Construct this man carefully

We're going to have some fun today.

Trap a man in an unholy pit. In the deepest, darkest recess you can conceive. Let the pit be the very belly of the earth. Cavernous, with no start and no end. Make certain that when the pit is sealed, there is no way out, and no way in. Nor light enter, nor breath escape.

Construct this pit carefully. Here is what you need to do:


Turn up the temperature, until it hits a dry boil. Three days in, when most creatures in that hole have died, fashion a tiny, shallow puddle of water in the very innards of this pit. Allow a drip to fall on to that puddle, a drop every hour. Let the sound of this drip echo through the cavern. Remember, one drop every hour. When it is the sound of water, trust me, it will hit every animate eardrum. Every creature alive will daredevil maps of the cavern in their heads. They will bore toeholds and finger-ledges using muscle, and skin, to reach the water. Five days in, turn the drip into a slip of a stream. Steady and gurgling. The man might have given up trying to find perches to climb to, but this should start him up again.

Make it so that there is no way to reach that puddle.

Now, construct this man carefully:

Fill the man with fire. For this to work, the fire needs be red. Not the golden glow of hope. Also not the amber shade of courage - much too meek - courage allows a man to wait it out on the top floor of a burning building, in the hope that a fireman or some watergod will come. It will not make him the demon he needs to be to escape this hell.

So, no. Make that fire red. It should burn him if he can't put it out. It should torch his blood and glass his eyes from the inside if he does not scramble fast enough.

One does not start this kind of fire with kindling and air. At best, that sort of fire burns blue at the edges with a cabin-warm shimmer at the centre. No, instead, start with fury. Add hate or add love - I'll leave that to you and the sort of morning you've had today. Don't just season though. Flood his core with it. It will be adding spirit to the fury. Let the mixture explode in his heart. Again and again. Valves should burst and veins should throb. If his body cannot carve a toehold in the rock to reach the next ledge, he should strip his foot of skin, flesh, muscle and ligament to expose bone, and again begin the battle against rock.

Make his bones brittle.

I hope you enjoy the fight.

Finish it with mercy. That's what we do.

I expect that after a while, he will lie there,  broken. Send in the black dust I'd left by the stove. You could unseal the pit, by a hair's width and slip in the dust. His breathing will be heavy (for he will be broken only in body), sucking in large amounts of air, and expelling it before it can reach his lungs, but the dust only needs to enter his windpipe. The moment it does, it will seep through his pores and reach his bloodstream. This dust will put out the fire and end his fight.

-------------------

See, my project should've ended there. You were there. You heard the instructions. Light fire, watch him fight, put him out with the dust.

But it didn't work out that way.

I descended into the pit and watched him as he inhaled the dust. He broke out into a violent cough instantly, stretching his arms to the rocks to pull himself up... but it wouldn't help. It was too late for him. He stopped after a minute. His body turned still. I thought he'd turned to stone. His skin, black, now turned leaden. I expected he would keel over. Instead, his stiffened legs folded..elegantly..and he sat back down, tucking the bloody, bony foot under him. His eyes, just now bloody, suddenly shot open. I looked directly into them. They were two balls of ash floating in a white-hot liquid. For a moment, I thought he could see me.

At that instant, I became conscious of how cold it had suddenly become in the cave. I looked back at the man. He was glowing red hot. As though he'd drawn into himself all the heat of the cave. What new divinity was this? I heard a rumbling underneath me, and suddenly a slab of rock split open where I stood. From it gushed upwards a flaming jet of gold. I looked around, and out burst another fissure, and another. Sprays of lava shot up, some reaching miles high, upto the very seal of the pit.

As I turned my eyes upwards, I saw that the man was now ablaze. A red plume of fire. There was no distress, no agony. Just a calmness. His burning body shuddered for a moment before shooting into the void above, splitting open my pit-seal. The molten rock under me turned into a massive geyser as it followed him out. For days it flowed out the sides of the pit, and I watched in amazement as it razed fields and animals. What a sight, what an incredible notion that I could do this - create a mountain out of a cave and fire a man into the stars.

Mad Men

Mad men

On a hot, dusty evening, a man fell to the ground beside a heap of rotting garbage. He skinned his knees and the side of his face as he hit the asphalt. His tattered pajamas did little to hide his modesty.

He lay there, sucking in short, sharp breaths. He was supposed to feel an emotion, but which one? Perhaps anger… or was it shock?  He tried to play dead, hoping the boys would move on to some other prey. Like bears. But he couldn’t stop his gasps of breath. The more he tried to stifle them, the more his body jerked. He was conscious of how his body had started to writhe again, uncontrollably.  

Today he was a stupid man, stripped of intelligence, stripped of sense. He was so stupid, he couldn’t even play dead. So when the pelting started again, could he blame them? He curled his beard in front of his face and put one hand over his eyes, the other over his genitals as the men laughed.

Mad men

As far as he could see, the world was a remarkable place. So many shades of sunshine. If he closed his good eye, he could only see the white hot light glinting off another bauble at the trinket store. And when he tried on another pair of sunglasses, the world was suddenly bathed in blue. The shopkeeper didn’t mind. It cost him nothing to keep the khyapa amused. 

And when khyapa smiled, it was so weightless that for those few moments, every customer at that roadside shop would feel themselves unplugged from the world and its cares.

Smiling comes easy when you’re in step with your world. When people do as you do, you smile. When the light looks just right, when the shade is cool enough or when food is found, you smile. When sleep comes easy, and you wake up because you’ve slept enough, you smile. When the body does what the mind tells it to, you smile because you’re harmonizing. 

And then when you can play with the world, that smile becomes a laugh. When a child comes and sits beside you, you can laugh and help her laugh too. When another day goes by, when you didn’t have to lie, about where you’ve been or what you did, you can laugh. If they’ll give you a roof for the night, where you can make your bed in plain sight, you can laugh, even if it’s in your head. When the rules line up neatly with what you were anyways planning to do, just laugh.

Mad men

So today was a good day. After an arresting conversation with a friendly constable (both of them parted, step-in-spring intact), he figured that the imbalance he struggled with, wasn’t so bad. Sure, he didn’t see why people needed to walk around as though wearing straitjackets, nor really why their up was down, and their down up, but as long as everyone got along, did it really matter?

When the shopkeeper had had enough of him, he’d give khyapa a fiver to send him on his way. The money meant little, and khyapa would later give it to a beggar, but he understood this signal - It meant ‘enough now, leave’. See? He knew what was what. 

Now, as the sun blustered in the evening sky, khyapa had grown thirsty and hungry. The buildings all seemed to slant in the wrong direction, so no cool shade was on offer as he looked for food. He knew better than to knock on doors, and some sense of esteem prevented him from sitting on the road to beg. 

That’s when he stumbled upon an open garbage pile. A maid from a nearby colony was dumping the kitchen waste. There was bound to be food there – homemade, at that. The promise of solid pickings started him on a clumsy dash towards the garbage, drool dripping instantly from the side of his mouth.

He perched himself on a brick and lunged from his squat towards half a boiled potato, nestled among some broken egg shells and cauliflower stems. How people could waste perfectly good food like this he didn’t know, not that he minded. 

A laugh rang out somewhere in the distance as he was about to bite into the potato. The next moment, he felt a sharp pain at the back of his head, and immediately after, a sting in the recess of his knee. The stones were sharp, almost as sharp as the taunts that accompanied them. A man broke away from the group, ran up to him and kneed him in the back. On that hot, dusty evening, a hungry man fell to the ground beside a heap of garbage. Mad men we are.

Commonwealth Games 2010

From numerous articles on the net about the mismanagement of funds at CWG 2010, here are some gems:

• 1 Treadmill rented for Rs. 10 lakh ($21, 500 US) for a period of 45 days

• 1 roll of toilet paper - bought for $89

• Payment of $429,000 to a British film company (AM films) helmed by one Ashish Patel, to supply outdoor display units for a ceremonial function in London last year. The firm had a paid-up capital of £1 and one share held by Ash Patel, i.e. a one-man shop, until one week before the function.

• 43 lakh pots for a whopping INR 30 crore ($6.437M USD) to beautify the venues in Delhi. - First of all, pots? Secondly, Delhi police have told the CWG organisers that these pots cannot be placed anywhere near the venues for security reasons. Back go them pots.

All of this money comes from the pockets of the tax-paying public, and the Organizers are toying with the media, the junta, and the money itself. I guess they figured it's Games with the Common Wealth after all, so what the heck.

Soccer World Cup

Overheard (or made up, not sure which):
Reporter on the street doing spots for a news show. Catches a random soccer fan and:

Reporter: So, who do you think is the dark horse for this year's cup?
Fan: India.
Reporter: India? but they aren't even part of the pool.
Fan: And that's just how dark they are.

Apologies

S'troo, I haven't posted the last couple of months. A thousand apologies to those that stopped by. A thousand more to those that stopped by more than once.

I'm creating some more time, you should see something new up here pretty often now over the next quarter.

Indian Winter

I'm in Bangalore for the next couple of weeks. It's sweater weather, and there's not a chance of snow. The idea is to put my feet up and do little - very very little. The agenda is to meet old friends, and check off the usual offenders:
1. Fanoos rolls
2. Avatar 3D
3. Gemini Circus
4. Talk to local politicians about the progress with the Metro project
5. Cleanse the city of all pollution
6. And all corruption, while I'm at it

More updates to follow in this post.

Prison Money

A friendly prof. sent me an article about the currency in prison. In the U.S., the old, gold standard - cigarettes, has now been replaced by "macks".

Mackerel fish. A can of the dastardly stuff goes for about $1. Two macks buy you a haircut, 400 macks a cellphone. There's obviously some elasticity in there, compared to the outside world. The prison has a cellphone-to-haircut ratio of 200 and the outside world, a ratio of about 6 (regular haircut, non-smart cellphone).

Explained easily enough:

Long hair, short hair, who cares? ...

The cellphone, OTOH, lets you keep tabs on your drug-peddling , allows cyber conjugal visits, helps plan the escape, etc...

So the currency is macks.

Me, I'd have thought it was simply the £.

Sorry. Prison joke.

No contradictions

Clinton (the Ms. of the Hill-Billie jodi) had strong words for Pakistan during her recent visit there:

Al Qaeda has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002,’ Clinton told senior Pakistani newspaper editors in the country’s cultural capital, Lahore. ‘I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,’ she added.

Harsh words, blunt words, but she said what many in the US have felt for the last few years.

Pakistan has recently stepped up military offensives against the Taliban in the Waziristan region. And the Taliban has stepped up the bombing. Here's a brilliant link to images of the strife in the country.

Tangled webs we weave
Pakistan's Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, claims Indian sponsorship of this new wave of Taliban attacks. It's difficult for the layman to knock this claim, given India's recent assimilation of embassies in Afghanistan. India is doing great work in Afghanistan, building roads, improving healthcare facilities, etc, but many feel this is part of India's strategy to undermine Pakistan's influence in the region. Perhaps it's all a front to provide the Taliban the means to wreck further destruction in Pakistan. Analogous to Pakistan's (ISI) efforts to build a nexus between Indian insurgent groups (IIGs) and Islamic fundamentalists in Bangladesh and to install Pakistani maulvis in Bangladeshi madrassas to catalyze anti-India sentiments.

Back to Hillary: She snapped at some students at a University in Lahore as they tried to grill her about how the US has mistreated Pakistan, a long-serving ally.
(paraphrased)"But we've given you billions of dollars".
"If you want to see your territory shrink [by allowing terrorists to expand their space], that’s your choice. But I don’t think that’s the right choice."

But the point of my post is this: The US has indeed given Pakistan billions of dollars. The US will continue to pour money and guns into Pakistan. But the effect on the ground, despite Pakistan's intentions, hasn't been proportional. In fact, the Taliban today are bolder, more aggressive in Pakistan than they have been in a long time. What's the plan to tackle this?

How thoroughly has the U.S. has considered the long-term effects of this supply of gun-money?

What if:

(a) The Taliban gain more ground, and defeat the shaky force that Pakistan's military presents - through building allies in the government, and among the population, through bombing civilian targets till the country grinds to a halt, among several strategies. The U.S.-provided ammunition would fall into hands that would turn, now far more resolutely, against the U.S. themselves.

(b) Pakistan's military is able to defeat the Taliban...The military pledges a feeble allegiance to the government. A new General, a new coup - everything's possible in that neck of the woods. Who's to tell what their policy will be towards the U.S. then?

Essentially, the same machinery that provided arms to the Mujahideen (of which the Taliban was a more fundamentalist subset) to defeat the Soviets, only to have the Taliban come back and strike the U.S. after, is at work again. I hope history does not repeat.