Bugle 4005 – Who Do I Bribe?

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4005 of the Bugle audio newspaper for an invasively visual world for the week beginning Monday the 21st of November 2016 with me Andy Zoltzmann here live in London which is in Europe or is it?

I guess we'll never know now.

And joining me from one of the Bugle's less used continents, Asia, talking to us live from a brand new Bugle location, Singapore.

It's a brand new Bugle co-host, one of India's finest comedians, scriptwriters, playwrights, javelin throwers, high wire circus acts, dolphin impersonators and lake volume estimators.

That got progressively less true as it went along, like a satirization of the history of American presidential election campaigns.

It is the Mumboy Mirthmaker himself, Anu Vabal.

Hello, Andy.

Hello.

All those things are true, Andy.

All those things, the javelin being probably one of my better-known achievements over comedy writing, but yes.

Well, what's your personal best for the javelin then?

I've thrown it some distance.

Right.

Now, automatically, it goes to show that given I don't know what distance that is, I'm probably not

a well-known athlete, but I do know that.

But like you said, you know, as a mirthmaker and a javelin thrower and all those other things, I said, I think I truly qualify as a Renaissance javelin thrower, if nothing else.

Because I don't know how many people in history that we could point to that threw javelins and were in Singapore at the same time.

And also, I mean, just the mere fact of claiming that you could throw a javelin some distance puts you quite high up the list of all-time greatest Indian Olympic athletes, I think, doesn't it?

I think so.

I think if you want to be an Indian Olympic athlete in javelin, the fact that you have a javelin and you've thrown it should qualify as a significant achievement.

So,

welcome to the Bugle.

It's great to have you on the show.

You are our official bugle rest of the world correspondent.

We've got Britain and the US covered, but you are basically all over the rest of it and currently in Singapore.

Anything to report from Singapore?

Yes, well, several things.

Well, Andy, it's a pleasure and honor to be here.

And I'm glad you have one rest of the world correspondent because, you know,

the rest of the world and Europe and America, it's about the same size.

So I think the rest of the world does not deserve more than one.

And the way politics in the world is going, you know, philosophically, morally, even geographically, I think the rest of the world deserves only one person.

And if only this could be replicated in, say, corporations around the world, where they would just have a head of North America, say, for Pepsi, and ahead of North America for Europe, and ahead of the rest of the world.

I think one of the things that Trump has shown us is that we've broken up the world too much.

There's too much known.

And I think now, just lesser, just being able to somehow summarize things.

I think, Andy, you're on the right track.

I think.

So, basically, you're praising Trump for reducing the world back to a basic simplicity of America, Vladimir Putin, and everyone else.

Other places.

That's correct.

That's correct.

I guess that does rather simplify things.

I think so.

I think so, Andy.

And just this whole specificity of countries and cultures and capitals.

I think, as Mr.

Trump has shown us, that they're overrated.

You know,

very soon, instead of saying, I've been to China, I know the Chinese, if he says, I've been to the rest of the world, and this is what these people.

I think you've spearheaded that.

Trump hasn't even got his team together, but you've already organized the world through the bugle.

The bugle is now just ahead of what will now happen in transition teams in politics.

Well, that's a great British tradition of basically seeing it as us and everyone else.

So, this is Bugle 4005 for the week beginning Monday, the 21st of November, 2016.

Now, less than 98 months until we can be sure that Donald Trump is no longer president.

So TikTok, TikTok.

On this day in 1877, Thomas Edison announced the invention of the phonograph, a machine that could record and play sound, without which this show in particular would be a very, very different beast.

Just be me wandering around knocking on people's front doors saying, can I interest you in some lies?

I really need to get them off my chest.

We're recording on Friday, the 18th of November.

On this day in the year 1307, apparently the Swiss archery ace William Tell apparently shot an apple off his son's head with a crossbow.

Also on this day, Mrs.

Tell supposedly said, you better have a f ⁇ ing good explanation for this, Bill.

And it's Mickey Mouse's birthday.

I don't know if

you know that, Anuvab, today,

the 18th of November.

is considered to be Mickey Mouse's birthday.

And, well, there are rumors that the legendary celebrity cartoon mouse could be considering a run for the US presidency in 2020 and I never thought I'd say this but stranger things have happened in American politics.

Tomorrow, Saturday is both International Toilet Day, treat yourself everyone, and also International Men's Day, which has not entirely set itself apart from every single other day in human history.

As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, celebrity clothes section, after the dress that Marilyn Monroe was wearing when she sang Happy Birthday, Mr.

President, to John F.

Kennedy, sold at auction this week for $4.8 million, we look at some other celebrity historical garments.

That Monroe dress, of course, largely responsible for what still remains and will remain for a couple of months at least, the stonkiest presidential boner in U.S.

history.

That record's set to be broken on the 20th of January when Donald Trump first goes into the Oval Office and looks at himself in the mirror.

Other famous celebrity clothes we track down for this week's episode going straight in the bin.

Francis Drake's bowls trousers from when he was told that the Spanish Armada was armada on its way to England in 1588.

Unlaundered

and there are some suggestions he wasn't quite as confident as he made out at the time.

Cleopatra's very avant-garde snake bra that she sadly died in.

Her last words apparently were, can you tell the designer to maybe use dead snakes next time or less or at least less bitey, bitey less poisonous life snakes sure i do feel sexy but i also feel dead and we also uh find the t-shirts alexander hamilton was wearing at his fatal duel with vice president aaron burr in 1804 which had specially printed at a t-shirt printing shop in manhattan the previous day with the words aaron burr vp verifiably perished and on the back a cartoon of hamilton as a golfer smiling with the slogan saying i just scored a bird eye he was going to tear off his shirt and run to the the press with his t-shirt showing what he won, but sadly, of course, lost and died.

And also, we look at the special necklace worn on her wedding day by Henry VIII's sixth wife, Catherine Parr.

Her wife, number six, that necklace, thought to be the widest necklace ever, measured eight inches from the top, just under her chin, to the bottom at the top of her collarbones.

It was made of reinforced granite, tungsten, and Kevlar.

That is a weird necklace, darling, Henry VIII said as they gazed into each other's eyes on their wedding night.

Yep, yep, yep, it is.

I acknowledge that it is, but you are a weird husband, she replied.

Are you going to take it off?

He asked.

Nope.

No, I'm not going to take it off.

That section in the bin, and also in the bin, a quick bugle audio mannequin challenge.

There we go, we've done our bit.

So before we get on to this week's top story, we'll just check the current British stropometer reading.

That's 8.4 this week.

That's a bit less of a crank than we've been in for most of the year.

U.S., that's coming in at 12.6.

That is good news for the new cantankercy that is taking over the political world.

Anuvab, how stroppy, by comparison with Britain and America, how stroppy is India right now?

Is very a number?

Very.

No, going with the javelin thing, I've been very specific with measurement today, Andy, as you know.

Very, very is what going well.

So, you know, as the rest of the world correspondent, you know, it's it's my responsibility to look for problems around the world far and wide.

So, I've travelled, being based in India, I've traveled far and wide to find that the biggest problem in the world was in India.

So, again, again, that goes to show the reach and diligence of my world travels.

And I found it right outside my house in that the nation has this nation of a billion people, which some people have heard of, I don't know if all the people in the world know what India is, but some people may have heard of it.

They outlawed currency.

They have outlawed

all currency.

86% of I mean, of course, you know, any economist listening to this will obviously dispute that, but they will also realize that this is pretty much nonsensical banter, just loosely based on facts.

But that's also the rest of the world, I think.

So I think we're only following a pattern.

So 86% 86% of the currency in use has been just overnight cancelled, withdrawn.

And then that raises many questions.

Can you do that?

Can you, can you, and anyone in the world, can they do that?

Can you, for example, in Great Britain, the country you are in, could somebody just say from tomorrow the ten pound note, the fifty pound note and the hundred pound note are invalid and now just

make do?

It is a truly extraordinary story, this.

I mean, I don't I think in Britain we'd I mean we'd probably quite happily take that on

because, I mean, we'd, you know, it would just get us further away from Europe, which has currency.

And, you know, if we could get rid of currency or at least go back to, you know, it's a basic kind of pig-based economy that we used to be quite happy with until the Romans came over here with their coins.

I think we'd be happy with this.

This is one of the most extraordinary stories.

that I can remember reading about in all our years on the bugle.

What happened is Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of india uh he he pulled a genuine political rabbit out of the hat and in this age of leaks that is quite surprising no one seemed to be expecting this and it was one i mean he pulled this rabbit out the hat and the rabbit had bloodshot terrified eyes but it was still a rabbit and he announced that he was withdrawing the two most used banknotes in India from circulation, the 500 rupee and the 1,000 rupee notes, roughly equivalent to the classic British banknotes, the Fiverr and the Tenner.

And he announced this in an unscheduled broadcast on the evening of the 8th of November.

And this law came into effect at midnight that night.

Now, that is, I mean, that is quite to basically pull, as you say, all currency, 86% of it, but we're rounding it up for

the ease of mathematics.

All currency, basically all currency out of circulation in a four-hour

timeframe.

That is in a country where 90% of all transactions still take place using cash.

That is bold stuff.

That is, I mean, I guess the kind of stuff you would expect from a prime minister who quite a lot of people in India think is a borderline genocidist.

But, you know, he's clearly not lacking in confidence.

How has this gone down, Anuvab?

The sudden withdrawal of 86%

of all physical money?

I think the biggest problem, Andy, is that Indians are having to stand in queues in an orderly fashion.

And

India not being Singapore, because any culture that's used to any sort of system

is used to queues.

But now, Indians having to form an orderly queue, there are two problems with that.

One is, every time there's a queue in India, there's one thought in an Indian person's head: who do I bribe?

The great irony here, however, Andy, is that you need to stand stand in the queue to get to the money to bribe someone.

So, what we're dealing with here is a philosophical conundrum.

What we're dealing with here is almost Aristotelian in its appeal and reach.

Because, you know, that which is, is also is not, I think, is one of the Greek philosophers' questions of our time.

And I think that that is what has been posed here.

I mean, there's, of course, you know, there's, of course, a lot of talk in India and in business circles, you know, because luckily, luckily, you know, we I mean, I don't know where you got your statistics from, but luckily, India is not a poor country that survives entirely on cash, where 500 million people are not literate.

Luckily, that is not the case.

I mean, what you're looking at is sort of a digitized twenty-first-century lethal economic behemoth.

That's what you're looking at.

So we were already on the edge of stuff.

But the big question was, can we be Sweden overnight?

Lots of Indian business people would ask, can we be Sweden overnight?

And I think one man needed to get up and said, let's try.

So, and I think he just took it quite literally and he said, let's try.

Now, the idea there is a very large, unorganized cash sector.

But is it really that important?

I mean, because you have to ask yourself, 300 million people eating and having access to basic supplies, what is the big deal about that

why is that critical you know and i think well that that is that's learned behavior isn't it that was basically the attitude that the british empire had to india during major famines isn't it i've got found this amazing quote from the great famine of the 1870s now you are an eminent historian and you've done uh uh stand-up shows about uh Indian history and the history of Britain in India.

I was reading about the Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, who during the Great Famine of the 1870s, when Britain exported over 300,000 tons of wheat from India whilst more than 5 million people starved to death,

he believed that apparently market forces alone would suffice to feed the starving Indians.

Now, that is, I mean, 140 years on, the world is really still sticking pins in that theory to try and see if they can make it work.

But that is...

Correct.

But maybe that's, I mean,

the legacy of that attitude has clearly informed this demonetization.

Exactly, exactly.

And I think there's some agile thinking there.

You know, like Lord Lytton was on to something when he said, you know,

if the ship stops here,

there would be grain for people.

But if the ship doesn't,

can they still eat?

Even though there's no food, let's see.

So I think it's a fundamental question of market forces when the market forces that are given to you are nothing, right?

Because Adam Smith in economics has you know, in the great economist it always said, zero is not a great number, you can't do much with zero.

I may be paraphrasing, but he said something like that.

Zero is not a very high quotient in economics.

I think they're challenging Smith.

I think they're saying, hmm, let's see.

Let's see.

If you've got no money because I've outlawed everything, apart from selling your cousin for some rice, what other innovative methods can you come up with?

That's the question India has to grapple with.

Well, it's basically challenging the Indian people to grasp the baton of 21st century entrepreneurialism.

So, you know,

if you can't rely on hackneyed old banknotes and you have to develop your own cousin for rice-based economy, that will give you a head start on everyone else in the world.

Precisely, Andy, precisely.

You've really hit it.

It is a startup economy.

You know, I'd read a thing about Silicon Valley once, and they had said that a startup needs to be hungry.

And I think Mr.

Modi has taken that literally.

I think that if you're a startup, who is the entrepreneur?

You're the entrepreneur.

You're starving.

You're not just starving to build Facebook.

You're literally starving.

So what would you come up with to change things?

And I think that really there was always potential among a billion people, but the only way you could find that potential was to just make their bank accounts invalid.

And I think that

there's really no truer test of a person, and I don't think nudity, like a lot of people think, what's the most shameful thing in the world, being found nude in public, right?

Happened to me a couple of times.

I wouldn't want to get into it in further detail.

Happened in several countries where I'm not allowed.

Wow, those are some stories we're going to have to get to.

But that's a different problem, Andy.

But the point you raised, a very valid point, extremely valid, which is there's no greater test than saying, just like Lord Lytton did, I'm just going to take this bank account from you.

You were not expecting this.

This has never happened in human history.

But now that it has, what are you going to do with yourself?

You know,

are you going to put that shoe in the microwave?

Are you going to use your child?

to do some manual labor?

Are you going to grow your own tomato?

How resourceful are you?

And it really makes you think back really to the days of the first Egyptian people by the Nile.

They'd have to come up with stuff, right?

They were like, okay, I guess this is a seed.

I don't have any plowing equipment.

What should I do?

Let me see.

Can I just use this human being as transport?

You know, you start really

thinking on your feet.

And I think that's what's happening here.

So basically you're saying that just need to give it, you know, five or six months and there'll be some massive pyramids all over India

I think I think so I think so Andy they would I think you're right I think what you've unleashed is perhaps the precursor to the Emperor Akhenaten I

Buglers who haven't followed this story will now give you you know a quick multiple choice question as to how this whole transition from having 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to not having them at at all.

How did that go?

Was it A, everything went smoothly?

People said, what a fun idea.

I hated having legal tender burning a hole in my pocket anyway.

Or was it B, total chaos?

And before you answer that, please bear in mind that India's default setting, and I've been to India on several occasions now and I've seen this firsthand, its default setting at the best of times, through no real fault of its own, being a nation of over 1 billion people, is total fing chaos.

Correct, the answer was B, total, and even more total chaos than usual if you can get more than total.

Massive queues at banks, General Mayhem, some fatalities.

Apparently some people were unable to pay for medical treatments because what they thought was money to pay for that medical treatment had become in the time it took Narendra Modi to have dinner after his special broadcast had become not money, but toilet paper.

So they could no longer pay for it.

And of course the people worst affected by this, again, any guesses, yes, it is the poor.

That is another loss in the results column for the poor, still way off form economically.

And some breaking news, the Indian government is going to collect all the defunct banknotes, mulch them up with some wallpaper paste and build a giant papier-mâché sculpture of Narendra Modi's extended middle finger to travel around rural India.

Now, the reason for this, because I mean, it might seem out of context, why on earth would you take out 86% of all the money, all the physical money in a country?

It was an attempt to clamp down on corruption,

the so-called, you know, the black economy,

which, I mean, corruption is more so even than cricket, India's national sport.

And unlike cricket, not only are you good at it at home, but you carry your form overseas in a way that the cricket team simply doesn't.

There's been...

But is this, Anuvab,

is this really an effective way of clamping clamping down on corruption in India?

Because it seems to me,

as an outsider, that withdrawing medium-denomination banknotes

as a means of reducing Indian corruption is roughly equivalent to beginning your New Year's diet by taking a slice of Gherkin from a two-pound gutbuster burger.

It is to me like the captain of the Titanic standing on the prow of his ship, pointing a hairdryer at the iceberg, shouting, everything is under control.

Feel the heat, you overblown Cornetto.

If I may exaggerate slightly, which I may, it's 2016 exaggeration is allowed.

In fact, you know, exaggerations have a grain of truth.

They'll probably be phased out of all political discourse in the next electoral cycle.

It seems an odd way to go about addressing this enormous problem.

Andy, I think it's a great point, Andy.

And as

a website, as an Indian news website called First Post pointed out, Narendra Modi has just burnt down a whole forest to find two or three snakes.

Very nicely put.

And I think that

that's one way to do it.

You know, that is one way to do it.

You see, one of the things that the government was hoping, which we're really known for in the world, was that this would go with Germanic precision.

I mean, from my trips to India.

Exactly.

That's what I've always thought.

I've just, you know, I've been walking around the streets of Delhi and Calcutta thinking,

this is so like Frankfurt.

It is uncanny.

Uncanny.

It's the same, really.

It's the same.

And I'm glad.

I'm glad as a visitor, Andy, you noticed that, because you know, we

function in a certain cold clinical sort of way.

Like every time anyone thinks of India, they don't think of color, chaos, madness, a billion people.

They think just leave functionality.

You know,

they think agility, precision, you know, just high-end design.

And so Mr.

Modi's gamble was successful because he said, like you pointed out, in the middle of this Germanic precision, what would be very easy to do,

especially when 600 million people cannot read and write, what would be easy to do is to tell them their notes are invalid, they have to go to the banks and exchange it, even if they don't have bank accounts.

So I think what had happened is that Mr.

Modi had seen a Monty Python sketch the night before

and any Monty Python sketch and told himself, I'm just going to enact this on the entire country.

So, what's happening now is that there are people in bank queues, like you said, you know, it's complete chaos.

Nobody knows how much money they can withdraw, nobody knows if their money is there or not.

And what's happening is now people in bank queues are doing things to get attention.

Yesterday, a man in Hyderabad set himself on fire after waiting for three and a half hours just for the bank manager to notice him.

And I think that that is a good approach anywhere in any bank, even when there is not a run on the bank.

I feel if you've been at a bank cube for a long time and you are not getting any attention, setting yourself on fire for a little while will get attention.

That's a good rule for life.

Yes, I mean, I've tried it in gigs, it doesn't always work.

I'm reminded of Henry VIII, Andy.

If you remember in

15

years,

that important year in history.

There was a shortage of, I think, gold coins.

So he had decided that

gold coins, there was a shortage of geese, cooking geese, geese that you would cook for food, and gold coins.

And he decided that geese were the same value as gold coins, and that just became a thing across the kingdom.

And

so I think that the rumors that are spreading is what else may be taken away?

What else may be introduced as legal tender?

You know, maybe a vase,

pillows, and the things they may take away are shoes and pants and all punjabi people like you don't know um precisely what might happen next so that's again all good like you'd say it's all good modi has made a big point of trying to reduce uh corruption um

i mean it is fascinating following indian corruption as an outsider because i mean we we jail our mps over here for you know, stealing 10 or 15,000 pounds worth of public money in a dodgy expenses claim.

I I think if an Indian MP stole £10,000 or £15,000 worth of public money in India, he would be praised for saving the states about £4 million worth of public money.

I was looking at some of the recent corruptions.

There was the

the biggest the Indian coal allocation scam of that blew up in 2012.

That was worth over twenty billion dollars.

There was a the Bihar fodder scam in the the Bihar region

that was worth around 10 billion US dollars, which involved, apparently, the fabrication of enormous herds of fictitious farm animals.

That is my kind of corruption.

It's amazing the imagination that goes into this.

That is right, Andy.

That is right.

Because you see, in that particular one,

the corruption was around cow fodder.

right uh that corruption was around basically fecal matter from cows right

um and this is the trouble with the Western world.

Where the Western world drives through India and they see just piles and piles of cow feces,

an Indian parliamentarian sees opportunity.

And I think this is the fundamental difference.

You see, one of the main problems with the Western world, and I hope they realize this, is that you have functioning systems.

Functioning systems really bother us.

You know, if it happens to me when I come to your country and I stand in queue and everything's functioning and I'm going in a line and they're asking me questions, the order and everything.

And it's a real bother because I look around and my head is doing, you know, it's an overdrive thinking, there's got to be a way I can mess up this system.

This is functioning too smoothly.

There's something wrong here.

I was reading also about the Uttar Pradesh Elephant Memorial scam from a few years ago.

And various articles put the value of this scam at between 9 million and 6 billion US dollars, which I assume is a misprint.

But even if it is only a $9 million million scam to cream off money from a program to put up public statues of elephants,

that is genius.

That is visionary.

British politicians would not even see that as an opportunity to be corrupt.

I think Indian corruption, they're like Spanish midfielders seeing passes that British midfielders cannot see.

There was another scam in which 35 million toilets went missing.

How do you lose 35 million?

The logistics in that are incredible.

Absolutely.

That's one of the greatest logistical achievements in human history.

And you can only pity the future archaeologists who, in hundreds or thousands of years' time, are going to come across a stash of 35 million toilets somewhere in a jungle in India and wonder what on earth had happened to human civilization.

This is why we need toilet day.

Precisely, because you know, as they say about toilets, when you've got to go, you've got to go.

You know?

And we took that literally.

The toilet has to disappear.

This is the thing.

I mean, you guys have fantastic sculpture in your country.

You have museums, right?

But,

you know, there are, if we went to Renaissance, Italy, da Vinci has done stuff.

Rodin has done stuff.

And I bet some of those popes that commissioned that are now sitting back and thinking, hold on a minute, all this is fantastic, but I made no money from this.

This is really disturbing.

They were commissioned, they were built.

Why?

That's the thing with the elephant statues, right?

How can you just build something and have it last for posterity, just for the people, without anyone making any money out of it?

We don't see it.

It just seems, in fact, the sculpture is the least important thing, right?

I think the statue of David, whatever, right?

If all the people involved in that were Indian, they would go see the statue of David.

It would be like, can you, do you know which political party made $7 million from that?

That would be the conversation.

The statue itself, some stone rubbish, we don't care.

That's not that important.

Anyone can do that.

One other bit of Indian news, last week, our Prime Minister, Theresa May, she, well, alleged Prime Minister, still waiting for an election to confirm that rumor.

She went to India on a trade trip, stroke karaoke cruise, stroke belated Hindu, delete according to whether you want a fact or a post-fact.

And

she refused to relax the visa rules on Indians

coming to Britain.

And it is, anyway, rather harder to get into Britain as an Indian today than it was to get into India as a British person some time ago when we would simply turn up and say, I have a very large stick and an extremely smart uniform.

I would strongly advise you to let me in.

If not, I will shoot you and I will shoot your wildlife.

Thank you.

I'm going to shoot you and your wildlife anyway, but thank you all the same.

Thank you.

This is true, Andy.

This is very true.

This is very true.

One of the things we forget about Empire, of course, is that we were just happy that anyone showed up to administer this place at all.

That the idea of colonization was so shocking to us that people would actually show up and be like, we'd want to run this place.

And we said, what, you want to run this?

You want to run?

Okay, sure.

Yeah.

I don't really know what's beyond my house, but I think there's a country.

If you can find it and you can sort of create a border and rail or whatever, you do what you want, it's fine.

And I think, I think that, of course, it's changed now that we're patriotic.

You know, now you found places

all across, you found where the country ended.

That was good.

Most of us had no idea.

You found oil and you found tea and all of that.

And now, of course, you know, you've got to keep some of that.

That was nice.

And now we have all of it.

And obviously, now there's all this trade and all this outsourcing going on.

And the Prime Minister Theresa May, she was here and she was wearing a sari and she went to a temple and that was all nice.

And I think she prayed to whatever gods there were that

no one would ask her to relax the visa thing.

I think in any Hindu temple if you give an offering and I think her offering was five visas for five Indian billionaires.

I think that was her point.

I think her policy was, yes, we're relaxing it.

These six people can go and I know them by name.

I think that works with policy very well.

You know, why should policy, as Donald Trump is reinventing the world, we have to ask ourselves, why does policy have to apply to everyone?

If you know the five people it'll benefit,

why not just say, Ramesh, Rajesh, Mr.

Tata, Mr.

Mbani, you can come and any time you want.

You don't have to scan your eye.

You just have to breathe heavily into the mouth of the immigration officer and just go go into the country.

We have no other scans in place for you.

The rest of you, look, I've made an effort, I'm wearing a sari, I've come to a temple, but I've got nothing else.

I've got no other offering for you.

Theresa May said the UK will consider further improvements to our visa offer if, at the same time, we can step up the speed and volume of returns of Indians with no rights to remain in the UK.

And again, looking back at history, if we step up that speed to anything under 250 years, it would be a little bit rude.

That's true.

That's true.

I think, you know,

and the exchange, it would also lead to chaos.

It'll be like the currency exchange.

Like, you know, Lord Clive, I think, is hanging around somewhere in Calcutta still.

And, you know, my cousin Vishesh is somewhere in Birmingham right now.

And I think

if we started getting into that,

there are just too many people that have to travel too much.

Just some latest other Indian news on the pollution crisis in New Delhi, the Indian capital.

Latest scientific reports show that it is now healthier to breathe inside an erupting volcano than on the streets of Delhi.

Doctors have said that you'll be better off filling your lungs with cement than attempting to find oxygen in the Indian capital.

Whilst the government of the planet Venus has issued a warning to all Venusians to wear special face masks when visiting Delhi.

And another scientist has claimed that if you cut out a zebra's lungs and leave those lungs exposed in the air in Delhi for just 30 seconds, that zebra would die.

So

it is that bad.

There were some tourists as part of the Teresa May Tre delegation

that went to see the Taj Mahal.

And there was so much

basically brown, gaseous substance in front of the Taj Mahal that they couldn't see it for two days.

And

I think, again, again, I think that the world has wrongly portrayed us.

I personally think that if you have the most beautiful monument in the world, it should not be easy to see.

You're going to earn it.

And I think that you should if, as a result of that, you need to pollute the entire atmosphere and kill about 12 million people to make something a little more enticing, then why not?

Before we go for this week, Anuv Abbas or rest of the world World correspondent, perhaps you could update us with how the rest of the planet has reacted to the election of Donald Trump to the post of King of America.

Yes.

You know, the rest of the world, I think, are quite surprised that basically that

a large joint family will now be running America.

It's a fresh start, really, because they're also quite amused by the fact that here some speeches have been given where

Donald Trump has acknowledged that he has no idea where the rest of the world is.

The other day, he said that I will be talking to Saudi Arabia, which is the capital of the Middle East.

And he said he was going to reneg on a treaty with Nigeria and other South Africans.

And so I think the rest of the world is hoping that they'll show up in Washington or New York or wherever Trump chooses to live and say pretty much anything about their country without it having to be fact-checked.

So I can imagine like a bunch of people from Thailand showing up and saying, We are massive exporters of shoes and orangutans.

And could we strike a special trade deal?

And then something would happen because

there would be no facts or any basis.

And, you know, Brazilians could show up there and say, We are not big with coffee and football.

You've been misinformed.

Like, people could say pretty much anything about their country.

And I think that is a fresh start, Andy.

Well, we will be covering these stories and others in a new section on a bugle in future weeks, as suggested by at Endless Coast Crew on Twitter, that we should have a bugle spin-off called The Trumpet, in which we cover Mr.

Trump.

So there will be a trumpet section in future bugles.

Not all future bugles.

I want to be able to sleep in at least some weeks.

But we will be charting the happy story of Donald, the magic president, as he takes four years out from his regular gig of tycooning the shit out of anything he looks at and hating everything whilst waiting to be enveloped by the fiery bowels of hell for a quick fun stint as the world's most powerful person.

So look out for the trumpet section in future weeks.

Sport now and we at the Bugle have never shied away from covering the sporting events that other leading media outlets in the world fear to cover and this week is no exception.

A huge event this week heading to its conclusion now.

It's the Buhlenschloff Scheitman Memorial Trophy, the rider cup of corporate jargon reaching its final stages.

So it's over to San Francisco to join the Bugles marginal sports correspondent, Wool, live at the Driveledome.

Wool, are you there?

Yes, Andy, much excitement here at the Driveledome.

America have hit the front in this hugely significant event.

Of course, in this increasingly globalized globe, communication is increasingly the means with which we use to communicate with each other, of course.

And today is, in every sense, no exception.

The real standard bearers here laying it out for us.

And America has taken a potentially unassailable lead as they seek to retain the old Bollenschlof Scheidman Korpjog Trophy for the 18th consecutive time.

YoungCom's exec Curlane Gragnatti, big star from the Jacksonville Jibber franchise, made the key play this morning in the freestyle exhortation discipline, telling his teammates that it was up to them not only to pump the hydrogen into the Hindenburg, but to make damn sure it catches fire while the cameras are rolling.

Well for Europe, young Spanish star Ana Granita Malfaniana hit back by claiming she was ready to toast the apricots even if no one else was and barked in some impressively uncertain terms that if you want to put your puppies in the post bag these days you've simply got to be prepared to douse grandma in jam and let the wasps do the work because as her old boss used to say she said no granny is immortal and there's no point firing up a crematorium for just one corpse did she make herself clear she asked and no replied the judges she did not and awarded malfaniana a score of 9.5 plus a bonus jog for outright incomprehensibility.

Super Everett from the young Spanish star, but is it going to be enough?

It doesn't look that way.

And even if I can interrupt us both here, I think now we can hear Team GB skipper Rolf Platters of the Birmingham Buzzwords.

He's taking the mic now for Europe for what could be some decisive business balderdash.

Listen, getting the right people doing the right jobs.

You don't make Picasso work in the paint shop.

And if you don't have a round peg for a roundhole, get a massive square peg and a digger.

Look not everyone is on board and ready to surf this dolphin I get that but we've got to embrace it.

We've got to embrace the changing global globe and as my old boss used to say if you don't like doing a school run don't kidnap someone else's children.

So the way I sit if you're barking up the wrong tree the cat's gonna shit on your strawberries.

So bark up all the trees shoot the cat win at meows and buy a fruit from the supermarket.

Am I right?

Well Anzy as you can hear super effort from Platter to get Europe right back in it and clearly the judges they think he's talking out of the bottom of the well there because that is an 8.7.

So, still all to play for here.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

Next week, the email address will have been set up as hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

So, do send your emails into that.

Keep them preferably under the 3,000-word essays that you seem to have started doing in previous

incarnation at the info address, which is being

decommissioned.

Um, next week will feature Helen Zaltzmann as uh in the Bugle co-host hot seat sister of the world-renowned cricket writer Andy Zaltzmann.

Uh, we will have uh more on on Brexit and uh whatever the hell is the government is riffing out in its uh elongated piece of improvisational performance art and uh a retrospective f eulogy for Ferdinand Marcos, who appears to have been uh given like it's sort of a hero's funeral

decades after his death in the Philippines, which is another country that appears to be going slightly round the spout.

So that is coming next week.

Anuvab, thanks very much for your glorious bugle debut.

You'll be back in December

to join us again.

So do keep an eye on everything that is happening in the world between now and then.

Are there any shows you've got coming up that you'd like to plug to our listeners or anything else?

Well, thank you for having me, Andy.

Thank you.

And, you know, given I have such a narrow, specific focus to keep my eye on,

I think I'll do it as I do with my Indian Germanic precision.

So

there's that.

Yeah,

I have a thing with Amazon that's coming up on December 16th.

They're recording a special in Mumbai.

Other than that, I hope that the country and I will remain penniless, as we've discussed the next time we speak in December.

Anu Anuva Powell, thanks very much for joining us.

Also next week will the nominations for the Bad Sex Award for awful writing about thruggulations in contemporary fiction.

The nominations have been announced and we have an exclusive extract from

a long-awaited literary sequel that many Bugle fans will be very excited to hear.

That will be coming up in next week's show.

Thanks very much for listening and we will speak to you next week.

The Bugle is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, made possible with great support from our founding sponsors the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos and teamwork.

Goodbye!

Hi Buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.