The UnReal Times

» see theunrealtimes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

It started as one joke. In April 2011 two men named Karthik Laxman and C.S. Krishna wrote a piece headlined "Government mulls direct cash transfers by dropping money bags from the sky," aimed at India's cash transfer schemes. It went over well enough that they registered theunrealtimes.com and committed to publishing a satirical article every day.

That rhythm held for five and a half years. The UnReal Times went after politics and cricket with the same instrument, and the comparison everyone reached for was The Onion, to the point that MakeUseOf called it the Onion of India in January 2013 and the description became semi-official. Indian newspapers quoted it back, which is the real measure of a satire site. The Times of India wrote it up and The Hindu profiled its columnists, and one spoof about Raghuram Rajan crossed into mainstream coverage of the man himself.

The writers were mostly not professional journalists, and a good number of them never used their names. The masthead ran pen names alongside real ones, which is an old arrangement for people who write jokes about a government in the evening and go to an office in the morning.

~ the record ~

~ the formats ~

The site did more than write fake news reports. It ran mock transcripts of cabinet meetings and of cricket dressing rooms, and it fabricated whole Facebook walls and Twitter threads when a joke wanted that shape. The picture series was the house specialty and the columnist behind it, Ashwin Kumar, was named by The Hindu as one of the best working in the format.

The early hits set the register. "Manmohan Singham" was a trailer for an action film starring the actual prime minister. "BCG hires McKinsey to advise it on how to become number 1" needed no setup for anyone who had ever worked near a consultancy. A reporter interviewing the Bollywood actor Imran Khan under the impression he was the Pakistani cricket captain is the kind of thing that happens often enough in real life to be unfair.

~ 30 november ~

November 2016 was an extraordinary month for anyone in the business of absurdity. The United States elected Donald Trump on the eighth. On the same day, India's prime minister went on television and withdrew 86 percent of the country's banknotes from circulation overnight. Three weeks later, with the queues outside banks still running down the street, The UnReal Times stopped.

No statement came. The Financial Express covered the closure on 29 November with a headline that was really a question, asking whether rising intolerance was the reason, and the absence of any answer from the founders let the question stand. Five and a half years of daily output ended without a goodbye post of any kind.

~ afterwards ~

A piece of it carried on briefly. In 2017 Ashwin Kumar started a weekly video series called Unreal Missions that ran ten episodes before it also stopped. The domain answers nothing at all now, over http or https, with or without the www.

Indian political satire in English was never going to travel to me in Ankara, and the jokes that made the site famous are the ones that need you to already know who the Reserve Bank governor is. What does travel is the shape of the ending. A country gets its strangest month in decades and the people who had spent five years making fun of it close the tab.

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