I have been thinking about dictators a lot over the past few years now, for reasons that aren’t always clear to me. I don’t know what prompts me to think about these pompous, semi-literate men in charge of countries, and laugh at their obsession with themselves. It’s a particularly strange topic to think about because India has no experience with people like these. And yet, they came to mind again a few days ago while I was reading a report from Venezuela about life after Nicolás Maduro.

Everyone knows what happened in that country when America decided to step in and do what the Americans have been doing for a long time now. It’s what happened in the weeks and months after they left that I found interesting. According to the report, the dictator who had portrayed himself as his people’s protector is already being erased, physically and metaphorically. Billboards with his face on them are being painted over, and his reputation as a superhero is already being forgotten by a nation that has moved on. It reminded me of how lucky India is to not have a cartoonish figure like this in Parliament. Imagine an Indian politician trying to con people into believing he was some sort of demigod? It would never happen here.