The week that should have been

Speaking at the BJP national executive meeting, a senior leader says that “the next 350 to 400 years will be the era of the BJP, long enough to remove every trace of Islamic colonisation and make the cow belt wide enough to fit all the official lies. In doing so, our next focus should be south India, where we must reduce literacy, increase news channels and make Hindutva trend faster than Thalaiva”.

Meanwhile, days after Money Heist-inspired posters called Narendra Modi a “nation robber” in Hyderabad, residents find they can no longer access Netflix on their phones or computers.

Elsewhere, the ministry of finance has assured state governments that the Centre will clear all its dues relating to MGNREGA payments to the states once every adult in rural India is officially unemployed.

Wondering what else happened while you calculated how long it will take you to buy your own house with the money saved on restaurant service charges? Here’s presenting the top stories from the week that should have been.

July 4

• Addressing the nation on the 246th anniversary of the rest of the world’s dependence on the US, Joe Biden annoys both Democrats and Republicans with his remark that “God invented guns so that Americans would read the Constitution”.
• A hacker who managed to steal data from a billion Chinese citizens because the operations managers at a Shanghai data centre were too busy watching speeches of Xi Jinping has revealed the three most common questions Chinese users ask on Baidu. In increasing order of frequency, the questions (translated into English) are: “Which countries don’t have a ChinaTown?”, “Are Uighurs humans?” and “Why can’t we use Google?”

July 5

• Following Boris Johnson’s resignation as UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, the woman Johnson had replaced as PM, explains how “mendacity, inefficiency and repeated misquotations from Homer” cost Johnson his job. May, whose Brexit deal Johnson managed to sell to the UK by promising everything to everyone, adds that “while Conservative icons like Winston Churchill will be remembered for making history, Johnson will be remembered for making it up”.
• Less than a week after the latest G7 summit, French President Emmanuel Macron gets into a major disagreement with the European Union over whether Vladimir Putin’s Russia should be treated like Germany from 1919 or 1939.

July 6

• Virat Kohli has been suspended from celebrating for six months after he punched the Edgbaston air so hard that it is expected to negatively impact precipitation in Birmingham for the next fortnight.
• The All England Club is debating whether players at Wimbledon should be asked to switch from an all-white to an all-brown attire, since Prince George keeps dropping chocolate ice cream on his kit every time he plays a round of wall tennis at SW19.

July 7

• Hundreds of IndiGo employees fall sick in order to attend Air India’s recruitment drive after India’s flag carrier airline lists “sub-optimal focus, drowsiness and general laziness” among the minimum job requirements.
• Multiple crashes in the crypto market prove to be a boon for a handful of adventure capitalists who had decided to invest in nature after a few bouts of altered consciousness.

July 8

• Sadhguru announces that he is “heartbroken” at the Maharashtra government’s decision to move its Metro car shed project back to the Aarey forest and will undertake a “non-stop tour of the US and Canada” to protest against the same.
• Aditya Chopra confirms that Salman and Shah Rukh Khan’s untitled action blockbuster, where physics is guaranteed to take the most beating, will feature a common love interest, set to be played by any actress who is, at most, a quarter of the Khans’ combined age.