In the first 5-8 years after the Second World War, China and the USSR became close friends. They signed a friendship treaty that saw military and economic aid flow from the USSR into an impoverished, agro-based China.

The bromance appeared to bring in a new age of Sino-Soviet co-operation, until the unthinkable happened. All of a sudden in 1953, Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev, a vastly different personality, took over. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was a bit like an earlier version of Gorbachev – a watered-down peacenik. Unlike Gorbachev, Khrushchev didn’t want personal freedoms for Soviet citizens, however. All he wanted was the scaling down of the nuclear posturing and peaceful co-existence.

When Khrushchev, in 1956, publicly denounced Stalin – an action once considered blasphemy – China’s Mao-Tse-Dong realized he could no longer take Soviet support for granted. Khrushchev’s openness could infect Chinese politics as well and threaten his grip on power. Mao wanted to keep his absolute power and his Leninist scorched-earth ideology intact.

That same year, when the Soviets invaded Hungary to crush an anti-communist rebellion, Mao feared the same thing could happen to China. Helpless without sufficient military might, constantly pressured to obey Soviet dominance in the communist bloc and paranoid that the Soviets could invade China and annex it with ease, Mao began devising a long term plan that would maintain the USSR’s standing as an ally but ensure a partnership that was more equal. He announced the “Great Leap Forward”, a hurricane-speed action plan to modernize China from an agrarian to an industrial economy.

Turns out, Mao’s great leap was an unmitigated disaster. Having already purged the “intellectual class”, he had no brain power available to carry his megalomania forward. The pulling of manpower from the farms to the industry devastated China’s agricultural output, causing a famine the world had never witnessed. Millions starved to death.

Meanwhile, sensing the sudden Chinese coldness, the Soviets gradually began to withdraw their industrial and military experts from China. Aid to China reduced to a trickle. Then, on a visit to the US, Khrushchev felt first-hand the vast chasm between America’s technological advances and sophistication and the Soviet system’s primitive industry.

Along a parallel track, Khrushchev initiated a series of moves that would later come to be known as Détente, a period of relaxation of strained relations, with the west. 

It was at this point that fate decided to take matters into its own hands once again.

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The 39-member Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the highest body of Soviet State Authority, itchy at the sudden closeness with the west, removed Nikita Khrushchev. Obviously, like Mao, the members of the Soviet Presidium too thought that Khrushchev was moving the USSR toward too much peace, too quickly.

Earlier removals had been accompanied by summary executions, but Khrushchev’s life was spared. He was told to henceforth shut the fuck up and relegated to a dacha outside Moscow, to spend the rest of his life in comfortable retirement.

Once again a Stalin-like hardliner took over, a guy called Leonid Brezhnev, not as foaming-in-the-mouth as Mao but close enough. Bezhnev’s ascent however didn’t help to lessen Mao’s paranoia, since the Soviets decided it was in their best interests to continue on with the détente process with the US.

The mutual mistrust between the Soviets and China gradually led to sporadic border skirmishes that flared up with increasing frequency, until it began to appear like the beginning of a much wider conflict.

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There have been moments in history when actual events have progressed rapidly out of control like cannoning dominoes, only to be aborted at the brink of an Armageddon.

One such event occurred in the early autumn of 1969, a month after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

It had begun that spring actually, when a group of 30 Chinese PLA soldiers waded through the chill, waist-deep waters of the Ussuri, onto a disputed 1 ½ mile long diamond-shaped spit of an island in the middle of the river, that was called Zhenbao by the Chinese and Damansky by the Russians.

Once on the island the Chinese soldiers engaged the KGB Border Guards, sparking off a series of skirmishes, that collectively came to be known as the Zhenbao incident.

There is no question though, that the whole affair had been orchestrated by the Chinese leader, Mao Tse Tung, to deliver an indirect message to the US that, by breaking with the USSR, China was prepared to begin normalizing relations with the US, a process that later came to be known as the Sino-US Rapprochement.

Then, in the middle of August 1969, a startling thing happened at a luncheon at the Hotel America’s Beef and Bird Restaurant in Washington DC. The meeting had been proposed by Boris N. Davydov (Second Secretary, Embassy of the USSR) with William L. Stearman (Special Assistant for USSR, China and North Vietnam, Department of State).

Davydov was paying. His proposal was pretty straightforward……

“We plan to bomb the Chinese – especially their nuclear installations and major population centres – back to stone-age in a pre-emptive strike, to eliminate any further threat on our southern borders. If you go along, you have two pluses – First, you will benefit from one less communist power to confront and second, Vietnam is yours. We will lay off Vietnam the moment we sign a deal. We didn’t like those gooks anyway.”

For once, the US acted with maturity. It declined the offer and cautioned the Soviets that any pre-emptive strike could start a nuclear conflagration and that was totally unacceptable.

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What the Americans (or the world) could not have known was that the Soviet proposal was actually only an intimation, not a proposal at all. The pre-emptive strike was already on.

What went down is cloaked in secrecy even today, but if you want to know what could well have happened, you’ll have to wait for Part-2.

1225th Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment

Belaya Long Range Aviation Base

Irkutsk Oblast, U.S.S.R

August 19, 1969

00:30 hrs

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The Tu-95 taxied to the end of the 3-mile long asphalt and made a sweeping u-turn before it lined itself up with its nose gear on the white median line. Its commander, Col. Anton Babayev, was a patient man. He waited, his hand on the throttle and right foot on the brakes, eyes impassive, now completely accustomed to amber green glow of the cockpit.

The Tu-95 Strategic bomber has had a storied past. When Soviet forces invaded Nazi Germany, they forcibly took back with them 2500 of the best Nazi automobile and aviation engineers and designers. The Americans too had their own get-the-nerds version, whereby 1600 Nazi scientists and engineers came over to the US, in an operation code-named Paperclip. 

Unlike the Soviets, the Americans didn’t have to use force. The Nazis happily moved in, set up house in government-purchased cottages and villas and drove government purchased late model cars and went about developing ground-breaking American aerospace technology. 

In fact the Nazis discovered to their delight that they had a lot of sympathizers among the Americans, with whom they could get misty-eyed nostalgic, reminiscing about the “good old days” using slave labor in their industries back in Germany. Short of being able to break out into the “Horst Wessel” song, they say what they liked.

The Soviets methodically stripped down the Junkers bomber factory in Dessau and shipped every little bit of machinery and design drawing to Kuibyshev in the USSR, where factory was rebuilt from ground up.

Among the Germans abducted by the Soviets was a brilliant aviation engineer and Nazi Party member named Ferdinand Brandner. Under direct orders from Stalin, Brandner was handled with kid gloves, given anything he wanted, a life of luxury and a pretty Russian woman and tasked to create new kinds of war planes. In time, he was co-opted into the Tupolev Design Bureau.

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In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, an American B29 bomber, its rudder slightly damaged in an air raid over the Japanese city of Sapporo, force landed on a country road outside Vladivostok in the eastern tip of the USSR. Earlier in the war, as a part of the Allied forces, the Soviet Union had wanted to lease a few B29s to study the design but the Americans had seen through them and hemmed and hawed deliberately, playing for time.

Now, with a B29 on the ground, the Soviets refused to give it back. Three more lightly damaged B-29s soon followed after emergency landings from participating in raids over Japan. The US demanded them back, but the Soviets kept them and asked the Tupolev Design Bureau to replicate them instead.

Ferdinand Brandner was put to work on the design. The result was a re-engineered B-29 called the “Tupolev Tu-4.”

Realizing that the Tu-4’s piston engines were not powerful enough, Brandner redesigned the aircraft and fitted four Kuznetsov coupled turboprops, each equipped with two contra-rotating propellors (see the box in the image above). 

The aircraft was initially called the Tu-20, but the name was later dropped in favor of the Tu-95. In time, NATO gave the Tu-95 a code name – Bear.

You are dying to know what a contra-rotating propellor is. Hang on, Uncle Spunky will tell you everything. 

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As Col. Babayev lined up the Bear for take-off, straight ahead the pitch darkness was punctured by two strings of blue runway lights that seemed to converge into a blurry point at the far distance. Beside him, his co-pilot, reed-thin Maj. Illya Molodchi, leaned forward a little and then turned his head sideways till he was staring at the swept-back, slightly drooping right wing, weighted down by the two Kuznetsov-12Ms, the most powerful turbo-prop engines ever developed.

Right now, the Kuznetsovs were barely ticking over at a sedate 600 rpm but already the contra-rotating propeller sets were deafening, their roar penetrating even heavily insulated ear pads in the crews’ helmets. When the propellers reached 1200rpm, the Bear would be in the air, cruising at 0.85 times the speed of sound.

An interesting fact about the Kuznetsov engine is that at cruising speed, the tips of its propellers break the sound barrier, making the Bear the noisiest aircraft in the world, so noisy in fact, that submarines can easily detect one flying overhead with their passive sonars. There is a belief that Tu-95 crew have experienced significant loss of hearing after prolonged service on this aircraft.

As to the Bear’s speed, to put it in perspective, regular commercial jets cruise at around 0.80 Mach, while the Tu-95 cruises at 0.85 Mach . This makes the Bear the fastest turbo-prop on the planet, which it is even today, being still in service with the Russian Strategic Air Command.

The Russians, when they see something that works, they stick with it. Tu-95 Bears have been around and going strong even today.

Contra-Rotating Propellers (CRPs, as they are known in the aviation word) are a set of two propellers on the same axis, coupled by a set of planetary gears to make them rotate in opposite directions, the second prop a bit smaller in diameter than the one in front. Between them, the two propellers coax the onrushing airflow and shove it backward with the thrust of 15000 horses. 

The product of Russian aviation genius, CRPs provide greater fuel efficiency, higher speeds and more power. 

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CRPs were just one of many Soviet technological advances. In science and technology, they were crawling with geniuses. Unfortunately they were, like the American saying goes, “all dressed up with nowhere to go”. Soviet scientists worked within a government structure that did nothing to motivate them to apply their scientific innovations to practical use. Brilliant research papers sat forgotten on shelves.

Likewise, Radio Transparent Technology, the Soviet moniker for Stealth technology, was gathering dust on some forgotten cupboard in the Soviet Academy of Sciences until the early 1990s, when an imploding Soviet Union spilt it’s secrets like a vanquished T-Rex sprawled on the ground, its guts spilling out.

Every victory has its spoils and the fall of communism was no different. In the chaos of the latter half of the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union leaked secrets like a sieve. Everything was up for a price. An engineer at the Lockheed Advanced Development Projects (a.k.a. Skunk Works), got his hands on a Russian scientific paper and said, ‘Hey that’s easy. We could do something like that’ and before long, the world had its first stealth fighter, the F117.

But I digress. Let’s get back to Col. Babayev and his crew.

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Standing frozen at the end of the strip, the giant bomber thrummed and grumbled as it strained against its leash, the effort to stay still sending shuddering vibrations through it’s air-frame. Outside, the night was moonless and the air surprisingly still, almost as if nature had decided to pause and bear witness to what was about to happen.

Tonight, the Bear would need all the power her Kuznetsovs packed, just to clear the runway. She had a passenger with a one-way ticket, a teardrop-shaped metal object weighing in at just over 22 tons.

Russians love giving names to inanimate objects and so the passenger too had a name – “Kuzkina Tetya”

In Russian, it meant literally “Kuzka’s Aunt”.

The passenger was so named after her illustrious twin, Kuzkina Mat, who had made a similar one-way flight eight years prior. Kuzkina Mat had been a test. Some say Kuzkina Mat was given her name by none other than Nikita Khrushchev.

The story goes that when the Americans tested what was for them, their most powerful thermonuclear device – a fusion device that was code-named Castle Bravo and had an yield of 15 megatons, the Soviets gave it a name of their own – ‘Kuzka’, a derogatory reference commonly used in Russia those days, roughly translated in English as ‘pipsqueak’.

Khrushchev is reported to have sneered at the American ambassador derisively at a meeting during the 1961 May-1st celebrations, “My obirayemsya pokazat’ im Kuz’kina mat!” (That’s it? 15 Megatons? Well, soon we are going to show you Kuzka’s mother).

And Kuzka’s mother she certainly turned out to be. The Kuzkina Mat test had the explosive power equivalent to the simultaneous explosion of 58 million tons of TNT. That was ten times the power of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War. Her mushroom cloud was 64 kms high and 40 kms in diameter and her shockwave travelling round the earth three times, breaking windows, cracking foundations as far as Marseilles.

Over the years, Kuzkina Mat also got to be called by many other names, including Tsar Bomba and Big Ivan.

In comparison, Kuzkina Tetya, though only slightly larger in size and weight, was going to be infinitely more destructive. It had been rated at 105 Megatons.

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The tower broke in over the whine of the Kuznetsovs, the voice over the radio sounding disembodied and almost casual, “Eto dvizheniye. Tetya Dobycha Kuz’kina yedet priyatno i legko, Polkovnik . Udachi.” (It’s a go. Drop Kuzka’s Aunt off and get the hell out of there, Colonel. She has bad breath. Good luck).

Babayev chuckled. “Spasibo , derzhat’ vodku okhlazhdennoy (Thank you, I am not the one who’s going to kiss her ass. Just keep the vodka chilled and stop worrying about us),” he said, as his right hand tightened its grip over the throttle lever and slid it forward while at the same time, his foot came off the brakes.

The Tu-95 heaved and then swerved momentarily, as though it was caught by surprise. It’s nose veered off the median line for a moment, before it regained its heading and charged down the asphalt, slowly accelerating as it raced toward the other end of the runway.

120 knots…130…140…150… the massive bomber labored to reach the magic figure – 200 knots, while the far-end perimeter fence and the south-side guard tower dead ahead, rushed forward to embrace it.

“If we are going by road, don’t you think we ought to slow down a bit, Boss?” Illya was known in the base for his understatements and his wry humor.

Babayev grinned, “Hang on, Illya, this devochka can fly us to the moon if she wants to. Here we go.”

The bomber staggered up into the air, the four Kuznetsovs screaming on full throttle. As soon as he felt it leave the asphalt, Babayev retracted the landing gear, afraid it might snag against the perimeter fence otherwise. The belly of the Bear cleared the fence with only a few meters to spare.

Thankfully, the land around the base had been razed flat, so there was no possibility of hitting a tree or a phone line.

Once off the ground the Tu-95 labored on, at a 20° pitch until it levelled off finally at 37000 feet, its nose pointing southward. After a while, everything went black as the world’s largest fresh water lake, the Baikal, slid by 7 miles below.

Once over Mongolia, the bomber would gain a further mile up before settling at 42000 feet. Thirty minutes out, the Bear made a slight course change to south-easterly as it entered Mongolian airspace and continued speeding along like a silver dart, eight miles above the barren steppes. It was going to be a nice two and half hour flight.

The last one and quarter hour would be inside Chinese airspace.

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The Bear was not alone. There were four others, strategic bombers all – two Badgers(Tu-16s) and two Blinkers(Tu-22s). Like the Bear, they were sneaking into Chinese airspace from different directions that very minute. The first Tu-16 had launched from the 444th Heavy Bombardment Wing at Spassk-Dalniy close to the China’s eastern border with the USSR and the second had scrambled from the 326th, Vozdvizhenka, a few hundred kms east of Spassk-Dalniy. The Blinkers had taken off from the 303rd at Zavitinsk in the Amur Oblast, directly north of the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator.

Like the Bear, the Badgers and the Blinkers too had passengers with deadly intent, devices that were considerably smaller in weight and yield – around 8 Megatons each. 8 Megatons isn’t puny exactly. 8 Megatons can wipe out a large metropolis like Mumbai and its suburbs.

Like Kuzkina Tetya, the others had names too. Sestra was going to hit a plutonium extraction facility in Guangyuanand. Dyadya would vaporize a warhead assembly plant at Harbin. Devushka would obliterate the Heiping Gas Diffusion Plant with it’s adjoining experimental reactor, while Babushka annihilated Chengdu, home of China’s gas centrifuges that spun at 30000 rpm, enriching uranium to 98% weapons-grade purity.

Hopefully, Babushka’s blast and fallout would lay waste to even the Chinese state-owned Chengdu Aircraft Industry which had painstakingly reverse-engineered the Chengdu J-7, a replica of the legendary Mig-21 jet fighter-interceptor, a squadron of which the Soviets themselves had gifted the Chinese just two years prior.

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And now about Kuzkina Tetya herself, the device that Col. Babayev and his crew were babysitting to target. It was a classic three-stage Teller–Ulam design, using a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary, as in most H-bombs, and then using the energy from the resulting explosion to compress a much larger third thermonuclear stage.

Tetya was not an identical twin to her elder sis, actually. Kuzkina Mat had only one third stage while Tetya had in total eight third stages, that would go off one behind the other, the intervals of course being in pico-seconds. It was going to be one big party for those frenzied neutrons.

Tetya would detonate in the atmosphere just as her predecessor had done, 2 miles above the earth, but that’s where the similarity would end…..

The 1961 detonation of Kuzkina Mat had a 58 Megaton yield. It been a test, planned over unpopulated Soviet territory, a barren ice-bound archipelago called Novaya Semlya, way above the Arctic Circle. Even then, concern over the fallout and the ecological damage to whole swathes of the Russian far north, had prompted the Soviets to install lead tampers at the second and third fusion stages.

The lead tampers restricted the flow of neutrons and thus inhibited both, her destructive power and radioactive fallout. They were kind of like a tranquilizer to a hyperactive kid suffering from ADHD. The inhibited detonation also gave the crew of the delivery bomber a fighting chance to get away far enough to be able to survive the shock wave.

In comparison, Kuzkina Tetya had a design yield of 105 Megatons and no lead tampers. It would explode over the heads of 12 million living, breathing souls going about their daily lives directly below, in one of the world’s most populous cities – China’s capital, Beijing.

Kuzkina Tetya did not need to be inhibited by lead tampers. She had U-238 fusion accelerators instead, that would do to the fusion reaction what anabolic steroids do to an athlete’s testosterone level. She was set to produce the same energy as a 500-meter asteroid slamming into the earth at 20 kms/second. To anyone with a seismometer within a 500 mile radius of ground zero, the resultant tremor would register 9.4 on the Richter scale.The energy released would be equal to 1.8% of the power output of the Sun.

All told, Tetya would be directly responsible for the deaths of 40-50 million Chinese, 12 million of whom, Beijing city folk, would be instantly vaporized, while the rest would die very slow and painful deaths from radiation sickness.

Tetya’s estimated yield of 105 megatons would equal the detonation of all the explosives that had ever been produced since 492AD, when a short beady-eyed Chinese alchemist discovered that saltpeter burned with explosive force and decided to find out if he could turn it into an offensive weapon, thus stumbling into gunpowder. 

I was just kidding about the short and beady-eyed. No one ever recorded what the alchemist looked like. Before he blew himself up.

Released from 42000 feet, Tetya was programmed to detonate the moment she fell through 11000 feet. It was not going to be a free fall. She would be slowed down by a massive 1½ ton parachute, in order to give the Bear hopefully sufficient time to make it to where it would not get knocked out of the sky by the shock-wave.

Not that that mattered. The Bear (and everything inside it), was expendable, a fact that Col. Anton Babayev and his crew knew well. It was a life they had chosen, drenched in adrenalin and patriotism.

A song hovered in the periphery of Babayev’s mind, one that his late father and his comrades used to sing as they scurried out into open ground between burnt-out shells of tenements in Stalingrad 1942, in order to draw fire so that the Wehrmacht sniper’s position would be revealed……

His chest swelling with pride, Babayev sang out as loudly as he could, “Rodina-Mat zovyot! Vse za Rodinu!” – The motherland calls! Everything for the motherland!

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy” – Elon Musk 2025

An interesting quirk about the Americans is this penchant for defining benchmarks……

For excellence in governance, Americans of every stripe pray to this one God named Ronald Reagan. Remember the “Shiny city on the hill guy” guy? This is the dude.

Ronald Reagan was nothing more than an actor of forgettable B-movies, with great networking skills who was very convincing, with his smooth, reassuring olive oil voice. He became more known for being a crooked political operator who thought nothing of selling arms to the very same Iranians who had just a few years prior held 52 of his fellow countrymen hostage inside the US’s Tehran Embassy for 444 days.

There is even a theory called “1980 October surprise” that posits that when it became apparent that the hostages were about to be released, Reagan, through intermediaries, begged the Iranians to delay their release till after he was sworn in as President.

What lends that theory some credence is the fact that only minutes after Reagan was sworn in as President, on 20 Jan 1981, all 52 hostages were suddenly released.

Lo and fucking behold!!

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There is another benchmark, but let me give you the background first….

Two decades immediately after the Second World War, here was America, in a security cocoon created by nature, between the world’s two largest oceans on the east and the west and two very friendly nations in the north and the south. With such buffers all around, no single nation has even tried to mount an invasion, ever.

America remained virtually unscathed and untouched by the devastation of the Second World War. I’ll correct that statement – America is virtually unscathed from any war, period. This is in spite of the fact that it has been the main participant in most of them, fought thousands of miles from its own shores.

After the Second World War, American industrial output and exports skyrocketed. That is understandable, since all the others – Europe, Japan, Korea, the USSR – had been decimated.

After the war, there remained a single unchallenged source of supply for everything, even toilet paper – America.

“America was exceptional,” they crowed.

The folks who lived through those two decades of incredible prosperity immediately following WW2 are the second benchmark – a demographic that Americans call The Greatest Generation. These are white Americans born between 1901 and 1927.

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According to 99.99% of all white Americans alive today, the “Greatest Generation” is the generation that “built America”. It makes them nostalgic and misty-eyed. What they conveniently forget is that the phenomenal economic growth happened over the devastation of others, not because of some kind of spectacular resourcefulness on part of Americans. When you are the last guy standing it is easy to prosper.

American economic supremacy and technological prowess in the immediate post war period was so total that it wasn’t bothered by free trade and competition. With the rest of the industrialized world razed to the ground, who was going to compete anyway?

Ordinary white Americans began believing that the prosperity of the Greatest Generation was actually the normal, the expected, the inevitable – the result of something intangible that is superior about white American folks over others.

Competition could not touch them. How could it? After the war, there was no one left to compete with.

Note : I have stressed on the race (white) of the members of the Greatest Generation. I am hoping you will not embarrass yourself by asking why.

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Overconfident and cocky, fully expecting to keep building on the technological and economic edge, America embarked on an eventually self-defeating process that we now know as globalization. We all know how that has panned out – every demographic segment has prospered, except the bottom half, as jobs have fled.

All those annual vacations in Hawaii, those garrulous, rude American tourists, they are gone. Those manicured suburban lawns and chrome-plated Impalas, they have all moved to Asia. Every time an American buys an Iphone, it adds $200 to the already blooming deficit.

It is a Chinese or an Indian who plans his next annual vacation in – not Hawaii or Yellowstone, thank you, but Switzerland, Thailand, Machu Pichu, anywhere but America where chances are good they might get shot and told to “go back to where they came from” or demeaned by a customs or immigration official.

Not that Americans fare any better when they plan a vacation outside America. It is a grim, sometimes life-threatening experience, given the amount of hatred that citizens of many nations, including western nations, feel toward America and Americans.

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Speaking from experience, I remember meeting up in the early 1970s with an American couple in an Indian seaside town called Panjim, known for attracting white foreigners in hordes.  These were two genuinely decent human beings, there to have a holiday, who found themselves cornered by some locals. I was there on a hitchhiking trip with a classmate from engineering school and had it not been for us, I shudder to think what might have happened to the two innocents. (My classmate’s dad being a high-ranking police officer there, we had two burly cops looking out for us).

Boy, it certainly turned out to be a holiday they would rather forget they ever had. Let me give you a background….

The Bangladesh war of independence had just ended with Pakistan’s complete capitulation, thanks to my nation of birth, India’s active support to the rebels. India didn’t start it, neither did they grab territory or gloat over their win. Rather, the rebellion was homegrown, against a corrupt Pakistani leadership. 

Earlier, at the peak of the hostilities, Pakistan’s sponsors, the ‘mighty’ US, had sent in the 7th Fleet dangerously close to Indian waters in the Bay of Bengal. America was trying to frighten the Indians into backing off. The parentheses around the the word mighty denotes scorn. 

Why not the scorn? Wasn’t America getting its ass kicked in Vietnam right about the time India was kicking Pakistani butt? 

Thousands of barely literate innocent American foot soldiers from rural farming families, with no power to conjure up “bone spurs” and be “disqualified” from military service, no chances of decent alternative employment, had been coerced into the war and had landed in Vietnam. 

Those soldiers, aptly called “grunts”, had been told they were “fighting for the security of their homeland”, a place that just happened to be 9000 miles away and completely untouched. They fought with rapidly flagging morale when they realized the scam perpetrated on them by the US establishment.

Therefore, just as in Vietnam, America had no right to be there in the Bay of Bengal. It was a fight between India and Pakistan. Alas, that criminal asshole named Richard Nixon thought otherwise. It was only when the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, directly threatened Nixon with all-out war on India’s side, that Nixon shat in his pants and the 7th Fleet backed away.

All this is history. To all Americans, go read about it. Want to know what really started the Vietnam War? Read ‘The Pentagon Papers’. Don’t worry whether it is a fake. It is not. It was written by your own Department of Defense, no kidding. Read about how treacherous your “shining city on the hill” can really get.

The word “scorn” above wasn’t used lightly.

To anyone who has even one little neuron rattling around inside his brain, it should be obvious that the whole Bangladesh affair left a darkly negative impression of America on Indians and directly led to the ‘situation’ that the innocent American couple found themselves in, one that my classmate and I and our two hefty minders in uniform saved them from, in the nick of time, exactly 50 years back.

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Every time ordinary blue collar Americans, descendants of the Greatest Generation hear their Grand dads tell them stories of life in the 1950s, they seethe with anger. They believe that their current situation is the abnormal, the unexpected, the avoidable. They heap the blame on their leaders, whom they have clubbed together as a reviled demographic called “the deep state”.

The reality however is that this is the normal and not the era of the Greatest Generation – that was the abnormal.

Finally……..

“Independence Day”……. to those Americans for whom the study of history has never been a strong skill, they want these two words to conjure up an image of a people in a centuries-long struggle against cruelty, torture, dehumanization and ethnic cleansing where millions have suffered and died. They want you to celebrate it with military parades and flag hoistings. They want to repeat meaningless inane words such as, “thank you for your service” over and over.

It is nearly 250 years, so why not ask a black American what the two words really mean to him?

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Elon Musk has said, “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is – empathy”. Today, USAID shut down completely. Apparently it was too empathetic for Musk.

The US Military must feel proud to jump from the world’s largest killer to the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. And Americans must be thrilled to have the world’s most morally corrupt Supreme Court judges.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO THE WORLD’S RICHEST BANANA REPUBLIC!!!

There’s a sex store in Saint Constant on the 132 that I drive by, on my way home from work. Saint Constant is a hick town, a Canadian version of Jhumritalayia.

This sex store is stocked with dildos, BDSM stuff, porn mags like Oui and Hustler, thin 5×7 paperbacks, leather paraphernalia, heels, lingerie, condoms with ribs that resemble the backs of triceratops. And lubricants, all kinda lubricants – lubricants to ream an asshole, peppermint-coated lubricants to make a blow job nice and tasty, lubricants to… umm, you get the hang.

You name it and La Sexie Folie has it. La Sexie Folie is French for ‘sex madness’. There it is. You can see it in the pic up there. The store used to have DVDs but who watches DVDs anymore, when Pornhub is around.

Sex stores are legal in Canada. Situated in perfectly respectable neighborhoods, they are looked at the same way you’d see a liquor store or a tobacconist. You walk in, browse the shelves, purchase a dildo for your lady that you can stick up her ass while your fingers are playing Dr. Livingstone with her pus… what’s that word for kitten? I can’t say it, I am too straight-laced.

Pick up a 12-pack of those triceratops condoms, swipe your card and you walk out. Its just like you went in and bought cigarettes. No furtive embarrassed glances to see if anyone recognizes you. No darting behind the back shelves when someone you recognize walks in.

In fact, the whole subject of sex is so matter of fact here in the west. At the same time, sex is a very important part of daily life. Relationships break up because “the sex wasn’t fun”.

Friendships are made purely to engage in sex, thus the word “fuck friend”. It denotes a relationship that, by mutual consent, will never progress beyond sex. Over here in the west, great sex does not require an emotional attachment.

After nearly three decades here, I am beginning to understand and not condemn that great sex does not have to depend upon being in love, though that can be a plus.

It is so easy to find a sexual partner here. As long as you dress decently and don’t behave creepily, you can literally walk up to a woman and tell her you are interested in her and “is she free this evening?” She won’t consider the approach inappropriate at all. If she is in the mood she’ll go right along with you and leave the next morning and you’ll never hear from her again.

At work, it is normal to hear a female colleague say things like, “ugh, he is such a fucking pussy. I bet he has a peanut for a dick”. Or if its a Friday afternoon, “God, am I waiting ta get laid tonight …”. No one will bat an eyelid to that.

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My first time in a sex shop was right there at La Sexie Folie. Freshly arrived from conservative hyper-hypocritical India, I was so embarrassed to be seen inside, I felt as if all eyes were on me and I wanted to just melt into the floor.

As I slunk around the aisles, I noticed that it had just about everything that had anything to do with sex, in it. The range of dildos amazed me. There was a long double-ended dildo that could…. ah forget it. Just know that there are double ended dildos on this planet and leave it at that.

I gradually loosened up when I noticed folk walking in and out as though it was just a grocery store.

Sexie Folie was manned by just one person at the counter – a fetching young brunette. She was dressed in a revealing but not overtly vulgar dress. It was the sort of attire that might help create the atmosphere and make customers want to buy sex stuff.

At the check-out I got to know the girl a bit. Lisa works here part-time. Curiosity got the better of me and I struck up a conversation with her after I overheard her advising a male shopper on the right kind of vibrator to pick for his wife as a birthday gift.

“Is she tight?” Lisa was asking the guy, a 60-ish man in a baseball cap and jeans.

“Nah, my Stephanie is big as a barn. By that I don’t mean she ever let a horse in there,” the man said and they both, Lisa and the man, dissolved into peals of laughter.

The brief exchange made me feel sort of exhilarated. This was not some shady joint, tucked away in Kolkata’s Free School Street, a back street maze of shops that survive by paying off the neighborhood constable and specialize in raunchy stuff that are considered taboo.

This was a regular commercial establishment, freely engaged unhindered, in the sales of pornographic merchandise, protected by the law. As in any store, like a clothing store, the manager was simply serving a customer. It blew my mind. It was the moment in time that I first realized I would love living in my adopted country, unburdened by bullshit hypocrisy and faux correctness.

Lisa is pursuing her Masters in Criminal Psychology at McGill and intends to join law enforcement, probably the RCMP’s Behavioral Sciences unit, the one responsible for investigating serial killings and violent, random crimes.

She told me she has never ever experienced being bothered by any customer. Just some giggly pre-teen boys and girls during the summer break. They left after she firmly asked them to. Entrance is restricted to 18+, by law.

Here, as elsewhere in the west, sex is something that is normal, matter-of-fact and considered an inherent and necessary part of daily life, certainly nothing to be hidden away. It is normal to find couples browsing through the DVD shelves together or picking up and feeling the skin of a dildo or trying on lingerie.

There is no bouncer keeping an eye on customers or looking out for the counter girl. The atmosphere is genial and open and the thought of misbehaving just doesn’t cross anyone’s mind.

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We had been chatting for a while when I realized it was almost 5, closing time. I paid for my purchase, two DVDs. One, titled “studs with suds”, had on its cover a buncha blondes soaping the willies of a buncha guys in a jacuzzi (I’m kinky). The other DVD was titled ‘Man maid’ and the cover had a beautiful woman dressed in a maid’s uniform that was unable to hide a richard peeking from under her skimpy skirt, that looked like a giant anaconda. I chose it because I have this recurring fantasy about having sex with gorgeous shemales with massive richards.

As I turned from the counter and made to leave, I saw a tall young man in a suit and crew cut, rapping against the plate glass show window, from the outside. He had a toddler by the hand and the kid had his arm wrapped round the man’s thigh.

“Someone is trying to draw your attention,” I said to the girl, gesturing toward the window.

“Oh, that’s Kyle, my boyfriend and our little Jeremy. We’re taking him to Kung-Fu Panda-4.” She smiled as she blew a kiss in the general direction of the window. Matter of fact, mundane, another day in the life of a law-abiding female blue-collar worker who is simply looking out for her family.

Can La Sexie Folie open up a branch in Jhumritalaiya anytime soon? I doubt that.

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My dear pal, Bergy (aka Jorge Mario Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis) has popped his clogs.

Bergy has the distinction of the being the Pope who came the closest to condemning the Catholic Church for it’s many criminal acts over the centuries.

By the way, that’s me above, practicing sainthood. It’s a cinch. First, you got ta organize a halo like mine. Doesn’t matter if it is thin and stringy. A halo is a halo. It remains in place right above and adjusts itself like a gyroscope when you move your head. You jump up and down and your halo will jiggle gracefully up and down, like size-DD boobs.

Now I may be 70 but I am a horny male, so don’t get me started on breasts. This post is not about breasts.

Getting back to the halo, remember not ta move your head too suddenly. Bumping into your own halo is a sin. But if you’re careful and you gently sway your head around, you can play with it like a halo hoola hoop.

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It is Labour Day 2016 and I am driving to the Hudson ferry when it comes over the car radio – Mother Teresa has been canonized a saint, 19 years after she died. A second miracle has been authenticated – that of a Brazilian man who has been completely cured, after he was diagnosed with malignant brain tumors and given little chance of making it by his doctors.

I am wondering how Mama Tee could figure in this ‘miraculous intervention’ given that she died in 1997 but I am afraid ta ask. Maybe she bumped into him and blessed him when visiting Rio while she was alive and it took twennie years for the man to recover completely.

Or maybe Mama Tee enrolled in Johns Hopkins University after her Brazil visit, got herself an advanced doctorate in neuro-oncology, completed a gruelling internship, did her Masters and wrote a PhD thesis and rushed back to save the guy……as a ghost. She was dead by then, remember?

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In case you are confused, Canonization is the process that ends in bestowing sainthood on a mortal. It is a recognition by the Catholic Church that is the spiritual equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom or the Bharat Ratna or the George Cross.

There’s another recognition that the Catholic Church likes to dole out – beatification. It’s like Canonization-lite. It is the recognition by the church that a dead guy has entered heaven.

Both, canonization and beatification, have one prerequisite – you have got ta be raising the daisies, ie:dead.

Until the mid-1600s, just about anyone – even local bishops – had the power to beatify but in time, the Catholic Church realized that complete jerks were being beatified. It got so bad that soon there were more assholes in heaven than in hell.

Not that one cannot be a saint and an asshole at the same time. In September 2015, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who first brought Catholicism to the natives of California in the early 18th century.

“Brought” would be a very charitable use of the word actually. “Rammed in“ would be more appropriate. Junipero Serra achieved the catholicization by brutally suppressing the native American culture and banning native rituals under pain of torture and even death.

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Here’s a few things you need to know in case you fancy the idea of being canonized a saint…….

Like I mentioned earlier, the number one requirement is that you need to be dead before the procedure can even begin. Of course there is an oxymoron here – if you are dead, would you give a fuck if you became a saint or you didn’t? It is like winning a posthumous medal. Would it have mattered to Capt. Vikram Batra that he won a Param Vir Chakra at Kargil? Or Navy Seal Michael A Monsoor for his Medal of Honor at Ramadi? Of course it wouldn’t.

The other thing is that you will be among the 900+ canonized guys and gals and you’ll be in haloed company.

The first three Abrahamic saints were male – the archangels Raphael, Michael and Gabriel. Raphael and Michael were low-key, except when they were required to slaughter sundry non-believers and assorted barbarians.

The rock star was definitely Gabriel. He was the one who came down to earth and conveyed God’s messages to Mohammad on a mountaintop cave near Mecca, where he went, evenings, to reflect in peace and quiet. Mohammad then packaged his jottings into the Quran.

I too like to go sit on that grassy knoll at the edge of our backyard sometimes, on summer evenings, to reflect on life. If then on one of these evenings, the angel Gabriel appears and expects me to take shorthand, I know what I’ll do….. tell him to fuck himself.

When I smoked Trichy weed in college and laid down to listen to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, I too saw apparitions with wings lecturing me. If only I had compiled ELP’s psychedelic words into a best-selling book, I too would be a messiah by now. Only, my following wouldn’t be a murderous one.

Raphy, Mike and Gaby were the only ones who didn’t have to earn their sainthood. They were born with it, somewhat like the Dalai Llama or Nepal’s Living Goddesses. They were God’s way of creating limited editions, I guess.

In order to be ordained a saint, the Catholic Church deems that you have got to perform at least two verifiable miracles. The most popular of all miracles has been curing someone of a terminal illness. If you think you’ll be made a saint just because you won a Presidential election (like Obama), forget it. This is not the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not the way it works.

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Here lies another oxymoron – if one of the basic tenets of Christianity is the principle of ‘as you sow, so you reap’, ie: if Christianity wants us to believe that we ultimately get what we deserve, then why should someone be miraculously saved without having to complete his suffering?

Doesn’t a miracle set a wrong example, send the wrong message? Like, you got tumors protruding out everywhere, tough shit, man, you musta done something wrong and so you had it coming. Isn’t that what Christianity preaches – that we must suffer for our sins, even when we do not always know what they are? There must be millions on earth, suffering the way that the Brazilian whom Mama Tee saved was suffering. Why should one chosen man be miraculously benefited, while the others are left to die agonizing deaths?

Don’t get me wrong. I hold nothing against Mother Teresa being canonized. It wasn’t her idea, I am certain of that. Left to herself, I am sure she wouldn’t give a flying fuck if she was made a saint or she wasn’t. She was a great human being and the world already knows it. Does her sainthood change anything, make us revere her more, turn us into better human beings? No, it doesn’t, not one bit.

Or is it just one of those last-ditch efforts by a failing faith that is in its death throes, trying to prop itself up by petty self-aggrandizement? One of the things that Hitler started doing at the fag end of the Second World War was to award every (Tom)as, von (Dick)en and (Harry)hausen the Knight’s Cross with the Oak Leaves, to raise flagging morale. If I look hard enough, I am sure I’ll find that Nixon did pretty much the same thing, throwing around Medals of Honor like confetti, after sensing flagging morale and defeat during the closing days of the Vietnam War.

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I believe that if one has done something exceptional, it shall be automatically registered and recognized ‘up above’, if at all there is someone there. Attaining true spirituality means that one doesn’t care about earthly recognition, like canonization.

True spirituality does not require me to sit up and say, “Wow! Look what a great faith Christianity is! It has so many saints”! Instead, true spirituality shows me the distinction between going to bed with choir boys and platonically loving fellow human beings.

Today, we have a world virtually on fire, consumed on all sides by racism, bigotry and hate and here we have a church that is totally out of sync with reality, busy making someone who died two decades back, a saint.

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At this point I am on the beautiful strip of asphalt that winds along the southern shore of the Lac Deux Montagne. It’s 11am on a beautiful day and time to banish all thoughts of the crap they call canonization and listen to “Wait wait, don’t tell me”.

I punch the preset on the FM button to 107.9 (NPR).

They say home is where the heart is — unless you’re a trucker. Then it’s wherever you find Wi-Fi and clean showers.

I always make it a point to visit the annual Transport Show at Montreal’s Palais des Congres.

The Palais is a massive combine of permanent exhibition halls, in the heart of downtown, just a few hundred yards from the ancient cobbled streets of the riverside by the old quarter.

The Transport Show is a truckers’ paradise. Daimler, Volvo, Iveco, Hino, Isuzu, Mack, Freightliner, you name the brand and it is there. Tractors, trailers, fancy buses and spares and accessories such as tires, lights, horns, paints, batteries, oils, stereos, cigars, chewing tobacco, truck spittoons….. anything that goes on heavy trucks is on display at the Transport Show. Lots of chrome, lots of metallic blue and turquoise, lots of fire breathing monster|sexy chic decals on the sides.

Don’t know what a decal is? The word is short for decalcomania, a decorative technique by which engravings and psychedelic designs are transferred to surfaces such as metals and pottery. 

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Then you come upon ‘accessories’ of a different category and you tarry a while longer there. Girly magazines. Phone book CDs with interesting numbers you can call when you’re trucking through any North American hick town. X-rated DVDs with blonde hitchhikers and very large truckers, always two hitchhikers to one trucker. Viagra. Condoms, CDs with compilations of truckers’ slang and swear words.

All the above are intrinsic parts of long-distance transportayshun. Oooh yeah.

Then there are ‘How-to’ books and videos. The hottest selling title there last year was,’ Ten ways to scream ‘m—er F—er’ at the guy in the next lane. This year the title that was flying off the shelves was,’ Tailgating and sideswiping for dummies’. Tailgating is the practice of driving too close to the vehicle in front, just to scare him shitless, the gap so close that safe stopping to avoid collision cannot be guaranteed.

Sideswiping is when you’re driving cheek to jowl with another vehicle, perhaps when you’re trying to overtake him. You suddenly swerve into his lane to frighten the bejesus out of him just for fun and you end up grazing him, sending him into a ditch.

Truckers love doing those things. Breaks the monotony, like. No, let’s say it the way girls in India do – ‘breaks the monotony only’.

Now about the “semis”. A semi is a heavy-duty vehicle that transports goods over long distances and consists of a “Trailer”, coupled to a “Tractor”. The Tractor has the engine, the driver’s cab and sleeping berth and usually has 10 wheels and the Trailer, which carries the load, has 8. North Americans call it by many names… “Tractor Trailer”, “18-wheeler, “Big Rig” or just “Semi”. The Brits call it “Articulated Lorry” (or simply “Artic”), “Juggenaut”, “Biggie” and so on. More about this later.

Then there is the “combi” or “double” that pulls not one but two trailers. Steering, especially backing up into a parking spot, can be very dicy, since the driver must know which way and at what distance to turn the steering wheel to line the mammoth up properly.

Years back, in preparation for an impending layoff, I got myself a Class-1 license, which says you can drive almost anything – truck, tractor-trailer, combi, anything (except 2-wheelers). It wasn’t easy getting the piece of plastic. I failed three times trying to back up into a tight parking spot.

On the fourth attempt I failed again, but this time the SAAQ examiner was a middle-aged woman and she said, “Qalis, you’ll never learn how to drive this thing.”

In the end she shook her head, sighed and gave me a pass. Because I had made her laugh all the while. Honest to God, true story. Btw, “qalis” is a French slang swear word which is like saying “Damn it” in exasperation.

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Some of the huge semis on exhibit look sleek, exotic, shaped like a torpedo or a diplodocus, with all sorts of fins, baffles, lights, rubber and chrome. And some look downright sinister, all black, with opaque, tinted windows, chrome on just the exhausts, a battery of lights in front, multiple heavy treaded wheels, powerful radio antennae.

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You won’t find any ‘monster trucks’ on display in this show. Monster Trucks are generally smaller pick-up trucks that have been heavily modified, with humongous wheels and suspensions that make them look grotesque, somewhat like that cousin, Duky, of Daffy Duck. You know, that duck with his head the same size as Daffy’s but the rest of him huge?

You haven’t heard of Duky? I feel sorry for you. Always remember, the only way to develop a well-rounded personality is to read more and more comics as you get older, till at 50+, you’re reading only comics.

Monster Trucks have their own separate show during the fall.

The Transport Show attracts lots of large, chubby, bearded men who communicate with surly grunts and have chronic flatulence. A guy with a squeeky voice and a smile will look as out of place here as Baba Amte at the Bildeberg Conference. For a week, the Palais des Congres sounds like the inside of a pig pen, with all those grunts ‘Gringa Grunga! Huggly Wuggly!! GriggaWigga! Humpi hoo!!’

Alas, many visitors are there not for the trucks and buses, though. You seen one truck you seen ‘em all, they’ll say. It’s what’s on display that you don’t normally associate with truckers or trucks that they come to stare at. Girls in shorts, their airbags fully deployed, draped over a hood here or reclining on the driver’s seat with one high-booted foot up on the steering wheel there. Models, employed by the exhibitors to attract the crowds.

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By the by, truckers don’t just grunt. Grunt, they do when they interact with civilians like you and me. Otherwise they have their own slang that they use when they communicate with each other on the road or with their bases. It’s a whole new lingo. Like, for instance, diesel is called ‘motion lotion’. A female highway patrol cop is ‘titty bum bum’ . The slow lane is the ‘granny lane’. A ‘seat cover’ is a female hitchhiker and a ‘lot lizard’ is a hooker who frequents truck stops.

There, don’t you suddenly feel enriched? Besides the above, truckers have their own visual signaling, their unspoken communications on the road. For instance, if you are overtaking another truck, he will flash his headlights on & off to tell you that you have cleared his vehicle and may safely change lanes in front of him.

Trucking in Canada is a terrific way to travel all over North America, while you earn at the same time. And comfortable. Air-conditioned cab, feather soft suspension, fully automatic transmission, a cabin just behind, with a bunk, satellite TV and a toilet, satellite connectivity with first-aid stations and law enforcement agencies, a  company-provided smartphone with unlimited roaming and data plan. If you’re on the northern side of the law, you will have help close by, even when you’re practically in the middle of nowhere.

And a double bunk bed. Enough for you, two hitch hikers and four tits.

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On the road, the trucker might stop over at a truck stop, to rest his weary butt. A truck stop is a gas station with pumps that are programmed to pump in diesel simultaneously into the two tanks that are on either side of the tractor. First he sticks a nozzle into one tank, then he circles the tractor to the other side and sticks another nozzle into the other tank. Both pumps are coordinated and you get one bill.

After he’s filled up with the company-issue debit card, the trucker will stretch his legs or grab a bite at the fast food joint there. Belching and picking his teeth, he’ll then huff and puff around the aisles of the convenience store that invariably goes with the gas station.

A truck stop convenience store is specifically designed for truckers. It’ll have all kinds of GPSs, bluetooths, cellphone accessories, lots of leather (jackets, belts, cowboy boots, hats), sunglasses, condoms, gum, chewing tobacco, cigars, shaving accessories, toiletry. And girlie magazines and ‘accessories’.

Everything is top-of-the-line stuff. Truckers get really well paid and are normally always loaded.

And, by the by, truck-stop convenience stores are filled with “mothers”. The trucker will swagger around the aisles, stopping at stuff that catch his eye. He’ll pick up a bluetooth, wave it at the man at the counter and grunt,” Hey, how much you sellin’ this mother foa? Wha..? Aitee? Those Flyin’ J fuckers ovah theah at Chatanooga are givin’ them away, man, at twennie a pop. Where you bin?”

Large truck-stops even have lounges, where, for a nominal fee, truckers can relax on sofas, watch a movie or the news on the cable. Next to the lounge will be showers and changing rooms for truckers who’ve been on the road a while and need a bath. If you wish to stay the night, catch a shut-eye, engage in some jigir-migir, there’s of course the cabin at the back of your own truck cab. Simply hook up the tractor-trailer to an electrical outlet if there is one, for a fee. Otherwise, the on-board power generation system can take care of you for one whole night, no sweat.

You’ve noticed me using the word ‘tractor’. Note that a tractor in the context of transportation is not the farm tractor that we normally associate with the word. Over here, a tractor is the front part of the tractor-trailer combo and the trailer is the long, load carrying part that is hitched to the tractor. Together, they form a gigantic 80ft long centipede with 18 large tires. If you’re the trucker, you sit in the cab of the tractor, to get to which, you climb up 12 feet, with the help of three hand-grips and footholds. If you’re giving a ‘seat cover’ a lift, you place your hands under her butt, dally there a bit (just a bit, otherwise she’ll be wondering what’s taking you so long) and then heave her up into the cab.

But remember, giving lifts is prohibited and could cost you your job, your permit, your Class-I rating and you’d end up receiving a load of demerit points. Demerit points increase your monthly insurance premiums and your Class-I permit renewal fees and beyond a certain number of demerit points, they won’t allow you to drive. But if you can’t keep your zipper on, I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.

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In contrast, trucking in India is very different. Firstly, in India, most trucks are straight-bodied, not tractor-trailers. Indian trucks are called ‘lorrys’, a term left over by the Brits. In Canada, Lorry is a woman’s name, though she might spell it as ‘Lori’. An Indian lorry carries 10-15 tons max. Wimpy, effeminate. A normal Canadian tractor-trailer carries 45 tons. And the level of driving comfort just cannot be compared.

The best part is that, if you start off being a trucker here, you might get to be a star one day. Don’t know what it is about truckers but many have gone on to successful movie and music careers. Rock Hudson, Sean Connery, Liam Neeson, Elvis Presley, Charles Bronson and Chevy Chase being just a few.

Just like in India, here too, especially on the Montreal-Toronto circuit, you get a lot of Sardarji (Sikh) truckers. You’re driving along the 401, minding your business, when you inadvertently stray a bit into the right lane a bit too close to the massive tractor-trailer you just overtook. And you see the huge tractor cab creeping up next to you and keeping pace long enough for you to hear, “Abey Pandchod, bund da kabooter! Hut, nahin to gand pe laath parega!” You look up and there’s ‘Praji’ giving you a withering glance and speeding up, leaving you shell shocked.

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I once traveled in a lorry, in the summer of ’79. An overnight trip, from Harihar to Bangalore. I‘d been to the Mysore Kirloskar plant in Harihar on business when I ran out of funds. Entertaining the receptionist the previous evening had severely depleted my finances. What was I ta do? She had a ponytail and she liked to swat my tiddly with it.

There were no credit cards those days and cheques were accepted only if the establishment knew you well. Travelling back by any organized mode of transport requiring the payment of a fare, was therefore out of question. And there I was, stuck in this hick town, with the last fifty I had on me.

Not in any way overlooking my immediate priorities, I got myself a pint of Old Monk, tucked it into my overnighter and with the tenner that was left, I took an auto-rickshaw to the outbound Bangalore highway check post, otherwise known as the Octroi Naka, arriving there smelling like a brewery.

I staggered out of the auto, fished out the tenner and for a moment, stared at Gandhiji on it. Did I catch him wrinkle his nose or was the tenner wrinkled? I giggled drunkenly. Gandhiji departed, relieved, and Babasaheb Ambedkar came in (ie: I got back a fiver). It was late, around ten at night. The pint bottle of Old Monk had so little rum left, you could count the number of C₂H₅(OH) molecules in there on the fingers of your hand.

I tottered up to a Leyland truck standing next to a dhaba and saw the driver, a sardarji, sitting on a khatia (rickety wooden cot) and wolfing down dal and roti with a whole onion and those really hot green peppers. Every time he bit into a pepper, he hiccupped and wiped a running nose with a rag that he had draped round his shoulders. On a small stool, right next, was a bottle of arrack and a glass.

Arrack is home-brewed Indian country liquor, a cloudy colourless liquid, with stuff floating in it, some of the stuff self-propelled before they drowned. Arrack consists of alcohol at around 55-60%, volume by volume. H₂O molecules enjoy minority status in there, I tell you. One swig and you’re zonked.

Sardarji sized me up and settled for a fiver after I gave him a hard-up story. “Go sit in the cab,” he growled. I weaved my way to the truck and climbed on, in a stupor. You don’t hitch a lift in a truck in India unless you’re sozzled senseless. I curled up in the far corner of the cab, nestled my bag behind like a pillow and passed out.

Don’t try this, okay? It’s not safe, especially if you happen to be a clean-shaven, not-too-bad-looking, slightly wimpy 25-year old. Some of those truckers can really have the hots for guys like you and you just might end up as his sex-slave for the rest of the trip, his unwashed richard mistaking the end of your alimentary canal to be a truck stop. 

Be that as it may, as I snored inside the cab, I immediately started having this beautiful dream. I was a trucker backing up my Tata1210 next to a dhaba and there was Mumtaz (the hot 1970s Bollywood siren) running alongside, cradling two ripe coconuts close to her chest, one in each hand, and singing,”Lelo re lelo babu, peelo naryel pani…..”.  Roughly translated that meant …. “Here, drink my coconut milk”. She jiggled around to the point where I was about sign her on to a large long-term contract for coconuts, when she suddenly faded out.

I was having the mother of all dreams when a sudden heave brought me awake and the first think I noted was that the sun was up and there was water all around. Sardarji had driven the truck right into a shallow river (more like a large stream actually) and he was busy washing it.

“Where are we?” I took off my shoes, rolled up my pants and jumped out into the stream. The water was muddy but felt good. My feet sank into the soft bed. Over on one side, was a dhaba, an adobe building in the shade of a copse of ‘hapoos’ mango trees.

“Tumkur,” he went on washing the windshield. “If you’re done with your beauty sleep, maybe you can come and give me a hand,” he flung a plastic bucket and a mug toward me. I scurried around filling the bucket and throwing the dirty river water at the truck for the next couple of hours, until the sun was right over our heads. By the time we were done, it was lunch time and Surdie drove the truck back up the bank, into the shade of the trees. He beckoned me to come sit with him on the khatia and eat.

The dhabawala (inn-keeper) had meanwhile caught a chicken and BBQed it. We had a full meal of delicious chicken tikka masala, naans, rajma daal and a few stray flies. It was the most satisfying meal I’d had in a long long time. Sardarji paid for everything. He refused to take the fiver I had left on me.

We sat there a few minutes in silence. The calm, the sweet breeze, the “murr-murr” of tyres on the highway in the distance, I was lost in this beautiful wilderness. Sardarji too seemed that way. Or maybe he sensed that I wanted to just hang around a while. He went on reclining on the charpoi, pagri removed for comfort, puckered eyes staring up at the blue expanse overhead.

It was dark by the time we reached the outskirts of Bangalore. At Yashwantpur, I said, “I’ll get off here..”. Sardarji eased to a halt and I collected my stuff and leapt off. 

As I started to turn to thank him, he thrust a tenner in my hands. “Here,” he said gruffly,” You’ll need this for auto fare,” and he was gone, leaving me staring back at the truck as it careened into the traffic, belching black smoke, turned the corner and disappeared into the dusk.

The mrrr…mrrr…mrrr of the tires on the semi-molten asphalt gave way to a cloud of dust as Sewa Singh spun the wheel sharply to the right. The old Ambassador taxi pitched and yawed as it swung off the highway, hit an earthen mound and came to a halt in front of the paan gumti, a tiny shop not any bigger than a large wooden crate, supported on four bamboo legs.

I figured we were at the outskirts of Purulia, a town approximately half way between Jamshedpur and Bokaro, in the eastern Indian province of Bihar.

Let me tell you what a paan gumti is all about. It’s like a mini convenience store, a small box-like structure on stilts, with the front side that swivels on hinges. This side is the store front. If you stand facing it, the floor will be at the level of your waist. Looking in, the first thing you’ll note is a thin square polished stone slab in the foreground on the floor, tilted slightly toward you. The shopkeeper (paanwala) rolls the paan you ordered, on that slab and it’s tilted to allow excess water from the wet betel leaves to drain off. If you’re standing too close, the excess water will drain off right onto your pants, where the zipper is. And if you’re not the sort who pees in his pants, you won’t like it, trust me on this.

A small mat right by that stone slab, is where the paanwala sits, cross-legged. Around him are spread his wares – loose cigarettes in a tin, beedis (Indian hand-rolled smokies, a penny a piece), paan (betel leaves), supari (betel nuts), paan masala (stuff that’s goes inside a paan), zarda(chewing tobacco), all in small round cans made of brass or aluminum.

There’ll be around 10-20 of those cans within his reach, with their lids open. And since the lids are always open, there will be a number of dinner guests, each a few millimeters in length and having the characteristics of a WWII Stuka dive bomber. They’ll buzz in for a sit-down meal and leave without paying.

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Outside, in the back of the paan gumti, sheltered from the loo is a kerosene stove on a crate, shielded inside a cardboard box, along with paraphernalia for preparing tea.

Relax, a ‘loo’ is Bengali for the dusty, searing hot wind that whips around through arid Indian towns on summer afternoons.

The tea stall is kind of like a high-margin wholly owned subsidiary and it’s CEO is a plump woman in a dirty petticoat, rolled up to the knees and no saree over it. She has a blouse on, with no bra under it, the bottom-most two buttons of the blouse having not been able to stand the stress and left.

The woman’s blouse has round patches of sweat where the aureolas of her bubby-boos are. Wait a minute, is it “aureolas”, or aureoli? One must be careful when writing a blog. Being lusty isn’t enough. One must spell his lust adequately. Aside from the sweat patches on her boobs, the broad also has sweaty armpits.

The woman is a strangely erotic sight. Oh yeah, I have a sweaty-Indian-country-girl fetish. I feel a stirring in my 25-year old crotch.

That woman is the paanwala’s wife, reporting directly to the chairman of the board, the paanwala. She’ll be hunched over a dekchi of boiling frothing tea while their sole employee, a snotty little girl, washes the dishes in a stream nearby.

Don’t ask me why, but paanwalas always have plump, bra-less, petticoated, wives and snotty kids. Just say “Hallelujah” and read on.

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The paanwala is most likely an avid paan chewer himself and will need to spit out the stuff from time to time. So he’ll have his tiny ‘pikdani’ (spitoon) right next, into which he’ll make regular deposits as he busies himself rolling you a paan or hands you a cigarette with grubby fingers, permanently stained red by betel juice. If you ask him a question, please stand well away out of range, if you don’t want to get sprayed. He’ll reply with his mouth filled with paan, face tilted up, lower lip basin-shaped, his speech having to do without being able to pronounce the ‘t’s, ‘th’s and the ‘d’s.

A paan gumti is the only place on earth where one can buy just one cigarette if he likes and not the whole pack. This has helped me stop smoking so many times while I was in India. If paan gumtis hadn’t sold single smokes, by now I’d be where you’d be only be able to communicate with me through an ouija board, I swear to ya.

And if you’re planning on getting yourself a paan from him, better have some loose change on you. If you don’t have small change and take out, say, a C-note, you’ll make the paanwala decidedly uncomfortable. He’ll fish around in that tin can of his, where he has all his change and a few tightly rolled 5s and 10s. Then finally he’ll put his fingers inside his bulging breast pocket and bring out a dog-eared notepad and myriads of small slips, receipts etc. Wedged in between them will be a few carefully folded 20s and 50s (maybe even one or two hundreds, but unlikely). He’ll carefully unfold the bills and count out the exact change, checking and rechecking his calculations repeatedly to make sure he isn’t giving you back more than you deserve. All the while, his eyes will be screwed close together, eyebrows furrowed in deep concentration. If he were sitting on Bikini Atoll while the Castle Bravo test was going off, he wouldn’t know it, believe me.

Every paanwala has a naked light bulb that he calls ‘balab’, hooked up to the ceiling, it’s wiring connected to a multi-plug which also feeds a radio, blaring ‘man chahe geet’ (hindi film favourites) or ‘sipaiyo ka man pasand’ (requests from our troops) on All India Radio. Requests for songs will be pouring in steadily from a hick joint called Amravati, giving you the distinct impression that it’s all that Amravatians do the whole fookin day, send in song requests. 

That same multi-plug also connects to a tiny table fan that is suspended from the corner of the ceiling facing down, the swivel movement performing half-rotations incessantly. And there’s no electricity meter, the power connection having been directly bled off a junction box nearby.

Even considering the free illegal electrical power line bleed, the average paanwala still just manages to eke out a precarious living.

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But hey, not all paanwalas are just getting by. Some, especially the ones at the main downtown traffic lights, do really well for themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if the one at the corner of MG Road and Moledina Road in Pune is sending his daughter to a convent school in Lausanne. 

The MG Road Paanwala is wealthy and that’s because, besides the regular paan shop revenue, he also acts as the bag man for the bribes that traffic cop stationed there collects. And the paanwala gets to keep a cut thereby. You cross a red light and the cop siddles up to you, a book of blank traffic tickets in hand. “Go give that paanwala over there a twennie and you’re free to go”, the cop says. You pay. It’s expediency, economics.

Some paanwalas also dabble in marijuana and hashish balls that they hawk in little paper sachets, Rs10 a sachet. Low grade stuff, diluted and cheap, meant for the hoi-polloi – the coolies and rickshaw-walas. More like the ‘khat’ they chew in Yemen.

Of course, you can’t just walk up to the paanwala and demand a sachet. You’ll have to know someone who knows someone who knows him. No big deal. You just grab hold of a rickshaw-wala and get him to introduce you. All rickshaw-walas are addicted one hundred percent. It helps them to fight hunger and exhaustion while they get through the day, carrying loads or pulling rickshaws.

Time out, for some nomenclature briefing. You must be wondering about the ‘wala’ bit. Well, adding ‘wala’ to an activity or an object transforms it into a guy. It literally means ‘that guy with the..’ or ‘the guy who has the…’. Thus, you could call a guy with cauliflower ears (like yours truly), ‘Cauliflower-ear-wala’ meaning ‘that guy with the cauliflower ears’.

Further, note that ‘wala’ is masculine and ‘wali’ feminine. No guesses on what ‘Watermelon-boob-wali’ could possibly mean to depict. Come on, this is a tutorial. You pass and I’ll give you a zarda paan that has just been vacated by the one of those 5 millimeter long Stuka dive bombers.

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Now where was I. Yeah, Sewa Singh had just parked his taxi by the paan gumti. I used all my strength against the hot screeching wind to nudge open the car door, got out and staggered toward the paan gumti, leaning way over against the wind, my head buried in my chest, trying not to get pinged by burning particles of hot blowing sand. As I found my balance, I stole a glance around.

There was one other car parked nearby, another Ambassador, bonnet open, the driver’s butt sticking out.  Obviously that vehicle has suffered some kind of a break-down. Poor sod.

This was the late 70s and the Ambassador and the Fiat 1100, a duopoly, were the only two brands of cars one found on Indian roads. Both cars were shitty junk buckets but the Ambassador was the more popular of the two. It was based on a 1940s design of the Morris Oxford, palmed off to a business family, the Birlas, which had managed to leverage the close ties that it’s founder, GD Birla, had with Mahatma Gandhi. In the process, the Birlas had managed to amass a business empire that had India virtually by the testicles. A sorry excuse for an automobile, the Ambassador can still be seen on Indian roads even today.

I felt sorry for the lone passenger whose silhouette I could barely make out in the back seat of that other car. Soon as my senses discerned that it was a female, the testosterone inside my horny brain demanded, “Well, don’t just stand there, go check her out. You know the drill, be nice, be chivalrous, be smooth and suave, offer her a lift. Do what you have ta do, but within the next 30 seconds your back seat should look like she was born on it.”

Bracing myself against the loo, I tottered toward the other car. The driver must have sensed my approach, for he emerged from under the hood and sized me up suspiciously.

‘Kya ho gaya, gari band ho gaya kiya?” (What happened? Won’t start?). I was trying to look concerned, having above strategic acquisition plans in mind.

“Sala, fuel pump gaya. Bhosriwala mechanic kal hi naya pump dala tha. Sala agar kahin dikh giya tho gaar pe laath parega, sala.” (Fucking fuel pump’s broken. The fucking mechanic changed it just yesterday. If I see him, I’ll ream the fucker‘s butt out.”

“Seems like it’ll take you a while. No sense in keeping a lady waiting all that while. It’s not very safe in these parts after dark, y’know. “ I was smooth, real smooth, “where are you headed?”

“Bokaro.”

“Hey, that’s exactly where we are going. Aren’t we, Sewa?” Sewa Singh nodded with a barely perceptible smirk. It’s true we were headed to Bokaro but we were going to Dhanbad first and wouldn’t reach Bokaro before 10-11pm that night.

Having been my longtime chauffeur, Sewa knew the antics I got myself into frequently. I continued without missing a beat, “If you like, we can take the lady with us and drop her wherever she would like us to.”

The driver sized me up and concluded that I looked decent enough. He must have acknowledged the fact that this desolate wayside joint was unsafe to be at for a lady, after dark. He walked up to the back and spoke with her and after a while she emerged from the car.

She must have been at least 70. This time the testosterone inside my head had screwed up. No matter. An offer, once made, had to be kept.

On the drive to Bokaro, the lady turned out to be extremely jovial and a wonderfully entertaining person. She also turned out to be the mother of Charanjit Singh, (Head of Purchasing), Bokaro Steel Plant.

I would rank that business trip as one of the most entertaining I’d ever taken. And the most rewarding.  Charanjit Singh showed his gratitude indirectly. Orders from Bokaro sky-rocketed. Tender contracts were skillfully arranged to favour my employers. I ended up winning the best salesman award in 8 out of 12 product categories that year.

To all the young men out there, here’s the moral of the story : Even a 70-year old can give you a good time.

Addendum to the moral : Fuck the grammar, aureoli-aureolas, it doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to blaze the trail, make the touchdown.

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Moscow
Present Day
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There is an elite unit deep within the Administratsiya Prezidenta Rossiyskoy Federatsii, (Presidential Administration of Russia), called the Federal’naya sluzhba okhrany Rossiyskoy Federatsii – Federal Protective Service (FGS).

The FGS mirrors America’s Secret Service and has the same job – to keep the leader of the nation alive.

Here are those attributes of the FGS that are similar……

The tools of the trade – the bulletproof limos, vests and briefcases, electronic surveillance, eavesdropping and signal jammers, high-power sniper rifles, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired surface to air or anti personnel missiles, multiple rings of agents each surrounding the President at all times, casing and bolting down of neighbourhoods long before a visit, et al.

Like the Secret Service, FGS agents are experts at many things – hand-to-hand combat, martial arts and standing for hours outside, in extreme cold as well as extreme heat, remaining alert and sharp.

Those things about the FGS that are vastly different from the American Secret Service are….

The FGS is answerable on paper to the director of the Presidential Administration but in reality only to Putin and no one else. FGS agents are wealthy, continuously endowed with cash and property worth millions by Russia’s equivalent of the Saudi “sovereign wealth fund”. Just as the Saudi fund is solely administered by Prince MBS, so is the Russian fund, by Putin and constantly topped up by his oligarch brigade. Estimates suggest that the Putin wealth fund owns assets worth over a trillion dollars.

On retirement at the age of 35, agents of the FGS are given plum positions such as regional governor, federal minister, special services commander or presidential administrator, where the opportunities for grift are infinite.

A 2018 exposé by Russia’s Novaya Gazeta and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed how a giant Soviet-era poultry farm and factory outside Moscow was appropriated and its valuable land divvied up among high-ranking officers in the FGS. Among those who benefitted from the scam were three former Putin bodyguards who were recorded flanking him during an official trip to Helsinki in 1999.

Putin has six rings of these agents surrounding him at all times and even multiple agents planted in crowds. In comparison, the American President has only two rings of agents around him.

American Secret Service agents are not given cash or property. An agent is covered by the FERS (Federal Employee Retirement Service) and is eligible to a voluntary 30-year period of employment. The agent starts at around $32000/yr and can end with $190000/yr if he or she retires as the Director of the Secret Service.

The above is as far as my information goes. I have no idea if things have changed with Trump in power.

Secret Service agents have no plum appointments lined up on retirement and as to the patsy (a.k.a body double), to the best of my knowledge an American President does not use one. I doubt if there are any suicidal guys willing to act as a body double for Donald Trump.

Putin’s personal security costs the Russian exchequer $30billion a year, while America spends just $3billion to keep its President alive.

Now, here’s the thing. In spite of all the expense and effort at securing his safety, Putin will not get to see his last wish, that he may die a world changer. He had wanted to see all the ‘prodigal sons’ (the breakaway republics) back in the fold and the Russian Empire at the head of half the civilized world. Even more than that, he always wanted to go peacefully in his own bed when the time comes. 

The end, when it does come, is sudden and quiet, with two sounds not louder than soft coughs. It catches him by complete surprise, his dimming eyes glazed, with hurt and betrayal.

The Russian President had spent the night at Novo-Ogaryovo, his official dacha west of Moscow, on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. Now the sun is barely peeking out over the firs in the distance and he is already at his desk in the den, leafing through the press briefing that he is scheduled to deliver this afternoon about what had been achieved at the recent summit with Trump in Riyadh.

The briefing is, as the title suggests, brief. The President hates flowery prose.

There is a discrete knock and his major-domo, Volodya, a Spetsnaz veteran and his judo partner, enters quietly, closing the tall oak doors behind him, as he balances a tray in his right hand. He is a lefty, a fact that the President sometimes forgets on the mat.

Volodya had broken his ribs twice while practicing the ‘harai goshi’, (a judo sweep throw) with Putin, but he would follow his master blindly and unquestioningly. Likewise, Vladimir Vladimirovich trusts Volodya with his life and has made sure that he and his family want for nothing.

Little is known about Volodya outside of the President’s closest circle of aides, but of one single thing there is no doubt in anybody’s mind – that Volodya is to Putin what Martin Bormann had been, to Hitler. Only, in his case he had the same name as his boss – Volodya is short for Volodymyr which is the Ukrainian way of saying Vladimir, a word that means “Ruler of the World”.

There is only one man more powerful than the FSG and that is Volodymyr Antonenko. Of course, it is always a roll of the dice in dictatorships. You are powerful as long as your man is in power. He goes and those multitudes with grudges, the long knives, will be out to get even and you might find yourself on a train to the Kolyma Labour camp with a one-way ticket.

There is only one way you can remain untouchable in today’s Russia – if you are awarded the nation’s highest honour….. Hero of the Russian Federation. A purge at that level would reflect badly on the leadership. 

Volodya is in the running for that honor.

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Even less known is the fact that Volodymyr is not his real name.

Volodya had actually been born Rustem Akhmetov, the only son of a certain Fedir Akhmetov, a Crimean Muslim Tatar, in a tiny hamlet called Rozovyi in the wilderness just outside Alushta, a coastal Crimean town of 30000, 100 miles east of Sebastopol, Ukraine. Crimean Muslims were generally progressive but by the time the son was born, Fedir had embraced the rabid Wahhabist Muslim version of the faith.

The match that lit the fire of Fedir Akhmetov’s extremism had its origins in the dying days of the Second World War….

For generations, the Akhmetov clan had been living in peaceful contentment in Rozovyi when, in late 1944, Fedir Akhmetov became one of the 190,000 Muslim Tatars who were forcibly rounded up, removed from Crimea and sent by Stalin on a week-long 3500 mile cattle car ride to be resettled in the Uzbekistan S.S.R. All his earthly possessions, his land and his home, were snatched by the Bolshevik apparatchiks.

It was an ethnic cleansing operation that Crimean historians call “Surgunlik”.

An avowed atheist, Stalin was concerned about more Muslim enclaves forming on the USSR’s western borders after the war ended. Already there were Islamist Iran, Iraq and Turkey – a bit too many. His childhood memories of Russia’s continuous bloody conflicts with the Ottoman Empire and later, Hitler’s desperate cozying up with the Islamic nations of the Levant to save the Nazis, were still fresh in the dictator’s memory.

Compared to the idyllic life in Crimea, the refugee camp in Uzbekistan was a hellhole, but the Akhmetovs somehow survived. Then, in 1986, after the Mikhail Gorbachev kindled “perestroika (reform) and glasnost (transparency)”, those memes became the zeitgeist. Under perestroika, Fedir and his family were allowed to return to Ukraine, this time to Donetsk, a mid-sized Russian-majority town in the east.

Deeply resentful of the way that he and his family had been treated, Fedir Akhmetov set about formulating a plan as the train carrying them back chugged through the Uzbek countryside.

First, Akhmetov decided that for the future prosperity of his family, he needed to shed his Muslim Tatar identity. He believed that his version of the Quran allowed him to masquerade as a non-Muslim if there was a higher goal ahead. He shed his Muslim identity quietly and on arrival at Donetsk, registered with the city council as an erstwhile orthodox Christian, Fedir Antonenko, now an atheist. You could get away with makeovers those chaotic days. Then, with the help of a newly acquired friend who happened to be an apparatchik, he got himself a job as a staffer at the Donetsk office of the Soviet external intelligence agency, the KGB.

An intensely loyal and hard worker who minded his own business, Akhmetov was well regarded by his superiors. A string of transfers and promotions within the KGB followed, until his final posting in East Berlin, as Chief of Station for Department V Operations, the Mokroye Delo (known in the CIA as the Black Ops or Wet Affairs – covering assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage).

All through his rise through the ranks of the KGB, Fedir Akhmetov, had managed to hide his true identity. It had been possible only because of the immediate post-war chaos

Sometime in the late 1980s, when on a routine visit to Dresden, Fedir rubbed shoulders with a diminutive, shifty, ferret-eyed man, a 30-yr old KGB agent like himself, a man who spoke in a soft, hesitant voice.

The agent was named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

It is said that they immediately took to each other.

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[It’s time for my date with the Stella Artois sisters. Toodle-oo. Watch out for Part-2]