New Delhi, April 9 -- Samay Raina did not write this line in a notebook. He arrived at it the hard way. It came through a police case. It came after a public apology he did not fully mean. He came up with this line, also with the inherited wisdom of a community that has spent decades knowing exactly when to stand and when to leave.

The line is a deliberate inversion of George Orwell's essay Funny, But Not Vulgar. In that 1945 piece, Orwell wrote, "Every joke is a tiny revolution" He means that humour, by its nature, challenges authority, punctures pretension and disrupts the comfortable order of things.

Raina takes that idea, holds it up against his own experience with the Assam police following the India's Got Latent

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