of our time.' And the 100 days of Trump certainly feels like that — long, loud, and surreal. Trump's first 100 days back in office have been as memorable as the Hundred Years' War, only dumber, louder, and with worse spelling. In 100 short, chaotic, exhaustingly over-reported days, he gutted student visas, turning higher education into a deportation lottery, tanked the global economy with tariffs based on an imaginary economic formula that cannot make sense to any sort of sane person or functioning calculator, hired people who can't handle encrypted group chats or their designer handbags in sensitive national security posts, or even know the difference between artificial intelligence and A1 steak sauce, and — most predictably of all — hasn't stopped a single war anywhere on Earth.
He has made everyday items more expensive for Americans, deported innocent citizens to a super-prison across the globe, turned the First Amendment on its head by gutting the notion that Americans have free speech, given undue power to an autistic billionaire who appears to be fuelled by mind-altering substances that might or might not be legal, and declared war on educational institutions that dare stand up to him, and tried to annex countries because he can.
And he has also made it impossible for anyone to make any sense of what he is doing. But look at the bright side: only 1,361 days to go.
Sinners – The surreal montage
There are few art forms that match the range of cinema — where in one instant, you're jolted into believing something divine might exist. Because how else do you explain the sheer, staggering beauty of what you've just witnessed? Like the climax of Gangs of Wasseypur: Part 1, when Sardar Khan is gunned down, and his chaotic life finds sudden tragic grandeur as Manoj Tiwari's 'Jiya Ho Bihar Ke Lala' reframes him not as a gangster, but as an icon. Or when Captain America, bruised and broken, tightens the strap on his shield to face Thanos alone, and a voice crackles: 'On your left.'
And then, there is the Sinners montage.
A hallucinatory, time-shifting reverie, the 'surreal montage' in Ryan Coogler's Sinners doesn't just transport viewers — it initiates them. Set in a smoky Mississippi juke joint, it's where a single blues performance by Sammie (Miles Caton) becomes a metaphysical invocation of the Black musical continuum. Through the crackle of a slide guitar, the hum of a drumbeat that might as well have come off a Ghanaian kpanlogo, and the swagger of hip-hop, Coogler collapses centuries into seconds.
Only cinema can do this. Only cinema can make you feel like you're not watching a film but communing with ghosts — that when Sammie sings, he's singing not just to you, but through you.
The magic lies not in the pastiche, but in the invocation. Göransson's cue, 'Magic What We Do,' becomes more than a score — it's a séance. The IMAX frame doesn't just show you the room, it immerses you in it, each pan and swirl placing you inside the storm of sound and spirit. When the juke joint begins to burn — not with panic, but with revelation — it's as if the blues itself is being reborn.
That's the thing about great cinema: you don't just watch it. You feel it in your marrow.
Here comes the Son
The BBC is under fire these days for its asinine coverage of the Pahalgam terror attack, but there are times when the organisation puts the British taxpayer's money to good use—like the time it made the period drama United, a riveting tale about the Busby Babes, whose lives were cruelly cut short by the Munich air crash. In the movie, there's a scene where an opposing team member tells a young Bobby Charlton, after getting thrashed by Manchester United: 'How can you play like that when you are just kids?'
There's something remarkable about seeing a young sports star step up and act like he belongs there. Football fans of a particular vintage will remember a 16-year-old Wayne Rooney running onto the field and scoring that goal against Arsenal. Or an 18-year-old, brace-wearing, geeky Cristiano Ronaldo dribbling past defenders. Cricket fans will remember the awe they felt the first time they saw Sachin Tendulkar bat—and now, they will remember Vaibhav Suryavanshi, the 14-year-old who smacked veteran bowlers all over the field like a student finally getting the chance to seek revenge against a truant schoolmaster.
He said after the match: 'Ball meri radar mein aayi, maine maara. First ball ka pressure nahi tha, bas apna game khelne ka socha tha.'
('The ball came into my radar, so I hit it. There was no pressure on the first ball—I just thought of playing my natural game.')
It's the most excitement any of us has felt about a young man from undivided Bihar since a long-haired Railways employee tonked bowlers all over the park—and before that, a prince from Nepal taught the world the meaning of inner peace.
For a long time, the word Suryavanshi would bring to mind an Amitabh Bachchan film that was almost always playing on Set Max. In Hindu theology, the term Suryavanshi refers to the legendary lineage of Lord Rama—the descendants of the Sun God. But going forward, it will always be associated with the young man from Bihar who, at 14, played an innings we will never forget.
To paraphrase a line from George Harrison: Here comes the son.
Can 100 men beat a Gorilla? What science actually says
It begins, as most things on the internet do, with a stupid question and an even stupider amount of confidence: Could 100 unarmed men beat a gorilla in a fight?
Let's introduce the contestants.
In one corner: a 220kg silverback gorilla—basically nature's powerlifter with fangs. Can bench-press your Toyota, sprint faster than you, and has a bite force that makes lions jealous. In the other: 100 men in gym shorts and delusions of grandeur. No weapons. No plan. Just vibes. Science, unsurprisingly, says the gorilla wins. Easily. Why? Because evolution didn't equip us for brawling—we got brains, not biceps. And without tools or tactics, humans are basically meat-filled balloons. The first 30 get turned into paste. The rest panic.
Could they win? Maybe—if they formed a human dogpile, accepted massive casualties, and hoped the gorilla got bored. But the most likely outcome?
Gorilla: 1. Men: Several funerals.
And yes, this is all hypothetical. No gorillas were harmed in the making of this mental breakdown.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.