A couple of days after the government made sure we couldn’t reach Jantar Mantar, my sister sent me a video game in which I could try to get there. It was called Chalo Jantar Mantar.

It’s a deliciously funny encounter, once you’ve lived through the day itself. The government can barricade roads, unleash the police, turn its capital into a fortress and treat citizens trying to exercise a democratic right like fugitives on the run. But a few days later, someone will build a video game about getting there, and you can sit at your desk and take a stab at what the government was so determined to not let you do on the ground.

With its fences and lathis and convoys and uniforms, the State demonstrates its predilection for theatrics, proclaiming that power is heavy business and that those who defy it ought to be in a cold sweat. Humour perpetrates a cathartic act of vandalism against this power play.

The Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin posited the notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ — moments in which laughter overturns the old guard, bringing the mighty down to earth and letting common people envision a world in which they can mock authority.

There is a similar anastrophe at work in the language of........

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