Opinion: ‘Hey Ram’, ‘Et tu, Brute’ and a 56-inch myth

What’s common between ‘Hey Ram’, ‘Et tu, Brute?’ and a 56-inch chest? A bit of myth-making, actually.The story of our leader’s chest size is of more recent vintage, but the other two are not. I had believed for many years that the last thing Gandhiji said was ‘Hey Ram’. For a man who had spent a lifetime talking about Ram Rajya it seemed only apt that his final words should be ‘Hey Ram’. Again, having lent my ears for years to fellow children who climbed the school stage and addressed us as ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’, I was inclined to believe the Shakespearean version of Julius Caesar. As Caesar lay dying in Act III, Scene 1, he looked at Brutus and said, ‘Et tu, Brute? — Then fall, Caesar.’ How can anyone ever forget a line like that?The reason why I was a staunch believer in the ‘Hey Ram’ version was because of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, a film I watched at Calcutta’s Metro cinema in 1982. On the big screen, there was Ben Kingsley taking three bullets in his chest, and then saying ‘Hey Ram’ before dying. The image stayed with me. But much later I learnt that what actually happened on the evening of January 30, 1948 was a bit different. When the frail Mahatma stepped out of Birla House in Delhi to offer his evening prayers, he was stopped by a man bowing before him. It was past 5 pm, and Gandhiji did not like this interruption. ‘It irks me if I am late for prayers even by a minute,’ he said. And those were his last words. He was dead almost immediately after that. The man who had bowed was none other than Nathuram Godse. A Sikh businessman named Gurbachan Singh had witnessed the assassination. He later claimed that the Mahatma died with an invocation to Lord Ram on his lips. And thus began the myth of ‘Hey Ram’.Things get even more foggy when it comes to Julius Caesar. For one, he was born over 2,200 years ago, in 100 BCE, and was murdered in 44 BCE on the Ides of March. The omens were not good, but Caesar was a brave man. On the morning of March 15, Caesar woke up to find his wife, Calpurnia, in a state of panic. She had dreamt that she was holding his lifeless body in her arms. But you wouldn’t expect Caesar to skip a Senate meeting just because his wife had a bad dream. When Caesar entered the meeting, all senators rose to greet him. But this was the story of a death foretold. A senator, Tullius Cimber, gave the signal to attack Caesar. Casca, another senator, was the first to stab him, Brutus was the last. When Caesar saw his long-time ally approaching, he stared in shocked disbelief. ‘Kai su, tekon?’ he said to Brutus in Greek. In English that would be: ‘Even you, my child?’ But ‘Et tu, Brute?’ or ‘Hey Ram’ is far more spectacular. ‘It irks me if I am late for prayers even by a minute’ doesn’t quite make the cut. It doesn’t have the ring of a ‘Hey Ram’.A 56-inch chest also has just that right ring to it. Imagine someone with a 47-inch chest. Even this chap would be pretty robust, I am sure, but a 47-inch chest can never become a talking point; it just wouldn’t sound right. The actual chest size, though, is completely irrelevant, but the process of myth-making is not. To make such a claim is to create an image in people’s minds of a strong man. And for our leader, this image matters very much. And it was precisely this well-crafted image of a strong leader making India aatmanirbhar and a global biggie that was dented by the killer second Covid wave.So, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that our PM would address the nation. He hadn’t done that for a while. And it was about time. The courts hadn’t minced words, calling the vaccine policy ‘arbitrary and irrational’. The line to get jabbed had grown longer, and the wait more excruciating. Many bodies had flown down the Ganges. It was only to be expected that the country’s strongest leader would address the nation.While it was a welcome relief to learn that the government had abandoned its incredibly messy vaccine procurement policy, it was indeed surprising that the PM would use this opportunity to again emphasise that India under his leadership had progressed much more rapidly than in the past. While the address to the nation was essentially about Covid vaccines, the PM chose to highlight the great progress India has made in the Primary Immunisation Programme under his leadership. India, he said, had managed to vaccinate only 60% of its children by 2014. At that rate it would have taken another 40-odd years to ensure all children get vaccinated. But after coming to power, he fast-tracked the whole thing, and in just seven short years managed to bump up children’s immunisation from 60% to 90%.This implied that leaders all the way from Nehru to Manmohan (with Vajpayee thrown in for good measure) lacked the kind of drive he has. But the fact is India wasn’t such a dismal country before this government took over. Between 2004 and 2014, India’s GDP grew by 7.7% on average (according to IMF data). Per capita GDP grew by 6.2% in this period. But between 2014 and 2021, average GDP growth slowed down to 5.3% and per capita GDP growth fell to 4.2%. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r Now, let’s look at the Primary Immunisation Programme. By 2015-16, BCG coverage was already at 91.9% (so it couldn’t possibly have been much lower a year back), polio at 72.8%, DPT at 78.4% and measles at 81.1%. These are the older vaccines and make up the backbone of our immunisation programme. So, India was not doing too badly before 2014. The PM also claimed that India has not one but two ‘made-in-India’ vaccines. While Covaxin was made indigenously, Covishield is a vaccine developed by Oxford scientists. Serum Institute is only manufacturing it. One can’t possibly claim it is a made-in-India vaccine even if two sounds better than one.Then he went on to say that the government has supported companies making vaccines for India in every possible way, from helping with clinical trials to funding. Thousands of crores, he said, was made available to them through Mission Covid Suraksha. Yet, on May 11, the government had told the Supreme Court that it had provided no financial assistance to either Bharat Biotech or Serum Institute for the development of vaccines. ICMR, however, had spent Rs 46 crore for the clinical trials of the vaccines. So, where is this ‘thousands of crores’ coming from?Facts are rather messy. They can get in the way of a good story. If Shakespeare’s dying Caesar had said, ‘Kai su, tekon?’ the audience wouldn’t even have understood the last words. Besides, ‘tekon' doesn’t quite rub it in the way ‘Brute’ does. ‘Tekon’ lacks drama; it sounds soft. But Brute has that brutal force; a good actor can make the word stretch and ring among the audience, loaded with grief and betrayal. Let’s face it: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ ticks all the right boxes, even if it is a product of the imagination.Saurabh Banerjee is Associate Editor, The Times of India. 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