Cards vs Sanskaar Takes On Bhakts, Bollywood and Bros

November 22, 2018, 1:05am

On the night of April 1, 2018 a thousand internet denizens received a visa to Pakistan. These weren’t just wokebros on Twitter being banished by saffron garbed mobs to our neighbour’s aangan for defending the right to eat a beef chilli fry on a night out, but innocent victims who fell for the spurious machinations of the big bad design industry. And they (we) weren’t even Aunties of WhatsApp falling for every forward that is coming in on the PTA group.

These marching orders were the return gift one received when signing up for what promises to be the hottest new game to hit the streets this year. Cards vs Sanskaar (originally, Cards Against Sanskaar and renamed for obvious/legal/broke bitch reasons) is, as the original website stated, “a party game for horrible anti-nationals”. A desi-fied, jugaad take on the foulmouthed party game Cards Against Humanity, Cards vs Sanskaar started off as a last-minute prank by Smarter Than a Waffle Studios (or Stawdio)—a Mumbai-based indie studio helmed by design duo Adrita Das and Karan Dilip Worah—to announce their month-old design studio’s social media presence to friends and family. What they didn’t expect was for people to take it seriously.

But it should have come as no surprise. The idea is immediately appealing to anyone who has been drawn into the seemingly endless and increasingly ridiculous news cycle in the past year. Our country and its problems are providing ready fodder for some readymade hot takes over booze and bar snacks in living rooms across the nation. How else can one cope with the farrago of distortions being churned out by the government that have resulted in us collectively flashing the biggest boner upon an unsuspecting world, instead of, say, blowing our load on completely eliminating manual scavenging by investing in robotic cleaners, going to the moon and back thrice over, or just including eggs in midday meals to give students the strength to deal with a failing educational system?

But it isn’t just the grandstanding government that Cards vs Sanskaar is targeting, but the society that lets it thrive. “We didn’t just want to get into the limelight for pulling down the government,” Das tells VICE. “Instead, we wanted to go deeper—dig into the question of what is sanskaar, really? We live in a complicated country where people have different ideas of what Indian culture actually is.”

Videos by VICE

This might surprise the 1,000 people who signed up to pre-order the game on April 1, expecting some wink-wink-nudge-nudge liberal virtue signalling to be delivered to their doorstep. Das and Worah have deliberately moved slow, working through multiple iterations of content as they develop the game. Incorporating the classic comedy ethos of punching up (to target the oppressor) versus punching down (to pick on the oppressed), they found themselves letting go of some well-loved jokes. If the makers manage to live up to the marketing, Cards vs Sanksaar might be more than a cut-copy-paste of the original. Their videshi inspo can often just feel like a sanitised avenue for people to present prejudices that are actually harmful in real life, hiding beyond the excuse of equal opportunity bigotry.

This is not a criticism Das is unaware of. “Initially, we were getting so caught up in making funny jokes, we didn’t have time to ask ourselves, ‘why is this funny?’ But once we did, we discarded a lot of content,” shares Das. “[At the time of the prank] the political climate had been so focused on sanskaar with ridiculous news everyday, we thought we’ll go all out and offend everybody—not leave anyone out. Over the last few months, we have grown.”