‘We prefer villains’: An excerpt from journalist Sankarshan Thakur’s (1962-2025) last book

We are like that only. We praise villainy; we prostrate before villains; we prefer villains; we poll for villains and then we put them on the covers of our magazines. Villainy Wins! Three cheers for villains! Look at yourself, look into your head if you have one of your own, tell yourself the truth if you can. And tell us who’s your preferred one. Tell us it’s not a villain. Or The Villain. The one who swept the polls and the one you put on the cover. Villains are, often who we secretly want to be but haven’t the trick or the temerity to become, isn’t it? Everybody likes a villain, the one you can’t become but would want to. Oh, what power. What privilege. What a thing of pride. To be TheVillain. To exude villainy, to be the centre of the aura that everyone’s apprehensive to even approach. You walk and everything around scatters away, a magnetic repulsion. What a thing to be. And why not? Why be shy? Badi baat hai, not everybody’s cup of tea to be a badmaash, or mug of coffee. Villains are a thing; you don’t get them every day. How long has it...

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