We've never seen such an escalation of bad language as in recent times

The free bandying around of insulting language, not just by trolls but also by leaders has become a virtual epidemic. Cockroach, presstitute, Dimagi Naxal-these were not phrases used by small time party foot soldiers but by people in high office.

“There were previous incarnations, (of using such language), but we've never seen such an escalation of it in recent times,” says Dilip Cherian, former journalist turned Image Guru who has been an observer of the public and political scene for a long time.

One reason is that we don’t have leaders of stature who had self-restraint and also had “both the power and the speed with which to quickly tell their stormtroopers, who were usually at fault, to shut up,” he said to Sidharth Bhatia in a podcast discussion. “Now, when it escalates from leadership to actually, in a sense, adding fire and brimstone to just abuse, then we are in very dangerous grounds.”

Today he said, the very users of such “putrid phraseology are now scurrying for cover because during the cockroach rally, you saw that girls and young boys were describing members of the establishment in the most colorful and profane words that previously had never been heard in the mouths of young girls or young boys.”

He said many of his clients who had got themselves in a fix because of something they had said, and his advice to them was always the same: “Three steps. Apologize, retreat, and promise never to repeat. I've been able to salvage really hairy situations, hairy corporate situations, by just making sure that they stick to this formula. “