Perhaps all this is true of the Modi government as well.

Judging from its efforts, the government will portray the record-smashing event at India Gate as a great triumph. But this triumphalism will be illusory because no previous government in India has ever pressed its resources to set a yoga record.  The Guinness world records have a great deal to do with thinking up categories and standards that did not exist previously. It’s illusory also because it isn’t a world competition in which other governments will participate: it is more a case of the Indian government competing against a previous endeavour of an organisation that cannot match the state apparatus.

India’s obsession with world records, mostly of the trivia kind, inspired Vinay Lal, professor of history at the University of California, to write a book, Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture. In one of his essays Prof Lal writes, “A certain anxiety over the manliness of a people, no less of a nation, may perhaps account to a great degree for the quest among Indians to have their names etched in the Guinness Book.”

Prof Lal says this is partly on account of the colonial experience, which still has Indians “look up to the white European male, who confers recognition upon inferiors, and who has established the standard that the Indian must meet. The Guinness Book is there to remind that such recognition is possible and desirable.”

The government’s high-pitched campaign announcing that yoga is India’s gift to the world (as if this hadn’t been known and recognised earlier), and its over-the-top proposed celebration of International Yoga Day, seem to reflect the vision of state managers who wish to persuade themselves that they have the confidence to stand with citizens of the developed world. We Indians must feel inferior to bring up the fact that even US President Barrack Obama’s had expressed an interest in yoga. Such self-conscious attempts at bolstering pride speak a lot of our own sense that we lack something – a sense that the government seems to share.

The government is about setting a goal it can’t but achieve. On June 21, an infantile sense of grandeur will be on display.

The BJP has already displayed its desire for superlatives. For instance, Gujarat is building the statue of Sardar Patel, billed as the Statue of Unity, and self-consciously projected as being taller than the Statue of Liberty. However, instead of counting the number of bank accounts opened in a week, shouldn’t we be trying to figure how many of them are in operation? Truly, all these are examples of form trumping substance.