Left to right: Varun Grover, PM Modi and Gaurav Gupta
On May 10, Narendra Modi stood at a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rally in Hyderabad and handed the country a homework list – don’t buy gold, carpool, work from home, postpone foreign holidays, use the metro, cut edible oil, send parcels by train.
Mainstream media, including television anchors, nodded solemnly. Nobody asked the obvious question: Prime Minister, what exactly is happening?
But two stand-up comedians did.
Varun Grover, performing to a packed house, noted that 80 crore Indians live below the poverty line and 60 per cent receive free government ration. These are the people receiving an advisory about gold purchases. He joked about dragging garbage bags and rum bottles to Tanishq and asking to rub a ring against his face, because he “definitely wants gold.”
The joke is funny, but the point underneath it is not. The gold advisory, in practice, concerns a niche population, the upper-middle class and the wealthy. The rest of the country was never in the market to begin with. Telling them to hold off on jewellery is not economic policy. It is only a performance.
Grover’s sharper line was this: “Have you left anyone with enough to buy gold?” Twelve years of demonetisation, a pandemic that gutted the economy, GST that squeezed small traders, and now a formal request that citizens not splurge on jewellery.
It seems the Prime Minister is tone-deaf. But, as Grover said, for most people, there was nothing left to spend anyway.
Gaurav Gupta had an Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer in his audience and used the opportunity well. Why, he asked her, is the Prime Minister “talking crazy things”? He said the speech Modi gave “even my father gives. Keep the lights closed, keep the fan closed, don’t run the motor.”
A father who says these things is managing a household that has gone quietly off the rails and practicing austerity without telling the family how bad things actually are. Modi’s May 10 speech ran on exactly this logic.
When Gupta asked his IRS officer if the country was okay, she said everything was fine. His response: “Even on the Titanic, the same thing was said.”
“If Modi was on the Titanic, he wouldn’t say the ship hit an iceberg. He would say, friends, don’t jump from the railing, don’t go to the basement, don’t be near the stairs.”
The Indian basket of crude oil has jumped from USD 69 per barrel in February to around USD 109 in mid-May. India imports nearly 90 per cent of its crude. Foreign institutional investors have pulled billions out of Indian equities. The rupee has slid more than five per cent since February. Remittances from a West Asia now at war will likely fall. The current account deficit is going to be quite bad.
The government knows this. The Prime Minister knew it when he spoke. None of it made the speech.
The easy answer is that comedians get away with things journalists don’t, and there is truth to that. Ticketed venues, live audiences, no advertisers to answer to. But the more uncomfortable answer is that the questions Grover and Gupta asked were not particularly radical.
They were just the questions a reporter should ask after a Prime Minister tells citizens to tighten their belts. Why, how bad, and what is the government doing about the parts of this it can actually control?
That these questions came from comedy stages rather than press conferences is, in 2026, no longer surprising. It is just the way things are.
This post was last modified on May 16, 2026 4:52 pm