India, Italy and the Melodi hai chocolatey

Beyond the bilateral agreements, Modi and Meloni are in on the joke together. Melodi is adding grist to the meme mill.

In Short

• Indian internet has constructed a Melodi cinematic universe around Modi and Meloni
• The PMs didn't try deflation through transparency, but absorption with participation
• Their Melody toffee video took the dull out of diplomacy, launched a thousand memes

Some bilateral ties have strategic depth. Some have ceremonial grandeur. Some have centuries of shared history. This one has all three and one more: confectionery.

There is a toffee named Melody. There is a prime minister named Modi. There is another prime minister named Meloni. At some point, the internet did what the internet does best. It combined two things that had no business being combined and produced something it had no business producing. Melodi. A portmanteau. A hashtag. A national pastime. Definitely here in India.

Welcome to the age of prime ministers who are also celebrities, celebrities who are also memes, and memes that are also, somehow, diplomatic dispatches. Let us be very clear about what Narendra Modi and Giorgia Meloni are. They are heads of government. They negotiate trade. They talk defence. They discuss the Mediterranean, the Indo-Pacific, the Global South, and presumably the weather in Rome, which is excellent compared to the open oven that New Delhi is right now. These are serious people doing serious things at serious tables. The bilateral relationship between India and Italy has substance, history, and considerable strategic weight.

And yet. #Melodi.

The thing about a joke the whole country laughs at is that you can either be very conscious of it, which makes you miserable, or you can find it genuinely funny, which makes you human. Modi and Meloni are, evidently, human. Not just occasionally human in the way politicians are trained to appear human, you know warm handshake, scripted smile, pause for the photographers. But human like actually, pleasantly, confusingly human. They have laughed together, taken selfies together, and now, during the latest Italian leg of what the internet insists on calling their ongoing love story, they have done the one thing that closed the gap between statecraft and spectacle completely. Modi gifted Meloni a toffee. A toffee called Melody. And then they posted the video themselves.

Consider the audacity of that move. Sibi George, who handles the MEA's communication for a living, did not see this coming. And thank god for that! Had he known, he would have delivered a TED talk on the spice trade between Malabar and the Roman Empire before Europe even existed. But a toffee? Called Melody? Given to Meloni? Filmed and posted with full awareness of what it would do to the timeline?

This is not an accident. This is a chess move dressed as candy. Melodi hai chocolatey. Now, Narendra Modi is not exactly the prime minister you associate with whimsy. He is the man of the long pause, the dramatic silence, the 56-inch mythology. The internet likes him stern. The opposition prefers him wrong. His own party has sanctified him beyond the reach of a punchline. And yet here he is, rummaging through a diplomatic bag, producing Melody toffee, handing it to his counterpart, and then filming it. Posting it. With a smile that said both knew exactly what they were doing.

That is not the act of a man who missed the joke. That is the act of a man who wrote it. The Indian internet had, as it does, constructed an entire cinematic universe around two prime ministers who meet at summits and discuss G7 agendas and trade corridors. Fan edits. Side-by-side photographs. A reel with Pehli Nazar Mein playing in the background over footage of them walking next to each other at a multilateral meet. This is the nation that invented Virushka and DeepVeer. It was only a matter of time before it exported the format to international relations.

The Italian version arrived with better suits. There is, of course, a certain familiarity already. This country is not unfamiliar with that country. Sonia Gandhi is from Italy and is as Indian as one can be. Familiarity breeds memes. And memes are nice and fun and witty and, sometimes, brutal. So, since their first photo-op together, the Indian internet went Jai Meme.

But here is what is genuinely interesting, if you step back from the toffee and the hashtag for a moment. Neither of them flinched. Modi did not start avoiding eye contact in photographs. Meloni did not release a 700-word statement on the professional nature of their engagement. They did not, as politicians so often do when caught being relatable, immediately become unrelatable in overcorrection.

They kept going. They took the pictures. They smiled. They handed each other a toffee and looked directly at the camera. It was, in a very specific sense, the most sovereign thing either of them could have done.

There is an old piece of wisdom that says the best way to stop someone from speculating about you is to bore them. Show them the sausage. Let them see the kitchen. The mystique dies, the gossip follows. But Modi and Meloni have tried something more interesting. Not deflation through transparency, but absorption through participation. If you don’t want raised eyebrows, raise your eyebrows first. And higher.

It has worked, if working means the people who were giggling are now giggling differently. With them rather than at them. Which is, arguably, the better outcome. The bilateral summit produced a joint statement. It covered green energy, technology partnerships, defence cooperation, and cultural exchange. These things will matter. Long after the toffee is forgotten, the frameworks will remain, the agreements will be implemented, the trade numbers will change. History will record what was signed, not what was posted.

But history also has a sense of humour, occasionally.

Two of the most digitally savvy leaders of the modern age, each running a large democracy, each carrying a country's foreign policy like a particularly heavy brief at a time the world feels heavier than ever, each fully aware that a camera is never not pointed at them, found a moment to be in on the joke. Modi ji found a nostalgic little toffee called Melody from the House of Parle-G, parlayed it across the table to Meloni ji, and posted the handover to the Gen Z with the confidence of people who have nothing to prove and know it. Ji.

Melodi, then. The hashtag that launched a thousand memes. The portmanteau that outlived the briefing. The toffee that made the timeline forget, for one afternoon, that diplomacy is supposed to be dull.

Easter Egg: Romans spoke Classical Latin. But large parts of rural Italy did not. Much like rural folk in ancient India did not speak Sanskrit. They spoke Prakrit and Apabhransa. The Roman equivalent was Vernacular Latin, or Vulgar Latin, the lingua franca of the streets. That language evolved. Spread. Softened. Someone wrote a love story in it. The language never quite recovered its dignity. We got the word romance. It originates from Rome, the very city from which Prime Ministers Modi and Meloni posted those photographs. History may not repeat itself, but it always rhymes.

(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)

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(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)