Plays of the day

The CNN-IBN (which is my biggest source of world news) news-ticker is claiming as I write this post that Zawahiri, OBL's right-hand man all these years, is the one who mountebanked the world's most-wanted man to the American forces in Islamabad. The ticker also claims that it was Zawahiri who convinced his boss to move to Abbottabad, that the courier who led the forces to the mansion was loyal to Zawahiri. I believe this piece of information has a great chance of being false because of two reasons:

1. The kingpin having been struck down, some confusion is bound to prevail in the ranks of the terrorist organization. Because of the widespread nature of it, communication disruption is the biggest threat they will face, as was seen when loyalists in Egypt and Yemen questioned the success of Op. Geronimo. Therefore, broadcasting news that Zawahiri was the whistle-blower is indicative of the West wanting to abuse such a disruption. However, even though I say there's a very, very good chance that this is false, it is still conjecture.


2. With OBL's demise, Ayman Al Zawahiri now sits at the top of the Al Qaeda pyramid - or "pyramid" it would be if the organization's command-structure was top-down. On the contrary, the organization is more like a web, and this web can never become a pyramid because its cause is furthered by the persistence of a set of beliefs that transcends the desires of any individual. If OBL falls, and if Zawahiri falls, the "jihad" still will not have suffered as big a setback as the West might think. Ergo, a man ranking so highly in such a organization will have as much chance of being a double-agent as he would have of not being an agent at all (if I were to give the claims of CNN-IBN any credibility).

If there was a power struggle, then the depth of the struggle will determine the depth of the fissure in the AQ's ranks, the depth to which the terrorists' ideologies have shifted away from transcendental meditations to germane and corruptible desires.

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The president of the Punjab State Women's Commission has asked for women across the country to not use mobile phones after marriage to, and get this, "minimize the chances of husbands misunderstanding messages from any other man as a sign of infidelity." Such an event is something I wouldn't cover as a journalist for two reasons (yes, they come in twos):

1. If the fodder for infamy the statement presents doesn't come across to you, the reader, or if the abject stupidity in the statement doesn't come across to you, then what needs be covered is not what such people in power are saying but what you, the common man, consider reasonable and what you consider unreasonable.


2. When I'm pushed to cover such things, the words "frikkin’", "frakkin’" and "fucking" come quickly to mind and are hard to banish, let alone translate with equal effect into words on paper - especially a newspaper.

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Whenever I interact with a middle-aged uncle from south India, the opening chorus of 'We Don't Need No Education' (Pink Floyd) comes to mind, when Gilmour croons about the derision that schoolteachers direct at children is the same derision that their "fat and psychopathic" wives spanked them with. My grandparents are such people who must win at every argument against me, even if that means trespassing blindly into illogical territories.

While my engineering education and ecumenical knowledge serves only as fodder to beef up their egos in a public forums, where they take all the liberty accrued over years of survival to chant my glories and victories in the ears of unsuspecting neighbours and equally non-phlegmatic relatives, they think it my duty to belittle that education by agreeing to whatsoever they have to say.

The irony screams.

Sometimes I think what must change is not what is taught, not how it is taught, but why it is taught - and the moment the question becomes a "why", the targets of the demanded reorientation-of-perspectives drive are not the teachers (let alone the students) and not anyone in the education ministry but those people the student comes home to, those whose education may quantitatively match the subject's but not qualitatively. In other words, people must be made to understand why the purpose of education is such-and-such.

I can still hear the echoes.