Hun koun chhun manne khabar nathi, maara Daddy koun che, maari Mummy koun che.
– IS Johar, Bhagwan Dada, Sunder Singh, Maruti Rao Parab and Kishore Kumar, Badhti Ka Naam Daadhi (1974). 

Teri meri love story ka angle… is angle mein hai triangle.
– Shaan, Sunidhi Chauhan, Babul Supriyo, Sameer and Himesh Reshammiya, Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya (2005).

The best stories are simply told.

A boy loves a girl. She is rich; he is poor. Her father, defender of family honour and balance sheets, disapproves. Obstacles are manufactured. Tears are shed. Speeches about “status” are delivered. True love fights, suffers and – because this is how these stories go – wins. They live happily ever after.

The best stories are simple – which is precisely why they sell. And when they aren’t simple, they are stripped, flattened and packaged until they are. Complexity doesn’t travel well; nuance doesn’t trend. 

So everything is reduced to a neat little duel: Good versus bad. Right versus wrong. Strong versus weak. Big versus small. Us versus them. Hero versus villain. Truth versus lies. Order versus chaos. Victim versus oppressor. David versus Goliath. Reform versus corruption. Growth versus decline. Nationalist versus anti-national. Stay in India versus go to Pakistan. And so on.

But once in a while comes a story that doesn’t fit into the neat descriptions outlined above. Take the case of the India–US trade deal, which sits at one corner of a triangle. At the other two corners sit the political audiences that must be persuaded: the Make America Great Again (MAGA) base in the US and the sprawling ecosystem one might call WhatsApp University in India.

Dear reader, this is what I like to call the Impossible Triangle.

Let’s summarise the three ends of the Impossible Triangle.

1) The MAGA Base in the US: They must be told that Donald Trump’s “Art of the Deal” worked and that America extracted a great victory from India.

2) The WhatsApp University in India: They must be told that India is a Vishwaguru and that this is a “clean,” triumphant win.

3) The actual India-US trade deal or the economic reality: The cold, hard truth about where India buys its oil – and the tariffs that are stacked against it.

So, what makes this triangle impossible?