February 22, 2021 Amitabh Bachchan’s 753rd tweet—the superstar carefully numbers his social media activity—was a somewhat unfunny joke on rising inflation. Fed up with rising petrol prices, a Mumbaikar goes to a petrol pump to buy “two to four rupees” of petrol in order to “spray on his car” in order to “burn it.” Clearly, it was unviable for a middle-class Indian to now even own a car. This was in 2012—a time when jokes around the price of petrol were so popular they almost made up their own humour genre in India. This was also a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was tottering. And as it soon learnt, there was little more damaging politically than humour. The widespread mocking of fuel prices served to create a middle-class “common sense” that the UPA was a time of exceptional misrule and corruption.