India, April 18 -- Bizarre as it may seem, the news of Viktor Orban's shattering defeat in last Sunday's elections in Hungary made me think of Zoltan Karpathy. Now, who is Karpathy, you might well ask? In My Fair Lady, he's described as "that dreadful Hungarian". Honestly, isn't that a term one could use for Viktor Orban?

In the film, Karpathy "made it the devilish business of his" to expose Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl pretending to be an aristocrat, on her debut at the Embassy Ball. And he got it terribly wrong. Peter Magyar, you could argue, is a bit like Miss Doolittle. He has captured the imagination of the Hungarian people. He came seemingly from nowhere to take by storm the citadel of Hungarian politics.

Let me first tell you a...