A few questions relating to Osama bin Laden’s death

1. Osama bin Laden is believed to have been employed by the CIA during the 1980s with direct financial, tactical, strategic and physical support of all kinds to create an army of men to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (which itself was illegal, inhuman, unethical and unjust). Political Islam took shape to provide bonding cover to men recruited in this war apart from the financial support their families received to give up their men for this war. There is documented evidence to support these claims. Yet the USA administration has never for once apologized to the world at large for nurturing this man and making him capable of what he was to do in the later years against their interests when they turned the heat on him. Why?
2. Can one employ the best Chartered Accountants in the world with an objective to understand the amount of revenues earned by the American, English, French, Australian and German military engineering, equipment supplying and contracting companies directly and indirectly after 9/11 in the name of providing security to its own people, going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq to decimate the causative factors of international modern terrorism and later to rebuild and reconstruct these countries from a heap of rubbles that they had been converted into during the war because the governments of these first world countries continuously exaggerated threats of terrorism and terrorists to hysteric levels?
3. It is being informed that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay had leaked the details of Osama bin Laden’s courier to his abode at Abottabad. Could this be a ploy to re-legitimize the concept and style of Guantanamo Bay?
4. The technology, reach, manpower, money, manipulative skills and collaboration that are available with the USA in its war on terror is so huge that it is practically impossible to gauge their length and breadth. Yet it takes so many years to find an ageing and ailing fugitive. Doesn’t it sound a bit strange? Immediately after the death of Osama bin Laden there have been painstaking announcements made by the American dignitaries of state that one should not underestimate the avenging capabilities of Al Qaida and how much of a potential threat to the world could such efforts be. This was as if to remind us that we should not ask them to stop their wars and war-games relating to counter-terrorism now that Osama bin Laden is dead. No?
5. Is there any court of law in any country (modern or despotic) that has established the crimes of Osama bin Laden? (Lest somebody should believe I am a fan of Osama bin Laden I must clarify that I believe he has been given an image so powerful that there is always an inclination to relate to him outside the domain of reality like you would treat mythical heroes and villains. I am more inclined to believe: he and his cohorts as a team form one head of a two-headed serpent – one head feeding on the other. The other head belongs to his creator and masters and their cohorts.)
6. Don’t we do away with all our civilization traits when we celebrate and delightfully glee at somebody’s death by murder even if he is allegedly the biggest criminal on earth?
7. The timing of the killing (initiating the presidential election campaign in the USA) and its style and later the flip-flop clarifications including the haste with which the DNA matching and the funeral were conducted are bound to raise uncomfortable questions for the USA. How many deaths would Osama have to die in the long run? Who will wear the face of Osama in future? 
8. The modern world has spun a tragic helix comprising conflicting strains of wars and terrorism. The foot soldiers on both sides continue to die at each others hands while the top brass espouses causes and trades with the existence of life on earth. Is there a way out?

On Democracy

Was at a friend’s place a few days back. Booze, smoke, small talk, big talk, bragging, failed attempts at groping in the dark, loud gulps of laughter at atrocious sms jokes – symptoms of an upwardly mobile class (nouveau rich which is mostly rich on hired money, inherited money and stolen money) – were floating dense in the air. I get bored with people too soon. So I was concentrating on cutlets and fries – well done and well made.

Suddenly a discussion erupted on the Bengal elections. People were clearly taking bipolar stands. I was asked about my views. Frankly I didn’t want to talk. Unrelenting silence coupled with endless munching of snacks in these circles is perceived as snobbish display of greed. So I thought I must break my silence. What I ended up speaking was not something that I intended to blabber here. My endless speech went thus:

“I’m not a great votary of democracy. I find in its original idea an attempt to fog the powerful behind a veil of large institutions – parliaments, courts, universities, police, publishing houses, rights groups and museums etc. Democracy is good at furthering and legitimizing industrial, technological and consumerist wars and associated interests. In a way both feed on each other to a great extent in a classical sense. In fact democracy is a good cause to bomb sovereign nations. Democracy requires people to be interlinked and integrated among and between nation states. This is brilliant from the point of view of accessing labour and consumer markets. Democracy takes away governments out of the ambit of people by assigning supreme power to the state of law as against state of nature. People vote between given choices and they think they are electing MPs and MLAs whereas all of us know it is not what we think. Elections increasingly are like mega-carnivals and create tremendous opportunities for business and wheeling-dealing. The political left and right both believe in parliamentary democracy! Large corporations and commercial interests have taken over every aspect of our lives in modern times: very subtly and at times grossly they select the leaders for us who will be beneficial to them but not us who have been rendered absolutely powerless by the might of statehood. So it really does not matter to us who comes to power.”

I was rebuked: “Stop lecturing us! Will you? If you have anything to say about the Bengal elections, puke!”

I continued pretty shamelessly devouring a bouquet of fish fingers: “The CPI (M) has been blocking policies (many a time rightly so) at the Parliament, which in essence they have been following in the WB and Kerala Assemblies. Why this conflict? Simple silly, because when you are in power you hobnob with the powerful and when you are not you can run into long intellectual discourse (like what I am doing now). Tell me: how many economic movements has the CPI (M) organized or stood by in the last 30 years? Contrarily they have thwarted all rebellion of the industrial workers, peasants, the dispossessed and the students in the last 3 decades in Bengal. Like the Congress they have appeased the more backward sections of the religious minorities. They definitely redistributed land (doing away with the ruthless and embedded zamindars and almost erasing the landless) but ended up controlling the peasants with small land holdings like feudal lords would treat the landless. People who are ideologically against SEZs should not be grabbing land cheap from farmers on behalf of large corporations. They should not be in hands-in-gloves with the building mafia. They should not be interfering in our personal lives as if we were in a concentration camp. But if you do not do these things you do not earn pennies and amass power worth enough to participate and win in elections. The TMC is a rudderless pathetic hate machine; its sole agenda is to dislodge the Left Front; they have no belief structure or vision for the state. They will do anything to win and then ruin by repeating the worst practices of the Left Front with enhanced efficiency. The Congress is eyeing an opportunity to throw out the Left Front based on the general perception that Mamata Banerjee after all is an honest anti-establishment leader who is capable of bringing imaginative changes to WB politics (she is the failing Railway Minister at the Center notwithstanding!!!). The Congress I believe has plans to make life as difficult as possible for the TMC if the TMC-Congress wrests power. In such a situation the TMC will eventually be removed with the Congress gradually climbing up the ladder of power. The Maoists seemingly want a new regime to regroup and remobilize in the intervening period. As such their close proximity with the TMC can be explained. But the Maoists will receive improved sodomy at the hands of the TMC-Congress when compared against what they have received from the CPI (M). Another thing: see the display of wealth and manpower that the Left Front used to exhibit a few years back has shifted to the TMC-Congress today including the quantum of  employed lumpens. I’ve seen North Indian traders in Kolkata voting for the BJP in Union Elections whereas they voted for the Left Front in Assembly Elections. Strange, no? But today they want a change. People who are positioning today as protectors of farm land would in due course of time, if they come to power, become the greatest land-grabbers; there is no doubt about that. In case of the Left, people have already experienced such turnaround. So you see I do not have a clear-cut choice. Hence I do not have a place in your democracy.”

I was breathless by now!

Somebody confronted me: “Hold on, hold on for a second! What are you saying – elections are no good to us; we should be returning to monarchy, autocracy and feudalism?”

Did I say: “I’m not sure: where we can go back to. I’m sure democracy serves the interests of corporations better than that of smaller communities and individuals as people. The worst part is you cannot complain because democracy has institutionalized prescriptions for every malaise, which you of course cannot access. Democracy does not do away with monarchy, autocracy and feudalism as ideas or even in practice; it refines and alters them into more ruthless institutions within the realms of statehood and the sad part is at some point in history mankind has given up the power of individuals to the idea of forming a state of law that today has rendered us utterly powerless. This process I believe has been irreversible.”

A group of guys started grunting all of a sudden; god knows why! The discussion (or rather my one-sided trumpeting) ended and we started discussing polygamy after a pee-break. Wow! I made a vow not to speak on this subject at all.

Dr. Binayak Sen

Yesterday, early afternoon, I received an sms from my sister who lives in Delhi: Supreme Court grants bail to Binayak Sen. I was at Dhanbad / Bokaro standing by River Damodar reviewing construction works of an upcoming water intake system of a steel plant. To put it simply I was delighted reading the sms; I took a break from the review and smoked 2 cigarettes back to back. I immediately shared the news with my colleagues. They were happy too. I was very worried since the day the Supreme Court had adjourned the bail hearing; the Chattisgarh government did not file their reply on time. I was very tense since yesterday morning about the outcome; we had had a brief speculative discussion about the outcome at the breakfast table where I was staying. It was a great relief to learn that the short term anxieties of Dr. Ilina Sen, Dr. Sen's 84 year old mother and his daughter had come to an end. 

3 things:

1. This intervention by the Supreme Court is likely to bring greater focus to revision of outdated sedition laws.
2. How perverse is the Chattisgarh government? Ram Jethmalani, a BJP politician and a political comrade (on a wider scale) of this government, ended up fighting Dr. Sen's case in the Supreme Court for the injustice had reached a level where even he - a seasoned and first-rate criminal lawyer that he is - could not stand its moral burden.
3. The difference between movements surrounding activists Anna Hazare and Dr. Sen is: one is conducted on a large stage almost similar to a grand concert in full view of the media and the elite while the other happens trapped inside the suffocating darkness of our jungles and tribal backyards.

Death rattle Clan

They forgot to put my body on fire

On freshly chopped logs of wood

On oil cracking and boiling

They forgot the charm of cotton ball plugs, the sight of wetted white petals of fecund flowers, the absent-minded twirl of smoke chains, incense sticks, the sonorous trail of holy hymns, crackling sounds of earthen pots and above all, the communal mourning around a corpse

Instead they hurled me down inside a pit – laboriously excavated, dark and deep

And, instantaneously covered it up with fast-setting slurry

With a sleight of hands that can be defeated only by mystic magicians at work

So, I exist there frosted miles below

From where you are waging your philosophical wars on trains against commuters struggling to reach their office on time, commissioning ecstatic cocaine soirees on yachts and rafts, executing orgies with strangers on a plane, stealing antiquity from private museums of nouveau billionaires

For you had told me once: I will blow up my life

Indoctrinating me with the scent of your body and introducing me to the nucleus of this explosive club: Death rattle Clan

What holds me here is an intricate web of undefined silence and darkness – so pure in form –

In this marsh of soil, water, plant roots and rotting flesh

You worry sometimes, don’t you; struggling in sleep:

Do I remember your face and touch as I crossed over the perimeter of life?

Do I know that your face is one among their faces?

Do I remember all their faces as distinctly as I should?

Do I remember our plot of blowing up our lives?

Might I end up sharing it with a fellow corpse?

Remembering and forgetting are complex phenomena even otherwise; more so after you’ve crossed the gate

Sometimes – nowadays – I will to laugh at our words – words crafted out of beliefs –  mostly non-beliefs – yet preached with so much intensity, precision and timing – a way of time passing for all of us at this explosive club, Death rattle Clan

Frosted Glass

A book comprising a story cycle of 14 stories and a poem cycle of 21 poems.
In the category of literature of metropolis.
Published by Frog Books (an imprint of Leadstart Publishing).
Being sold online and offline at bookstores.
The Frog Books link is at:
http://frogbooks.net/frog-books-leadstart-virgin-leaf-poolani/frosted-glass/

Pentacles

A book comprising a long story and four long narrative poems in free verse.
In the category of literature of metropolis.
Published by Frog Books (an imprint of Leadstart Publishing).
Being sold online and offline at bookstores.
The Frog Books link is at:
http://frogbooks.net/frog-books-leadstart-virgin-leaf-poolani/pentacles/

A Conversation and An Incomplete Detective Story

I met Mr.X a couple of weeks back at a smoky joint. We meet at irregular intervals to eat an elaborate meal and talk. Usually we talk ideas (methods of peaceful submission to death, ways to beat forgetfulness, how to keep in shape without dieting etc) and mostly about the deadline of extinction of the human race. Sometimes we discuss women and very rarely children and pornography. We also talk a lot about cricket and football and nowadays about badminton (pursuant to the consist performance of Saina Nehwal).
I am going to now reproduce the conversation from memory that I had with this man in the dimly-lit joint. While we talked (that night) there was no distracting music playing at the eatery. There was no much noise barring the whirring of the air-conditioners, the movement of the waiters, waiters talking to each other and other guests and the people eating or waiting for food talking to each other in hush-hush tones and the general cling-clong of cutlery. The absence of loud sounds, whether pleasant or unpleasant, helped me to focus all my energies to the occasion, especially the conversation. There have been other instances when we have been witness (of visual and audio type) to a brawl (between an arrogant waiter and a hyper anorexic salesman), a quarrel (between two aged fat men over what to order for dessert), a hot bombshell (in a pink top and a black skirt) and rendition of rock-and-roll music (1967 April number) on an ancient sound system: all highly disturbing and infringing experiences. The conversation (the one I referred to) went something like this –

I: You look thoughtful; no, I mean clouded with dark thoughts; so much so that you are actually looking dark!
Mr.X: It’s not untrue; my appetite has gone done. I don’t think about sex any more. I don’t fanaticize. I feel very tense, you know.
I: Tense? Tense about what? About losing your balls, you mean?
Mr.X: Do I have my balls at the right place; I’m not so sure? I’m actually anxious about my son.
I: Why; what has he done: fallen in love with your house-maid or what? Both of you are in competition, is it?
Mr.X: Be serious Mr.Y for a change! If I die now what will happen to my son; have you ever thought about that?
I: You expect me to think over such top-class shit. Are you truly contemplating suicide? Disappearance for a change: I mean something like that?
Mr.X: Suppose if I die a natural death: my heart just stops pumping all of a sudden. My son is a teenager. He does not have a mother or family support from my side or hers. Where does he go for his upbringing? He would be left absolutely lonely after I die. An orphan almost! Last night I cried a lot holding him to my chest; the funny part is he felt suffocated and advised me to consult a psychiatrist. I did not sleep the whole night. I saw him sleeping and snoring so beautifully. He has an angelic face, surely an angelic face Mr.Y!
I: What can you do about dieing? When it is time to go you go, not a bit before or after. But you worry me: if you move away from erotica you die before you are actually dead.
Mr.X: I know that for sure. But I just feel horribly pensive with the thought of how lonely my son is already and how much lonelier he can get after I die.
I: You want to die?
Mr.X: No Mr.Y, I want to live, at least for the next 10 years by which time my son would have settled in life.

I: So you will live Mr.X! Lock yourself up in a balloon up in the air away from this heat, dust, smoke and fungus and bacteria and virus! And, above all, women, you idiot!
Mr.X: Do I take my son as well in this balloon?
I: You can.
Mr.X: What kind of a future does he have by spending a life in a balloon?
I: Then get him married to the youngest daughter of your house-maid. This way you will leave behind his wife and in-laws to take care of him in your absence.
Mr.X: You have come up with a very good idea; I must compliment the efforts of your brains Mr.Y. Marriage is a good way to extend your social base. But the marriage of the kind that you propose would be illegal. I don’t want my son to take law in his hands.
I: Stuff it up your ass Mr.X; you have a nice one.

My kind words about Mr.X’s butts lifted his spirits; the shadows on his face were gone and he ordered for keema parantha with methi-chicken.

Later in the night after dinner instead of bidding farewell at the gate of the restaurant, which we did otherwise (having paid a small tip to the mustachioed pot-bellied doorman from North India for saluting us), we set out for an adjoining park famous for its carnivorous insects and ants of all variety; lepers, beggars, drug addicts and dealers taking shelter within its unfolding darkness and dull-faced-sullen-ugly whores. This was because Mr.X demanded of me to tell him a detective story.

So I told him a detective story: The Chief Minister of a State wakes up soggy one rainy cloudy grey morning to find his face in the mirror irrevocably changed - precisely having been replaced by the face of the Leader of the Opposition. He does not shave or clean his teeth and tongue or discharge his turds; instead he phones the Home Secretary right away in a spell of shock urging him to leave all business and set up a task force of the best police officers in the State with the only agenda of finding out the terrorist-miscreant who had committed such a murderous act: cutting up his original face (which was liked by women of all cultures) followed by replacing it with a hateful face (which means that this face was amputated in the first place); and most importantly, to go all out in search of his original face. The thought upper-most in the Chief Minister’s mind ran thus – Was somebody already wearing it (his face) and buying a Honda Civic or was it (already pale and ever paling now that it was drained off its blood supply) cooling off in the refrigerator of a homicidal lunatic?

As the story unfolded chapter by chapter, taking Mr.X’s wholehearted attention within its layers, a planet burst into flames in the sky. Needless to say, we could not reach the concluding chapter of the story; instead we had Swirl designer ice-cream stuffed with fruits and nuts.