Aadhaar Battle: The Backbenchers Win This Round

After sending out a million individual reminders to people to link their

Aadhaar cards to their accounts, PAN cards, and Hrithik Roshan wall-posters, the government has gone ahead and decided that it would no longer be mandatory to link Aadhaar cards with bank accounts and mobile phones. That’s right, all those messages, all that time you spent going to the bank and back, has been a massive waste of your time. The news must have come as a massive shock to one section of society: The I-Came-First-Ma’am people. The ICFM personality type applies to organised people, the ones who finished all their homework before leaving school. They’re the ones who, as adults, are excited about paperwork. They spend their time re-arranging files in alphabetical order instead of just throwing them in the bin like the rest of us, and often have zero unread messages on their phones (imagine that). On paper, the ICFM-type is far superior to the unorganised guy wearing two socks on his left leg and going commando on the right. But today, us backbenchers finally get our revenge. We can’t help but let out a slow, evil laugh at the ICFM type. This time, the squares who went ahead and linked their Aadhaar cards to their neural networks because “teacher told to do,” are starting to look a bit like idiots. Some of the more eager ones went ahead and linked their numbers before the Prime Minister even had time to say “mitron”. Others succumbed to the incessant messaging from the telecom companies, banks, WhatsApp forwards, and distant relatives with agendas. Now they’re stuck in limbo while the government just decides that all this time it’s just been joking about mandatory Aaadhaar linking. The procrastinators have come out of this verdict on top. We deleted all Aadhar messages on sight, ignored pretty severe warnings that our bank accounts would be frozen, and slept through a barrage of badly shot “how to” videos urging us to link before it was too late. It’s like how we studied in school, on the eve of the exam. We can proudly say today, that for once, things have worked out for us.