———————

If you are going caribou hunting in the Canadian Tundra, read this before you leave. It might save your life.

Foremost, you never call it a hunt over here. It is a ‘harvest’. You are going to harvest a deer, not kill it against it’s will. This is a wildlife conservation country. You conserve by killing, oh yeah.

In the west, you learn to couch your words. Forcibly kidnapping and transporting for the purposes of torture is rendition. Cancelling a supplier’s contract without reason, just because you can, is making a usage decision. The list of humans that are chosen by the CIA for targeted assassination by drone strikes is the disposition matrix.

But I like calling a spade a spade. It is a hunt you have chosen to go on. You will be killing in cold blood a living being who never did you any harm.

————————

Let me digress a bit here. This is called an ‘aside’ when a genius blogger veers slightly off topic, with a view to enlighten…

Australian moral philosopher, Peter Singer, speaks of ‘bio-ethics’ in his book, “Animal Liberation”. He asks us to imagine a really intelligent orangutan like say, Clyde, in the 1978 Clint Eastwood movie “Every which way but loose”. Clyde, a highly trained orangutan, acts like he is human. Even untrained Orangutans are known to be very intelligent and to display human-like emotions.

Now, compare Clyde with a child with Down Syndrome or a cognitively impaired woman stricken by Alzheimer’s. It is quite possible that Clyde might trump the above two humans in all those qualities that we take pride in as setting us apart from animals. And yet we would treat that child with Down Syndrome and that woman with Alzheimer’s with far more deference than we would treat Clyde.

So here’s the question – is it okay to stalk and kill an animal to eat it’s meat or simply for the sport, because we can? One argument is yes, it is okay to kill animals. Our digestive systems and taste buds are attuned to eating meat. We have evolved to be more intelligent and be smart enough to snare and consume. It’s the ‘cycle of life.’

The opposing argument asks us to imagine this .. ‘We men are physically stronger that women and if one assumes level of intellect between genders to be equal, men should be considered superior, so why should women have equal rights? Take slavery. Surely, there is no question white colonists were smarter than the black African natives – just as we humans are smarter than other living beings. If it is okay to hunt, why should slavery be condemned? Why shouldn’t the ‘cycle of life’ argument also apply to slavery?

——————-

My aside is over and if you still want to go harvest some caribou, read on..

It is September – caribou season, a one-month window when the Quebec Ministière de Forêts, Faune et Parcs permits you to hunt caribou. The period, coming just before the mating season begins, is well chosen. It is the time when the prey, getting horny and wanting to fuck, practices the least caution and emerges out in the open. It is the period when an animal is most vulnerable, easiest to kill.

Yeah, there is a designated season for everything. The MFFP designates the season for the type of device you can hunt with, the species, the number and even the gender of prey. The hours when you can hunt are restricted – usually a half hour before sunrise to a half hour after sunset. The zones where you can hunt, the kind of vehicle you can use to travel inside the hunt zone, when and where you can use hunting dogs or falcons, every tiny aspect is regulated. Break those regulations and you are looking at hefty fines upwards of $5000, confiscation of your firearm, license and even your truck and gear and worst, a ban if you display dangerous negligence.

Then there are the ‘random draws’. If you are a resident local, you can enter the random draw and win a tag to hunt one adult female deer or moose, over and above your regular quota of tags. Otherwise, hunting females is banned. You could also win a tag to go hunt inside protected wildlife reserves that teem with prey. That is permitted when the conservation folks at the MFFP deem it necessary to cull.

Notice that I keep referring to the word ‘tag’. A tag is a permit additional to your regular hunting license. You need to have the hunting tag on you when you are on a hunt. Non-compliance can land you in serious trouble if a ranger catches you without a tag. One tag gives you the right to harvest one animal. It is a piece of paper that specifies all the stuff that you can do, such as the type of game (deer, moose/elk, bear, boar or antelope). It is a form that has boxes on it that you’ll need to check if you kill an animal, the date and time of the harvest, the location and the sex and other descriptive features of the prey (eg: the number of points on the antler, etc).

The widely accepted way to mark a tag is to punch out (make a hole with your knife) the sections corresponding to the correct information pertaining to your hunt. So when someone says he “punched a tag” or “filled a tag”, it means he had a successful harvest. If a hunter says he had to “eat his tag” it means that he was unsuccessful, ie: instead of eating fresh wild game he is stuck dining on his permit. “Mmm, yummy tag sandwich…”

So, let’s say you punched your tag. Now you need to present the animal along with the duly punched tag at the nearest designated ranger station and the ranger will staple the tag to the animal’s ear. Up until then you are not permitted to decapitate the animal.

Wait, you’re not done yet. Load the animal back on your pick-up truck and drive to the boucherie. The boucher (butcher) will wait for the rigor mortis to pass which takes around 24 hours. He will then ‘dress’ the animal, which means skinning and removing the innards. Afterward, he will hang the animal up by it’s two hind hooves, inside a refrigerated room where the temp is maintained at around 0°C. He will leave it hanging there for around 5-7 days, to break down the collagen and allow the meat to age and gain tenderness and flavor. 2-3 decades prior, they left carcasses hanging outside in an unheated barn or shed but Septembers are a lot warmer now, so the fridge room.

After the visit to the boucher, you are done. Get back home and celebrate with a bottle of wine the fact that you murdered a living being who, given the option, would probably have liked to live on.

—————————

Let’s check out your weapon. You have brought along your TenPoint Viper. You have chosen well. A cross-bow is noiseless, except for the click of the latch and the twang of the string, hardly audible and easily drowned out by the howling wind. At 60 yards, the crossbow’s range might seem little but that won’t be a problem since the caribou don’t seem to mind it if you get real close.

So you get close, rest the barrel on something hard, aim and let loose. The Viper won’t start a stampede. A gun might.

I remember the last time I used my Viper. It was on a moose hunt in 2016. The doe didn’t know what hit her, dead before she hit the ground. The bolt had pierced the left shoulder and exited through the right, not forgetting to bore a neat hole through her heart. After it exited, the arrow went on flying through the air with barely diminished momentum, disappearing in the brush beyond. I located and retrieved it, buried upto the fletching in the ground twenty feet beyond, it’s jagged saw tooth titanium point flecked with bone and sinew.

————————

Now lets backtrack to the caribou. A close cousin of the more popularly known reindeer, the caribou has the same magnificent antlers but is larger and heavier, adults sometimes weighing in at around 350-400lbs. Dressed and cleaned, a caribou will provide you upwards of 100lbs of fresh succulent meat. You won’t need to go to Costco for 6 months.

The other basic distinction is that while the reindeer can be domesticated, the caribou cannot. You won’t see any pet caribou but go up north and nearly everybody has a pet reindeer or two. The caribou is also the only deer species to have antlers on both, the male and female. In other types of deer, females do not have antlers.

Unlike the moose or the whitetail, caribou roam in large, tight herds of hundreds, sometimes thousands. And like any beasts that live in a herd, they are way dumber – misled by the faux security in numbers. It makes them easier to kill. From the hunter’s perspective, there’s no thrill in the chase. A caribou herd is too closely packed. There are just too many of ‘em. All you need to do is aim in the general direction and you’ll have your allotted five kills.

But nature has given the caribou an even chance at survival, a compelling one that keeps them from being hunted with the same gusto as the whitetail and the moose – it is their habitat, a barren forbidding sub-zero expanse where the sun never sets in summer and never rises in winter, where if your frozen fingers fumble to cock your rifle or latch your crossbow bolt and aim within a few seconds at an approaching bear or wolf pack, it may turn out to be you that is the prey.

We have gotten too used to our creature comforts. Today’s hunter doesn’t want to fuck around in the -20° cold and face the very real possibility of losing the tips of his fingers and nose to frostbite, when he can just drive an hour east of Montreal and get a nice juicy whitetail, tag and register the kill, drop the animal off at the neighborhood boucherie and be back home by sundown. After 10 days, you drop by the boucherie and collect your 80lbs of succulent venison, in the form of neatly chopped and shrink-wrapped portions, take them home and stick them in your basement freezer. The whole hunt will cost you less than $200 including gas.

In comparison, a caribou hunt is a $15000 grand adventure, a northern safari, thousand miles from home, on barren land hundreds of miles north of the tree line.

———————

The first goal on a caribou hunt is not to punch your tag. It is to make sure you have the tools you need to survive the elements and get back home alive. Besides your Viper, bolts and paraphernalia, you packed your Bushnell Trophy binoculars, Galvatron flashlight, Nikon Weatherproof, battery packs and truck charger. And sunscreen and chapsticks. Dry skin and sunburn are omnipresent above the 60th parallel. Then there is your ‘peepee and kaka stuff’ – toilet paper and baby wipes.

You could pack a handgun, like a lightweight Glock, for emergencies(like frisky bears and wolf packs), but be aware that handguns are banned during season. But if you weigh the risk of being mauled against a fine, you would choose being fined wouldn’t you? A Glock however is not an absolute guarantee. It is just a fighting chance – if you broke your ankle and you’re lying in the snow, your back resting against a granite outcrop and you are trying to figure out how long it will take to drag yourself to the truck which is idling just beyond that ridge over there and at the same time, you are watching a large brown bear (otherwise known as ‘Grizzly’) approach, the chances he will get to you first and hurt you real bad are very high. It will have to be a head shot, right between the eyes, if you want to come out alive. Personally, I practiced at the range at Dorion for that eventuality, before I went on my one and only caribou hunt.

And medication. Pack a suitcase-sized first-aid kit that has, besides wound dressing paraphernalia, pill bottles of Tylenol(pain), Imodium(diarrhea) and Dramamine(motion sickness). Dramamine, because the rides (including the hair-raising ten-seater flight to the destination) are bumpy.

And chocolates – lots of Mars, Coffee Crisp and O’Henry bars. Nothing like chocolates to quell hunger and keep you warm.

————————

This is the Canadian Central Barren Ground, otherwise known as the Tundra. The caribou here are the almost white “barren ground caribou”. If you choose to hunt a little ways down south, but still above the tree line, you’ll come across the slightly dirtier-grey “woodland caribou”. Both species do not believe in migration. Dumb as doornails that they are, they just stay put and wait for you to come get ‘em. Here September is late fall.

Your Casio Rangeman says its 2pm and the temp is -20°C with wind chill. By late November it will have crossed -40°C. You have been outside the shack two hours and already the tips of my fingers and toes are numb and you are beginning to lose feeling in your feet, even with your fancy thermal socks on. That is a sign that you don’t have much time left before you have to get back inside the truck.

You are 20 miles south of Whapmagoostui, a Cree native American village (population : 20) at the edge of James Bay, the little spit of water which makes the 500,000 sq.mile Hudson Bay look like it is sticking its tongue out at the rest of Canada.

Tundra Adventures, the outfitters, had provided the charter flight to haul you over to the nearest airstrip at Kujjuarapik from Gaspé, where you had left your F150 at the parking lot of the Auberge sous les Arbres hotel. For 15,000 smackeroos you got a fully stocked shack at the site, a skiddoo (snow mobile), a Toyota Tundra with 100 free gallons of gas (ten bucks a gallon thereafter), a satellite phone and an insurance policy (subject to having a valid driving permit and hunting license). The policy included a free airlift to the nearest emergency ward, wherever that might be. Of course, you would have to be able to get your frozen fingers to dial the emergency number on the phone. Frostbite and hypothermia are unforgiving to fingers.

The Pilatus PC-12 with it’s single Pratt and Whitney PT-6 turbo-prop had been a scary flight. The forbidding sight of the terrain 12000 feet below was scary – sapphire blue lakes and snowy white pines, little patches amid a horizon to horizon expanse of white nothingness. If the Pilatus went down in there and you somehow survived the crash, you were a dead man for sure. Even a satellite phone wouldn’t save your ass in time for the medevac to arrive.

There had been six others in the charter flight, four hunters just as insane as you and two local Cree businessmen. The four were hardened arctic hunters – thrill seekers who had done this multiple times and got a kick out of, much like the American alpinist, Dave Hahn, who kept going back to the Everest, fifteen times between 1999 and 2013.

You learned that the four had always hunted in a group, but you are alone. Lone Daniel Boones are rare and they command a certain respect in the tribe. The four admired your spirit for that reason.

You are of course stupid to be alone. The Tundra is singularly unforgiving toward folks who venture out into the wilderness alone. The chances of your making it back in one piece, not frost-bitten and not bear-mauled, are less than four in ten when you’re alone. You won’t hear a bear coming until it is lightening your weight, removing pieces of skin and flesh off your back. If its any consolation, he won’t eat you. Bears don’t enjoy human flesh. He will just want to maul you to death, that’s all.

Or say your Toyota Tundra broke down on the hard-packed ice thirty miles from Whapmagoostui. Or maybe you just switched off the ignition, inadvertently. In the Tundra you don’t switch off the ignition. From the time the outfitters handed you the keys to the truck, right up until you hand them back three days later, the engine will be running, non-stop. You just have to keep gassing it up, time to time.

But it can happen – the Toyota is a machine after all – and when it does pack up, that is another way to die in the Tundra. For that reason, Caribou hunting is always done in groups of at least four, in two trucks.

Another reason for the multiple hunting buddies is you are permitted by law, four caribou per person and you’ll get your four kills within the first couple of days, easy. But if you are alone, what are you going to do, carry their 300-lb bulk all on your back all the way to the truck? And if you have shot two at the same time – when you’re back for the second carcass, there’ll be just blotches of blood left on the snow and a pack of twenty timber wolves, a welcoming committee waiting to tear you to pieces.

But then you are just that – a loner – and you are prepared to face the challenges that come with being one. The 18-round Glock in your jacket won’t save you from a wolf pack. They will keep coming at you. But it will scare away a bear for sure.

There you have it. Now go get ‘em.

“Twenty years after the opening shots of the Bosnian War were fired, former Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladic, is finally being tried by a United Nations War Crimes tribunal in the Hague, on 11 charges of crimes against humanity”        

The words of the 8pm CBS Evening news anchor, Scott Pelley’s words seemed to fade out, while and another voice dovetailed in, his voice. His. Arjun Das’s. It said…“……I have this insane urge to hold you in my arms…”

Just a few meters away, in the hall, Sukumar sat sprawled in front of the TV as a 1995 video of Mladic flashed on, showing him inspecting a crack unit of the Serbian Army Special Forces, ‘the Scorpions’, on a rain-swept hillside just outside the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, on the eve of the massacre.

Sukumar had his laptop open as usual, his fingers paused, to take in the news video. He turned and looked at Nandini who’d just dropped the soup spoon in the plate of pasta she’d prepared for Dharam. Her son was already seated, waiting.

“Mom! There’s soup all over my pasta!”

Damn! The tremor in her hands passed. She took a deep breath, steadied herself and started preparing a fresh helping.

As she ladled the pasta, Nandini raced back again, to the first time Arjun had unfriended her. Their first interaction, two months prior. He’d unfriended her just an hour after she’d accepted his invite. She was baffled and messaged him,” Hi, it’s your business of course but it’ll be nice to know why you unfriended me…”

“Hello”, came the reply, in measured tones,”I unfriended you because there’s just nothing on your page. No info, no wall, no photos, no friends list. You have friended me but denied me access to virtually everything. It’s demeaning and frankly, I don’t have time for this. This won’t work, thank you and good bye”.

Nonetheless, Nandini realized that her FB settings needed to be reconfigured. She decided to reach out once again, a trait he later came to adore in her. She hurriedly replied,”So sorry about that. I didn’t know my settings were that way. Have fixed it now.” She sent him back an invitation without ado. He accepted.

In the beginning she’d been reserved, hesitant about talking of herself. He was just an unknown strange man who wrote outrageously funny notes that made her burst into laughter. As the days went by though, the levee she’d hurriedly constructed, seemed to look like it was made with cotton candy. It soon started to dissolve. She began to be excited every time she saw his message waiting when she logged in. Oh, he had this wonderful old-world graciousness and oodles of charm and he made her feel so so good.

“Mom!…do you mind not staring into space with a spoonful of pasta, also in space? How about dropping it back to earth and my plate?”

Sukumar looked up..“If Mladic is actually pronounced Mladich, why can’t they just step up and add the ‘h’ to their names, for Christ’s sakes?” A top-knotch software brain, he couldn’t stand anything with hidden tones. Everything had to be either black or white for Sukumar Vittal Shyamrao. Zeros and ones. “Life, simplified,” would be the title of his book if he ever chose to write it. Painfully shy, perpetually immersed in solving knotty software issues, Nandini felt lucky if he said more than two words at the dinner table. Sometimes, when he suddenly broke into Telugu, that was a sign he was moved by something and maybe wanted to talk.

“What did he do?” Nandini was referring to Mladic in a desperate bid to stop her mind from sliding back into that crevasse which had suffocated her a minute ago and caused the soup spoon to slip from her fingers. Please, Sukumar, keep talking. Don’t stop. I don’t want to be alone with him anymore.

“What did he do?” Sukumar again, “He slaughtered eight thousand men, women and children in one night in a small picturesque mountain town in Bosnia. Right after he’d given the UN peacekeepers his word the day before that he wouldn’t go in. Mladic is the father of the term, ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

“1995…hmmm…let’s see now, where was I then…” Dharam began, trying to establish his whereabouts at the time, almost 18 years ago, while shovelling pasta into his mouth. He was going to be 8 next March.

“You were a doddering old Mongolian sheperd with two billy goats and a horse, who’d just been to see his married daughter in Ulan Bator, darling,” Nandini wanted to play along. She smiled, rose, went over and engulfed him in one of those comprehensive all-season squeezes that only mothers can impart.

“Ugh,” Nandini made a mock grimace as she held her son tight,”Correction, you can’t be the sheperd, you must be one of the goats. You smell like them. To the showers right after supper, billy goat, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

Later, as she rinsed the dishes, Dharam and his Ipod having retired for the night, she heard the TV being turned off and felt the armchair in the hall creak. Slippered footsteps flopped up to her and stopped right next.

“Here, let me dry them”. Sukumar took a wash cloth and reached for a plate. Nandini turned. The man standing next to her was tall, crew-cut, clean. A mild shadow of a beard covered his lower jaw. He looked solid, simple, honest, wholesome. Just as he’d been, the first time they’d met. She reached up and laid her head on his chest, the sobs breaking out, shaking her whole being. He dropped the cloth on the counter and just as her body went limp, he drew her up to him fiercely, till she was on the tips of her toes, her breath gasping upon his cheeks.

She tried to open her mouth, to speak through her sobs. To tell him. Everything. But he laid a finger gently on her lips with a ‘ssshhh’. Holding her close, by her shoulders, he placed one arm just below the round of her buttocks, lifting her off the floor effortlessly, while at the same time he advanced purposefully toward the stairs.

“Welcome back, darling,” he whispered.

You might remember Ken Kesey from of his 1963 novel ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ and it’s more famous film adaptation. By the time the movie was released in 1971, Kesey was already creating a stir within conservative America.

Kesey was quite a piece of work. He was the kind of guy to whom if something looked weird, he was probably going to try it. He volunteered for the testing of a psychotropic drug that was later to be known all over as LSD or simply acid. He ended up loving the stuff, happy that he was getting paid to do a fun thing like getting high on it.

For the tests, Kesey had to be kept under observation in a hospital ward. One night he crept out of his bed, broke the lock of the infirmary and stole as many vials of LSD as he could lay his hands on. Fortunately there was no inventory list and his nocturnal raid went unnoticed. For the rest of his hospital stay he was perpetually zonked out of his mind, even on days he was not administered the drug, leading the researchers to draw entirely erroneous conclusions. And Kesey? Yikes, he was hooked. Cuckoo’s Nest incorporates some of his own experiences inside that hospital.

Ken Kesey became one of the symbols of the counterculture hippie movement that began in the 1960s. By the time I became a part of the counterculture scene, it was no longer that counter. Heck, I had pot-smoking professors in engineering school. Everyone was stoned. While I drew the line at an occasional Saturday night pre-movie joint of Trichy weed or fresh moist ‘Tal hash, the other guys were doing pills like mandies (Mandrax), lippies (Lippitone) and dexies (Dexedrin).

In 1970s Chennai in southern India, where my engineering school was situated, you could get powerful ‘downers’ and ‘uppers’ over the counter fairly easily. All you had to do was find a bent pharmacist and mumble a phony doctor’s name to him which he made a note of and then charged you a rupee a pill. For a broke student in those days, a rupee was a fortune.

The go-to guy for pills was a pharmacist near Moor Market, a cavernous building right next to the rail station, which housed hundreds of tiny stores crammed together, selling stolen and second-hand stuff – books, household appliances, electronics. Even the pennies there were bent. (Don’t try looking for Moor Market now, it doesn’t exist anymore).

The pharmacist himself was a heavy user, stoned out of his mind on mandies most of the time. Mandies and Lippies were very strong sleeping pills and the kick came when you resisted the drowsiness. If you took two of them, they could put you in such a tailspin that when you finally stopped resisting the snooze and let go, you ended up sleeping the next 48 hours, dead to the world.

I tried a Mandy once but found that when I spoke, the words came out funny. For example, if I wanted to say, “lets go for a movie, dude”, it sounded more like, “leh wo foah yayy mooo, joo”. After that one time, I decided that those kicks were not for me. Talking like a retard was not my scene.

Dexies on the other hand, kept you awake. I tried dexies too but like mandies, it was just once. Boy, did they keep me awake. I was stark, raving awake. The downhill after the drug wore off, was really downhill. I slept for a whole day.

Pills were very much in the scene at college, oh yeah. Guys took dexies going into class and mandies and lippies coming out of class. At any given time of the day, around half the population in campus was staggering around.

I didn’t mind getting high on weed occasionally those days, but I got stoned only to listen to music with friends, within the confines of my dorm. I had to have control, even when I was zapped. If I went out in public, stoned, there was a possibility I might start behaving like a jerk and that I could not tolerate.

Bands like Jethro Tull, Jefferson Starship, Uriah Heep and Pink Floyd were great music to get stoned with. Here’s the thing about marijuana, for those who have never tried it – even the crappiest music sounds like the work of a genius. Every tinkle, every note and every beat is sort of embedded into the consciousness through some sort of osmosis. The most mindless lyrics sound intelligent and deep. If you are lying down, the bed will seem to float up after a while. Even movies….if you are watching something really crappy, like one of those old KL Saigal films, it will seem like an edge of the seat masterpiece.

But if you are tired, depressed or stressed out and if someone passes you a chillum, don’t go for it. Just as it enhances the good, weed will amplify the bad too and your trip is quite likely going to turn into a nightmare.

Here are the other things weed does to you…. it makes you really hungry as hell. You’ll want to eat just about anything you can lay your hands on. And then there’s sex. If you are with someone who is stoned too, sex after a joint is just beautiful. You will turn into the world’s greatest lover. And she, Raquel Welch. Yucky stuff, like going down on her that you wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise will seem natural for you to want to do. Cross-eyed, sniveling, skinny, flat-chested, bad breath, smelly armpits, they will seem overpoweringly sexy to you.

In the end, after the effect of the marijuana wears off, you will fall into a deep restful sleep and if you haven’t had one too many joints, you will wake up fresh, without any hangover or any other after effects at all.

————————————

Wait, before you begin to think smoking pot is great, there are long-term side effects to regular marijuana use. Besides medical issues such as BP, lung cancer and pulmonary problems like bronchitis, prolonged use also affects you psychologically in tiny incremental stages. It makes you lethargic, impractical, unrealistic, aimless and generally unconcerned about your future. It makes you edgy, impulsive and easily excitable. Prolonged marijuana use is also known to play havoc with short-term memory and is believed to be responsible for a sizable number of incidences of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Nowadays I see how marijuana is becoming more and more socially acceptable and easily available and legislation is being tabled all over the world, to legalize it’s use. Frankly, I do not think that legalizing marijuana is a responsible thing for governments to do. Look at cigarettes. It might sound crazy now, but back in the 1930s, doctors actually recommended smoking ‘to remain fresh and alert’.

——————-

——————————-

———————————

———————————

The pendulum has swung. Today, cigarette ads are banned outright, everywhere across the world. In Quebec, stores are banned from even displaying cigarette packets on shelves. They now have a kind of hinged flap behind the counter that, when down, hides the packs from the eyes of a customer standing at the counter. The aim is to keep minors from seeing the cigarette packs and wanting to smoke. Seems a bit stupid if you ask me but any effort to reduce smoking is welcome. Look what banning cigarette ads, prohibiting smoking at public places and constant anti-smoking campaigning has done – cigarette smoking in North America has fallen from 45% among adults in 1950 to 19% in 2010. I am one of the 19%. I left smoking a decade back. Yay.

—————————-

Then there was hooch.

Back in the 1970s, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu where my engineering school was situated, was under prohibition. Regular liquor brands were available on the black market but penniless college kids like me couldn’t afford them. And as 1920s America showed us, the moment the prohibition began in 1972, our own Al Capones, Joseph Kennedys and Dutch Schulzes came out of the woodwork with their bootleg liquor – Arak, an often lethal concoction.

Just outside the Velacherry gates of our college campus was a sprawling slum that had a hooch den. It was a ten by ten wooden platform in the center of a clearing in the palm trees. In one corner of the platform sat a massive, menacing lady with huge jugs, a dirt-caked drum of hooch by her side. For the villagers she had a look that said ‘you get outa line by even a micro-inch and you’ll get your butt kicked outa here’. She plunged the glass inside the drum with her grubby hand and handed the customer the spilling and sploshing drink.

Everybody called the woman Amma (‘mother’, in Tamil). She operated the den under a single light bulb that was connected by a long wire which traveled overhead supported by branches and palm fronds to a nearby hut that had electricity. The lamp threw long eerie shadows.  Scrawny, inebriated day laborers staggered up to the woman with their hands clasped together in supplication, imploring her for one last slug for the road, signaling that they had run out of cash. For her financial well-being, Amma was mandated to keeping them hooked but she decided who could have one more and who could not.

————————-

Students like us were given the red carpet treatment by Amma. Somehow she felt legitimized and honored by our presence (the way Kim Jong Un must feel when he gets to meet world leaders). Rickety steel chairs were hastily arranged for us and we were served the Arak in glasses that had been equally hastily washed in a nearby stream which didn’t exactly originate from a Swiss mountain spring. Twenty pairs of drunken eyes then watched us spellbound as we downed the stuff. The taste was terrible and if one of us made a face like a grimace, there was raucous laughter all around.

The liquor was colorless and if you looked closely, you could find stuff floating in it, some of the stuff multi-legged, able to propel themselves on their own. If you were desperate to get high as we sometimes were, then you closed your eyes, took a deep breath and downed it in one shot. Quite honestly, I am lucky to be alive and disease-free.

——————————-

But in all this, there never was any of the really hard stuff like crack or heroin going around in our college dorms, at least not in my time there. Thank the Lord or I would have tried that too and who knows, I might have gotten hooked.

Eventually after five short years of merriment and bliss, I graduated with a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with honors. I recognized that I had to earn a living and so I left all the stuff we got high on, behind. Thereafter I touched only beer occasionally. No, make that every weekend, until June 2013, at which point I stopped even the beer. I am now a teetoatlah. Yay.

——————————-

Sometimes I think back on my college days and wonder what made me pull back from the brink of addiction while so many of my classmates succumbed. I recall with sadness a dear hostel-mate, a promising undergrad, who plunged to his death when he climbed out onto a 3rd floor window ledge of our dorm completely stoned, lost his footing and fell out head-first.

But I Didn’t end up splattered on the concrete. I think my holding it together had much to do with the company I kept at college, the circle of friends who coalesced around me and matured with me through engineering school. Like me, they experimented and got high but knew when was enough.

I don’t know if the Virginia Slims girl managed to get there, but I’ve come a long way, baby.

“Business is by nature collusive and conspiratorial, readily congealing into monopolies and cabals and it is a good thing, a must for Britain’s prosperity. We must fix the highest gain that can be squeezed out of the natives.” – Robert Clive (1725-1774), British business executive, army Major General, opium trafficker, plunderer and mass murderer.

——————————————–

On a bone chilling evening in January 1601, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth signed a royal charter, granting a joint stock company that had 220 merchants working for it, a trade monopoly in all the regions of the world that lay to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. Thus, the British East India Company (EIC) was born. In the 280 years that it existed, the EIC grew to be the world’s largest and single most unscrupulous business entity that man has ever known.

The Brits had it good, didn’t they? East of the Cape. With a flick of a ink-dipped quill, an ugly overweight woman with bejeweled fingers gifts half the world to just one company to do business with. Look at them now, making feeble attempts to look independent with their Brexits, Megxits and so on and no one takes them seriously anymore. The fall took another 350 years but good riddance anyway. Now I, an Indian, can tell a Brit to go fuck himself, better still, ”fuckxit”. No one will bat an eyelid.

The East India Company began with a simple mandate – commerce. It brought in silks, textiles, spices, coffee, indigo, tea and ivory from India and carpets and nuts from Persia and the rest of the middle-east, in exchange for gold and silver. The EIC leadership was made up primarily of British military officers and therefore it backed up it’s exclusive business with a standing army of 250000 soldiers, artillery and a fleet of ships.

And opium, the EIC dealt in lots and lots of opium. The quantities it trafficked would put the Colombian cartels and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta to shame. The EIC made opium consumption fashionable. You weren’t a member of the 18th century London haute société if you didn’t regularly peruse opium. Where do you think Sherlock Holmes got his daily fixes from?

There was competition of course, though not from other British business entities. There were other jackals at the kill – the Dutch East India Company, the French East India Company and the Portuguese East India Company. And they had been there before the EIC. India had many suitors but the Brits won out, through sheer military muscle.

To make all that trade happen smoothly and profitably, the logistics had to be worked out. The EIC first set up an office at a coastal village with a natural harbor in south India, called Machlipatnam. From there, through the 17th century, it spread and established fortified trading posts at Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

—————————————-

The logistics of the day weren’t like the way they are now. A business trip to and from India by a boss from the East India Company’s HQ in London was more like how we see inter-planetary space travel today – long and hazardous. Each trip to India was a two-year expedition, with four to six fully armed ships, mounted at considerable expense and fraught with immense risk. The waters were uncharted since the maps were rudimentary, the weather patterns were unfamiliar, tempests and 50 foot waves were frequent and as if that was not enough, pirates prowled the seas for easy pickings and they took no prisoners.

Given all the hazards, the chances that you would be back, sipping sherry with your mistress in a London salon at the end of it were 20-80.

If you wrote a letter to your branch rep in Kolkata, you would be lucky if his response came within the year. Under these circumstances, the EIC branch heads or ‘Governors’ were given an enormous amount of independence in how to conduct their business. And what happens when you have an employee at the other side of the world doing business any which way he likes? He throws the rules to the winds, kicks native butt and enriches himself of course.

Take it easy, don’t begin envying the Company men. Life was hard. Enriching oneself in the face of attacks from the French or the Portuguese, who were the other hyenas at the kill, or even the armies of the native rulers, or killer diseases like typhoid, flu, TB and malaria, the life of an EIC rep was not for the faint-hearted.

The EIC’s trading post chieftains were merchants and military commanders rolled in one. They had in their payroll, large armies that protected what they saw as their turf. If a regional raja or nawab didn’t negotiate business with them reasonably, he was looking at being invaded and ousted.

The Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, was one of those unfortunate nawabs who paid with his life for his obstinacy, in the Battle of Plassey (c.1757). Those days, the British were still just traders looking for a secure base from which to conduct their business with Indian merchants. When they began to look like they were digging in and building a small empire within his territory, the Nawab told them to desist and leave.

Imagine a empire-building testosterone pumped white guys being told by some two-bit brown nabob to get the fuck out. Robert Clive took it personally.

In those days if you spoke up, you had to back up your words with military force. The Nawab and his league of like-minded Bengali military commanders had on their side, 45000 infantry and 20000 cavalry. Artillery had been provided by the French who saw the British as a threat to their own French East India Company, a similar ‘carpet-bagging’ outfit under the then French King Louis XIV. The French held two bases in India, one in Chandannagar, 50kms from Kolkata and the other in Pondicherry, a coastal town south of Chennai.

The EIC’s commander, the robber-baron I mentioned earlier, Colonel Robert Clive, had just 3000 men. The Nawab’s firepower should have been sufficient to beat the crap out of the Brits. But Clive had guile and a cool head. Like any successful military man, he had human intel and he looked for the enemy’s weaknesses. He came to know through a Bengali birdie that the Nawab had a huge stockpile of gold and silver that he had grabbed from his subjects over the years as tax and had not thought to share with his equally rapacious commanders.

Clive sought out those commanders and got them to change sides, after promising them a share of the spoils (which by the way, they didn’t get when the dust settled). The Nawab ran for his life, was caught and executed. What can I say? A Nabob who didn’t share was a dead Nabob, I guess.

Siraj-ud-Daulah has been portrayed by Robert Clive’s biographer as an 18th century Cesare Borgia, a mercurial monster of vice and depravity, given to harsh cruelty toward his subjects. I read somewhere that when he sent for his senior commanders, they trembled, much like the way those New York Mafioso felt when they were summoned for a sit-down, not knowing if they would come out feet first. Even if Bobby Clive’s biographer had been biased, enough is on record to suggest that maybe the Nawab got what was coming to him.

After his victory, Clive installed Mir Jaffar, the commander who had switched sides, as the new Nawab of Bengal and did what his EIC masters in London had emphasized was his Key Perfomance Criterion – loot, a word that actually originated from the Bengali word ‘loot’, which means just that – loot. Clive’s men looted Bengal’s treasury, loaded the gold and silver worth over 5 million 1757 dollars (which is around $ 1 billion today), on to a fleet of more than a hundred barges and sent them downriver to his base at Kolkata.

Clive got to keep 10% – 500000 dollars (~ $100 million today) for himself – finder’s fees, I guess. Palashi was the first step in the creation of the British Empire in India. It is perhaps better understood as the company’s most successful business deal.

500K here, a bag of diamonds there and Robert Clive went on to become one of the world’s richest men. Unfortunately, he broke the golden rule for drug traffickers and it took his life – he got hooked on the very opium that he traded in, to dull the pain that one historian says was caused by gallstones. One night, unable to bear, the constant pain, Clive over-dosed in a drug-riddled moment of frenzy. Poetic justice, innit?

In India, right up until the 1970s, they still had roads named after those British colonials. Thyagraja Marg in the heart of the Indian capital, New Delhi, was till recently Robert Clive Road, while in England the statue that adorns the frontage of the British Foreign office is his. Clive’s partner in crime, Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India, had till the late 1970s numerous streets, buildings and parks named after him all across India. Oh yeah, we Indians have been in boot-lick mode for decades after gaining independence.

There was another act that the East India Company excelled in, just like the Exxons of today who splurge millions on ‘green’ ads. It went to great pains explaining to the public at home how it was delivering the wretched Indian natives from deeply ingrained backwardness, how it was planning to remodel education, how the ‘ignorance and superstition that was inherent in Hinduism’ was being addressed by dedicated Christian missionaries in its payroll. (The world hadn’t yet woken to pedophilic Christian priests but let’s just say that the first missionaries must have had a ball in India and leave it at that).

———————————

As the decades passed and the 19th century dawned and the Mogul Empire waned, the EIC’s mandate expanded, from just commerce to subjugation. The East India Company grabbed more and more territory as its own until all of India was theirs. The new nabobs were now the EIC chieftains like Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, wielding enormous power, not only in India, but in England as well, where they bribed, threatened and cajoled their way into both houses of Parliament.

The EIC now had, not only a trade monopoly, but also the right to tax the Indian citizens, mint its own coins with the company crest and maintain a 250000-strong army. For a while, before the bubble burst, EIC owned not only India but England as well. Profit became everything. It is universally believed that the great Bengal famine of 1770, which claimed the lives of 10 million of Bengal’s poor and the wretched, was brought on by rapacious greed and the lack of governance of the EIC.

Seeing that the harvest was doomed, EIC’s traders started buying up all the grain that they could lay their hands on, driving up the price and making it impossible for the poor Bengali commoners to feed their families. As if that was not enough, the EIC decided to raise taxes so that revenue levels would remain stable.

Those who aspire to rule have a responsibility toward their subjects. EIC was not concerned about any such responsibility toward the native Indians. But what the EIC honchos hadn’t bargain for were the men with a conscience back home (ie: if one can imagine colonizers having consciences). There was Adam Smith (1723-90), Scottish moral philosopher and economist and Edmund Burke (1729-97), an Irish author, orator, philosopher.

And a prick named Lord Thomas Macaulay (1800-59), historian and Whig politician, who loved listening to his own voice. Macaulay had gained infamy for attempting to wipe out the native languages of the colonies and replacing them with English He once remarked that the world was divided into two categories of people – civilized and barbaric. Britain of course was, in his scheme of things, the torchbearers of the former category and the colonies, the latter.

But even an asshole like Macaulay was alarmed enough by the shenanigans at the EIC that he had this to say about it…..“The traders of the East India Company simply wrung out of the natives every drop of blood as speedily as possible, so that they might return home to marry a peer’s daughter, buy some rotten borough in Cornwall and throw balls in St. James’s Square.”

All these “venerables” denounced the East India Company as a bloodstained bunch of thugs, bent upon mercilessly raping a nation of its wealth. Some historians consider the aftermath of the 1770 Bengal famine as the beginning of the end of the East India Company’s presence in India.

Around the same time as the Bengal famine, other events were conspiring to pull the rug from under the EIC’s feet. Its stock price crashed on the London market, in lock-step with a Europe-wide financial meltdown. The EIC’s handling of the Bengal famine came to the notice of the British parliament and did little to bolster investor confidence.

By the turn of the 18th century, the British government had taken away EIC’s monopoly and finally in 1873, the East India Company ceased to exist. India now became a full-fledged colony of the British Empire.

——————————

During its heyday, the East India Company not only established trade through Asia and the Middle East but also effectively became the ruler of territories. It created colonies like Singapore, an island that the EIC purchased from the ruler, the Sultan of Johor, and developed into one of the world’s richest and busiest mercantile hubs.

The East India Company has had quite a few parallels, in the modern age. The American conglomerate United Fruit Company owned every tiny Central American nation, to ensure unimpeded imports of fruits, especially bananas, into North American and European ports. The American mob co-owned Cuba, with the American telephone monopoly International Telephone and Telegraph. The solid gold telephone that the ITT rep presents Batista in Godfather II, really happened.

Some commentators opine that if Stalin’s Soviet Union hadn’t gone overboard with its purges and gulags, American style capitalism would have lost out to socialism and we would not have had to see the Reagans and Thatchers gloating obscenely, mistaking overkill for victory of the forces of good.

————————-

The late comic genius, Robin Williams, put it quite simply in December 2008 when he was performing in front of Britain’s Prince Charles. Referring to the placard that the US President, Harry Truman, had hung up on the wall behind his desk, which read, ‘the buck stops here’, Williams gave it a twist – ‘Yeah right, the buck stops here…for just a wee moment….and then it sorta ambles on, to Boeing and GM.”

Let’s get back to the bananas, shall we?

You might have noticed that bananas on the supermarket shelf are either green or green, turning yellowish. This is because they have to be transported while they are still unripe or green, as otherwise by the time they are on the shelf, they will be overripe and worthless. Most of the wholesale business is therefore carried out with green bananas, otherwise known as greens.

The other two avatars that a banana goes through by the time you sink your teeth into it are first, as a turning (when it is yellowish ) and finally as a ripe. A ripe is what you have inside your fridge, ready to eat but you have to gobble it quickly or else it will turn into a pathetic gooey mass. Not a problem with me since I love bananas. A ripe doesn’t stand a chance in my fridge.

Bananas ripen for all sorts of reasons. Squeeze a green banana too hard and it will turn within days, instead of weeks. Ditto, if it is nicked or dented. And then ripening is contagious. A ripe banana will cause those around it to ripen and soon you have a whole shipload ruined while it is still on the high seas, chugging along west of the Azores, still weeks before it can dock at Marseilles.

————————

In the late 1800s, before refrigeration came along, as high as 15% of a shipment ended up as ripes by the time the ships were unloading at the wharf in the US. A ripe is perfectly okay if you intend to eat it within the next couple of days but the distribution system in place those days was a slow one. Freight trains traveled at a crawling pace and loading and unloading was labor intensive, nearly always done by hand, by work details of Chinese or Mexican migrants.

Big banana companies like United Fruit Co. did not like to waste their time with bananas that would be mush by the time they reached the supermarket shelves and so the ripes were discarded right there at the quay, before they were loaded into the railroad boxcars for destinations across the US. It didn’t bother Minor Keith and his gang. The banana business was booming. Americans had fallen in love with this cheap, delicious fruit-flower. He could afford to let go of 15% of his load.

Here is where a penniless but enterprising young man named Sam Zemurray stepped in, to build one of the US’s largest businesses brick by brick, starting by picking up those ripes that had been discarded at the quayside. He believed that, if he could somehow devise a transportation and distribution method that could deliver those ripes right up to the consumer within three to four days, he would have a business. And he set about doing exactly that.

Born Schmuel Zmurri in present-day Moldova, Zemurray initially worked at his uncle’s business at Selma, Alabama, before launching his banana ripes business. Gradually, in time, his customers – those small traders and grocery store owners to whom he sold his ripes, he would come to be known as ‘Sam, the banana man’.

The bananas that did not pass muster were dumped by Minor Keith’s men on the side of the rail yard, where they were further divided into turnings and ripes. At the end of the day, the turnings were sold at a discount to local store owners and peddlers.

The ripes, nobody touched and Sam recognized a product where others saw only trash. He was the son of a poor Russian farmer, for whom food had once been scarce enough to make even a freckled banana seem precious.

After the ship had been unloaded, the trains had carried off the green bananas and the merchants and peddlers had taken away the turnings, Sam bought all the ripes lying around, from the company agent, for $150. He knew that he would have to sell his boxcar load of ripes within three days, maybe five max, or else they would be worthless and he would be ruined. $150 in the early 1900s was a ton of money to lose.

But Zemurray believed he could make it. As far as he was concerned, ripes were considered trash only because Boston Fruit and similar firms thought they were trash. They were not quick enough with their distribution system. Sam’s calculation was based upon an arrogance – I can hustle where others are satisfied with the easy pickings of the trade.

Zemurray’s first cargo consisted of a few thousand bananas. He did not spend all his money but retained a small balance, which he used to rent a railroad boxcar. he had just enough time to get to the main market at Selma.

Those days usually a fruit merchant liked to buy himself a berth in the caboose (a car on a freight train, that has bunk beds for the the crew and one or two passengers, usually attached to the rear of the train). But since he had spent all his cash on the freight charge, Zemurray traveled in the boxcar with his bananas, the door open, his long lanky legs hanging out and the great American prairies rolling by.

As the train chugged west, maddeningly slow, Zemurray sat in the doorway and fretted about his consignment. In the country, the train had the speed of a mule that was on a lazy trot. As it approached the little towns along the way, it slowed to a walking pace and inside town, it stopped completely for hours, waiting for cargo. All the while, Zemurray paced the railroad bed, hands on his hips, muttering.

In a Mississippi railway siding, where the redbrick buildings, cattle feed stores and tin smiths crowded close to the tracks, a brakeman, taking pity on Sam suggested that if he could just get word ahead to the towns along the line, the grocery owners would meet him at the platforms and buy the bananas right off the boxcars.

During the next delay, Zemurray went into a Western Union office and spoke to a telegraph operator. Having no money, Sam offered a deal – if the man radioed every operator ahead, asking them to spread the word to local merchants – dirt cheap bananas coming through for merchants and peddlers – Sam would share a percentage of his sales.

When the Illinois Central arrived in the next town, the customers were waiting. Zemurray talked terms through the boxcar door, a tower of ripes at his back. Ten for eight. Thirteen for ten. He broke off a bunch, handed it over and put the money in his pocket. The whistle blew and the train rolled on. He sold his last bunch of bananas in Selma and went home with $190. In six days, Sam Zemurray had earned $40.

Zemurray had stumbled upon a niche – ripes, overlooked by the big boys in the trade. All the while that the big fruit companies were busy with their railroads and ships to distribute the greens, the world of ripes had been wide open. Zemurray set out again and again, on his boxcar retailing trips, coming back with his pockets full each time. He had $100000 in his bank account by the time he was 21 and his first million just a few years on.

Sam Zemurray went on to become one of America’s richest and most powerful men who, in the 1930s through 50s, owned and lorded over whole Central American and Caribbean nations as he sat at the helm of United Fruit Company, engineering coup-de-tats wherever the local governments failed to do his bidding. In 1953, when the democratically elected government in Guatemala wanted to expropriate and redistribute among the peasants the hundreds of thousands of acres of land that the United Fruit Company had gotten free, Zemurray orchestrated a PR campaign to besmirch the Guatemalan President, Jacobo Arbenz, while the CIA began training right-wing guerrillas to stage a military coup. Arbenz was ultimately replaced by a more pliable leader who reversed the expropriation.

The Sam Zemurray story is an interesting truth that repeats itself so often. It is the story of a destitute who got a bright idea, capitalized on it and got rich and powerful and ultimately, instead of using his financial might to help other destitutes, became a part of the same corrupt system.

————————-

Life Magazine once did an in-depth of Zemurray, in which it wrote – ”Sam, the banana man, the tycoon who once used the railroads as pushcarts.”

It is the most abundant fruit in the world, available all year round at every grocery store regardless of ethnicity. Whether it is a mom and pop operation or it is a large chain store in Beverly Hills, you’ll find it occupying multiple shelves and if you look closely at the UI tags, you will never see a price more than 99¢/lb.

It is also perhaps the most consumer-friendly fruit known to mankind, with no worries about whether it has been washed before you sink your teeth in. Just peel and chomp. It leaves no aftertaste and I guarantee your breath won’t smell from it. You can walk while you chomp and when you are done, just flick the peel into a garbage bin without missing a step.

And don’t worry about sticky juices squirting from it and messing up your fingers or shirt front. It is firm but not hard, sweet but not chocolaty and as you chew, it melts inside your mouth with ease, without sticking to your gums or between your teeth.

It is packed with nourishment. Rich in manganese and potassium, vitamins B and C and dietary fibre, it is the perfect little snack to gobble if you are ravenously hungry but have to watch your weight at the same time. If you have ulcers and cannot remain on an empty stomach for too long, one is enough to keep the gastric juices at bay. And I have never heard of anyone who has an allergy to it.

You can gobble down as many in one sitting as you like. There’s no downside in eating too many of them. Just be sure to gargle afterward, as the little bit of sugar that is in them may cause tooth decay, long term.

Horny middle-aged women too have a unique use for it but I am too straight-laced to tell you about that.

Meet everyone’s favorite snack – the banana, the world’s fourth largest food item after rice, wheat and milk. If you live anywhere on earth, bananas are sure to be a permanent item in your grocery list. Transported raw, they get just ripe enough by the time they are displayed on the grocery shelves.

——————————-

There was a time when the banana was a virtually unknown fruit in the developed west. That is, until an American named Henry Meiggs (1811-77) inadvertently started the banana boom.

Meiggs was one of the early robber barons of American business, an enormously powerful and ruthless individual who stopped at nothing to build a vast empire and lord over it. He was the torch bearer for the Kennedys, the Du Ponts, the Rockefellers and the De Beers.

Born in Catskill, NY, Henry Meiggs made his mark building railroads for Chile and Peru. Endowed with great entrepreneurial talents and a complete lack of scruples, Meiggs battered and bludgeoned his way through entire Latin American governments to make his millions.

In 1860, while Meiggs was in Peru, he was approached by President Tomás Guardia of Costa Rica, who wanted a railroad built to connect the Caribbean Sea port of Limón to the national capital, San José. Here is where the great banana story began.

At that time, Costa Rica’s economy was based mainly on coffee exports. Coffee was grown in the central plains around the capital city of San José and transported by mules to the nearest port at Puntarenas on the Pacific coast. Due to the ruggedness of the terrain to the east, the mules could not go the other way, to Limón on the Caribbean coast, from where the lucrative European market would have been easily accessible, across the Atlantic.

There was no Panama Canal in those days and so the coffee would travel by ship eastward from Puntarenas. Creating a railroad to carry the coffee east, direct to Limón on the Atlantic seaboard and thereby gaining easy access to Europe’s coffee drinkers became top priority.

Meiggs took the mega-contract but before he could begin building the railroad however, he died. Eventually, 14 years after his death, the construction was restarted by one of his nephews, Minor Cooper Keith, 14 years after his death.

Minor Keith eclipsed his illustrious uncle in ruthlessness and ambition. He saw opportunities that his uncle hadn’t. He and his partners got the Costa Rican government to donate free of cost 800,000 acres of prime land along the railroad he had built and he promptly turned the land into an enormous banana plantation. The new venture was called Tropical Trading and Transport Company.

While the passenger load density on the new railroad proved disappointingly low, Keith found that transporting the bananas he grew was enormously profitable. The railroad carried the bananas from his plantations to Limón and from there on to the US and Europe by ships that he and his partners owned and operated.

What is capitalism without mergers? And so it was with Minor Keith’s business. In time he merged his company with an equally gi-normous rival banana grower, Boston Fruit Company and the newly formed behemoth was named United Fruit Company (UFC).

It was a synergy made in heaven – Minor Keith’s railroads and ships and Boston Fruit’s pet Central American dictators and tax-free land that was ideal for banana plantations. At it’s height, 1930s to 50s, United Fruit Company directly controlled and distributed 90% of all bananas grown in Central America, the Caribbean and Northern South America.

In the movie Godfather-II, the rep of ‘General Fruit Company’ is shown at the conference table with the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who was later overthrown by Fidel Castro. It is a thinly disguised reference to United Fruit Company which in it’s heyday, backed up by a garrison of US Marines, behaved like it owned Cuba.

The dictators, whom United Fruit (and the US government) went to bed with, were essentially nothing but powerful thugs inside a backward, desperately poor agrarian region, their main crop – bananas, a tasty novelty that America and Europe were just beginning to relish. These thugs maintained a highly unequal feudal structure that terrorized and subjugated the common folk.

The term Banana Republic was first coined by the writer, O’Henry, in his 1904 novel, “Cabbages and Kings”, to describe a fictitious Caribbean country called Anchuria, his narrative inspired by what he saw during a visit to Honduras. O’Henry meant Banana Republic to be a derisive term used for poor, backward nations that are riddled with corruption and whose despotic rulers were beholden to the United States for their personal survival. Nowadays the term is used more broadly, to refer to any autocratic regime ruled by a demagogue who thinks he is the law. Russia – and in some ways, even Trump’s America – can fall into the category of a banana republic today.

Interestingly, partnerships with the US were invariably unstable. Whenever the tin pots could not deliver the free and safe environment necessary for American companies to operate in, or if suddenly the ruler of the republic started feeling that the Americans weren’t paying him enough, disputes broke out and an invasion force of US Marines came in, to facilitate a coup and install a more pliable tin pot dictator.

Direct American military invasions into sovereign Caribbean and Central American countries were rampant in the first half of the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1945, the US invaded Honduras five times, the Dominican Republic three times, Haiti twice, Nicaragua thrice, Cuba thrice, Panama thrice, Guatemala twice and El Salvador once. This, in spite of the fact that none of these nations had ever meant the US or any of it’s citizens any harm.

Wherever the marines went, CIA black ops agents were not far behind. They followed the GIs, torturing and murdering opponents of the regime they wished to install, training counter-insurgent death squads for those puppet regimes and terrorizing the general population. They were like the scum known as SS Einsatzgruppen who followed the regular Wehrmacht troops into the Soviet Union as a part of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941.

———————————

In order to justify America’s strong-arm tactics in Central America and the Caribbean in front of the world, the US began a PR blitz that made America the civil liberties champion of the world and the Soviet Union the fall guy, even though declassified CIA documents show that it was all spin and that there had never been any commie threat at that point in time (The Cuban Missile Crisis came decades later).

The man chosen to be America’s spin master for the PR barrage was a very able guy whom the Americans proudly tout today as the ‘father of public relations’, a man named Edward Bernays. He achieved unparalleled success in projecting America as a benevolent, pain-filled and saddened nation which had no choice but to invade and save democracy and the rule of law. His successes led PR to ultimately become a regular course taught in American universities. It remains the only stream of study in the world that adds no value to your skill set but only shows you how to get a PhD in creating “alternative facts”.

———————————

By the late 1920s, United Fruit Company was huge, wielding power that would be comparable to the political clout that Google, GM, Microsoft or Goldman Sachs have today. UFC became the de-facto face of the US Government, bribing, threatening, cajoling, coercing and extorting it’s way into the governments of those tiny Central American nations.

Only one man was responsible for making United Fruit Company the largest business entity in America in the 1940s and everybody knew him as “Banana Sam”. I’ll tell you all about him after I have traveled to the fridge for amother beer.

Till then, toodle-oo.

———————————

————————————

When Socrates(470-399BC) was standing trial for capital crimes, he spent time with his groupies musing about what death would be like. He hoped that one of three things would happen – he would be sent to spend eternity with Homer or Pythagoras or Diogenes or any of the other philosophers who had died before him and he would engage in lively gabfests with them (Socrates loved talking).

If he couldn’t get that, Socrates hoped he would fall into a deep, restful, dreamless sleep, the kind of sleep one drifts off to after smoking plantation-fresh, dew-moist Kodaikanal weed. Into a world devoid of anything except kaleidoscopic designs.

And if he were deprived of even sleep, Socrates wished he would be permitted to recline on a plush meadow looking up at the star-filled sky above while a beautiful boy with golden locks stimulated him for eternity. (Socrates was a flaming pederast and pedophile, but then so were most members of the ancient Greek elite).

I like that. Not the pederasty bit, but the fact that Socrates thought simple thoughts about simple pleasures just before he died. He wasn’t concerned about all the BS like heaven and hell and soul.

Not that Socrates didn’t believe in Heaven and Hell and Soul. He did. In fact the concept of an entity called soul which inhabits the human body and leaves it upon death and goes on living for eternity, has been recorded since at least 3200BC during the first Egyptian dynasty.

It’s just that at the point of death Socrates, like most of us, was ‘unencumbered’ by extraneous crappy issues like was he going to heaven or hell and where would his soul be going after he was dead.

Crap generation officially began with the advent of organized religion in the form of Christianity, Jesus and his Holy Ghost dad. It was Christianity which put an official stamp on the mind fuck called “soul”, the part of us that is supposed to live on after death. The mind fuck part being that you’ll not feel soul unless you are already dead.

Hinduism too has a parallel concept of soul – Atma and if you want to know more about the Atma, Hinduism advises you to “find it in yourself” or go ask a “wise master” (a.k.a guru). I am a Hindu and I dare say I have looked and haven’t been able to find Atma in myself so far in my 65 years. About going to a wise guru, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch with one of those phoney monkeys. I have first-hand knowledge of gurus. It was a guru who brainwashed and drove my mother from our home into a convent, when I was 12. He is lucky he is dead because if he had been alive, I would have gone over to India and strangled the son of a bitch with my own bare hands.

——————————————-

The 18th Century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, believed that humans are capable only of posteriori knowledge – ie : knowledge gained empirically, through experimentation and observation. Kant concluded that the soul is a noumenon, something that is beyond human sensory ability or perception, an entity that cannot be proven to exist through experimentation and therefore he believed that proving or denying the existence of soul is a futile exercise. Like debating whether God exists, for instance. God too is a noumenon.

The soul is therefore like the shape shifting alien, married to a unicorn, which lives down in my basement.

Research from interviews with hospice caregivers suggests that the most common last words spoken by dying patients are usually “Mom, are you there?”, “Fido, are you there?” , “Water, please” or simply “Sorry”. The words that are rarely spoken are “God”, “soul”, “pray”, “mercy”, “heaven” and “hell”.

So, why would I give a fuck about my soul if I was taking my last breath? Am I missing something here? Why can’t we keep it simple, like Socrates did?

I know what I am going to be saying just before I die. I have been memorizing it, like Neil Armstrong did for his “small step, giant leap” line. Since I believe soul exists just as much as I believe that the married shape-shifting alien in my basement just fathered a tiny fire-breathing dragon with the unicorn, my dying words are going to be short and simple…..

“Fuck everything.”

————————————————

When he died, in December 2016, Marine combat pilot, war hero, astronaut and US Senator, Col John Glenn had been married 68 years, to his childhood sweetheart, Annie, whom he credited for being the very reason for his success in life.

The story of John and Annie Glenn is the very well spring of inspiration.

John first met Annie when they were neighbors and their moms would put the two five-year olds together in a large basket swing in the backyard and they would spend the afternoons giggling and screaming.

As Annie grew, she was found to have a severe stutter in her speech, so bad that she couldn’t even utter certain words without going into a long stutter. That led her to be shunned and bullied in school – until John took charge of her ‘security’ and she was never bothered again. Glenn remained true to Annie through seven decades and sometime during this very long honeymoon, Annie was able to conquer her stutter through therapy and perseverance.

In 1982, a reporter for The globe asked Glen, who was then considering running for the 1984 US Presidential elections, whether marrying someone with such a severe stutter ever made him reconsider his presidential bid.

“That never really made any difference,” he replied,” we grew up together with her stutter and I knew the person she was and I loved the person she was and that was that.”

John Glenn passed on in December 2016. It is okay to have never ever met a man like John Glenn but still feel a sense of loss – at another little bit of good, chipped away and lost inside the maelstrom of survival. Annie is still alive, now 100. It must be hard living alone. I hope the world for you, Annie.

There must be so many ways to show your love for each other. Little simple ways, like this one I read about the Glenns somewhere…..

John and Annie liked to play a secret game between themselves. Whenever, as a combat pilot in the fifties, Glenn went on a mission, he would turn at the front door of their little cottage at the air base and give Annie a quick peck on the cheek and say with faux curtness,” I’m going down to the corner store for some gum. You want any? Yours is pineapple, isn’t it?”

“No, silly,” Annie would smile,”Jill Travers at middle school liked pineapple. Mine is orange. And don’t be too long. There’s shepherd’s pie for dinner….”

The same conversation played out on a clear blue morning on Feb 20, 1962, when Glenn stood at the door of the astronauts’ bus and she touched the visor of his helmet. Only this time she strained to hold back her tears as she watched him board the Mercury-Atlas rocket that stood steaming a mile away, ready to fly him into the unknown.

Update : Annie Glenn passed away on 19 May, 2020, her death caused by complications from the Covid-19 virus infection. She was 100.

————————————

A Pakistani-Canadian colleague had just returned after a month in Karachi, settling his father’s affairs after his funeral. He was the only offspring and his mother had preceded her husband of 60 years the previous spring. We were at the lunch table at work, when I said to him, “Your father, what kind of a father was he?”

He thought for a moment and said,” I never got to know him actually. He was always busy running his restaurant chain, while my mother brought me up. One thing I do remember though and it was when I was in college. Late evenings, I would be upstairs in my room, books and notes spread around me, trying to cram as much as I could, for a test. When Abbu arrived home, it would be late and my mother would be asleep in bed in their ground-floor bedroom, the first door to the right from the front door.”

Here, my colleague’s eyes got misty as he carried on, “At the sound of the front door opening, I would go over to the landing, in time to see him stoop to remove his shoes and tip-toe over to the bedroom door which was always left ajar so there would be some circulation in the steamy heat. He would stand still and look in and stare at my mother’s still form for a long while and then he would turn to me and ask in a whisper, “Has she eaten?”

———————————

It is hard to put in words the transcendental emotion, the sublime feel of couples who have been married 40,50,60 years. Almost all long-married folks agree that it is tough making marriages work, but that in the end they choose to stay together because of an almost indescribable connection that has been formed over the years by myriads of little things that they feel about each other. It is also the little words they say to each other that matter.

————————————-

—————————————

“Trust Allah, but tie your camel.” – ancient Arab proverb

—————————

When a Bedouin, visiting Prophet Mohammad at Medina, left his camel untethered outside the mosque, the Prophet noticed and asked him why he didn’t tie the animal. The Bedouin replied that he had placed his trust on Allah and therefore it was not necessary to secure the animal.

Mohammad famously replied,” Trust Allah, but tie your camel.”

Interesting quote. It is not an either-or……it’s not either you trust Allah or you tie your camel, which implies that if you tie your camel, you don’t really trust Allah enough. It is more of a diplomatic do-it-anyway statement.

On the face of it, Mohammed’s advice is very empowering. It exhorts us to look at our situation dispassionately and take the necessary steps to address it. But don’t his words actually caution us against relying too heavily on faith? To me they seem like they do.

You and I have a certain level of intelligence, an ability to reason and make sense and we must utilize it. We are responsible for our own destiny. It is our ass on the line. Hard science tells us today in the face of the corona virus that we have to shut down sermons and communions at churches, anjali and bhog ceremonies at temples, namaz at mosques and even restrict the number of people that can gather at funerals.

But organized religion is the only thing that has not issued any upgrades. It still peddles the same old “as you sow, so you reap” crap, which it has been hustling for the last three millennia, during which time history has proved exactly the opposite – that you don’t reap as you sow and that many have reaped without bothering to sow at all.

The world has seen plagues galore, since the beginning of recorded history. If there is one singular fact that we have learnt from them it is that religion has not, cannot and will not save us from them. But that goes against a fundamental tenet in all religions – that there is an all-powerful God (Or Gods) who can make anything happen and stop anything from happening.

Thankfully, the human race has never actually waited for any divine intervention. We have found out the hard way that we are on our own and thanks to our ingenuity, we have survived. The fundamentalist kooks and their dumb believers might say, “but it was God who gave us the ingenuity to develop ways out of every jam. He encouraged us to find our own solutions to our problems”.

So here we have a mind-fuck of a lifetime. Our God is all-powerful, can get anything done, prevent any catastrophe from befalling us………. but he won’t. He’ll let us solve our own problems while he sits up there and just watches. Innocents, believers and little babies who aren’t old enough to develop the means to live a virtuous life, they will all die horrible deaths, painful sores covering their bodies, high fever turning them delirious. But God will just stare back, he’ll do a Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse now”.

That Bedouin at Medina had the right to feel confident he could leave his camel untied. His own religion had taught him that if he had been virtuous, it was okay to leave everything up to God and everything meant literally everything, even a fucking camel on the loose. But then here was God’s sales rep – his prophet, telling the Bedouin, “ummm, nyet, buddy. That’s not a good idea. You had better be safe than sorry. Just tie the bleeping camel up.”

Within the mafia there is an unwritten contract between the Capo and his crew – that if they do strictly as they are told to do, the Capo will have their backs. It is a covenant that is set firmly in stone and the single most important reason why the organized crime gangs like the N’Drangheta remain a deadly force. It is why a made wise guy can put a bullet into anyone’s head in broad daylight and still get away with it. He is invincible as long as he has that covenant.

A man of faith must expect a similar covenant with God, no? Why is it unreasonable for him to believe that if he remains virtuous, God will protect him and his family from misery, prevent robbers from stealing his camel? Is it too much to ask of God to hold up his end of the bargain? Alas, history shows it is. History tells us that when needed most, God has been the “absentee landlord”.

It’s all very simple actually. There never has been any “my virtue for your protection” quid-pro-quo covenant with God. It was our desperation to cling to beliefs.

When the Roman Empire was at the height of it’s power (250AD), an ebola-like plague ravaged it, killing over 5000 a day, causing crippling manpower shortages, severely weakening Rome’s defenses, nearly bringing the empire to it’s knees. It is known as the “Plague of Cyprian”, after the guy who wrote a treatise on it. Over a period of 14 long years, the virus spread all across the Italian peninsula and into the adjacent regions of Gaul, Hispania and Sicilia, ending up killing 27 million. It took the life of even the Emperor at the time, Hostilian.

The Plague of Cyprian had a consequence – Romans believed the plague to be a “lack of performance“ by their existing pagan deities. Hadn’t they prayed to them constantly, offered sacrifices in their honour? And yet..??? It was not long before Romans began to see the hollowness of their pagan beliefs. Waiting in the wings for over two centuries was a new, yet untested alternative – one that preached a single, omnipotent God of all things, who had the power to heal the worst of plagues – Christianity.

The conversion to and rise of Christianity in Rome is commonly credited solely to Constantine the Great, whose reign began in 306AD. The actual fact is that by the time he came to power, fifty years had passed since the Plague of Cyprian. Fifty years of excruciatingly painful recovery from the plague. Fifty years of softening toward Christianity. Constantine merely made it official.

Unfortunately, the Christianity upgrade from paganism remains a “Beta” version till this day. There have been 20 major plagues since the one in Rome and they have killed a billion people so far. Religious adherence could not prevent them.

Christianity has managed to cling on, but there have been hiccups. When the 14th Century “Black Death” killed 100 million in Europe, Christians felt they weren’t getting the bang for their buck and Catholicism splintered, giving way to Protestant Reformism.

Today Christianity stands further divided into scores of different denominations – Lutherans, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Pentacostals, Baptists, Anglicans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Coptics and on and on and on. Oh and the largest, most evil, most corrupt denomination of them all – Catholicism. The christianity practiced today is unrecognizable from the one Jesus Christ envisaged. Just like the Islam of today – the prophet Mohammad would have great difficulty recognizing it.

There is no question that pandemics (and other natural disasters) shake people’s faith in religion. The fastest growing new religion today is actually – No Religion. As secularism grows, the influence of atheism and agnosticism is expanding. Driven by growing apathy and disenchantment, churches all over the western world are going bankrupt. Extreme fundamentalists like Mennonites and Amish and their faith are succumbing to the relentless onslaught of technology and vanishing. In North America, the religiously unaffiliated (atheists and agnostics) now form over 30% of the population, while across the Atlantic, one in two Europeans think religion is senseless and irrelevant. I look at pandemics not so much as the scourge of humanity but much more as nails in the coffin of organized religion.

———————————

Okay, so pandemics affect religious belief, but does religion influence the way we look at pandemics? Are you kidding me? Of course it does.

The concept of a higher power that controls everything began to crystallize around 11000 BC in a little settlement called Jericho, in present day Israel. Since then as more settlements grew, humanity acquired a new travelling companion that has stayed with us ever since – pandemics. Viral infectious diseases have regularly wiped out two-thirds of a population.

With the growth of settlements came self-appointed holy men and belief systems, some of which advocated staying put and just sitting out the scourge, while others said run, head for the open spaces.

And then came Christianity and Jesus’s reputation as a healer. His followers listened rapt as Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbour as yourself. Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his life for others.”

Jesus healed a number of ailments, such as blindness, leprosy, lameness and demonic possession. He didn’t (or maybe couldn’t) heal plagues or any sort of viral infection. It is a known fact that viruses do not survive extreme heat and the Levant being an exceedingly hot and dry region for most of the year, maybe the opportunity simply didn’t arise for Jesus to try his hand at curing viral infections.

Be that as it may, Christianity encouraged tending to the sick and risking death as that was a sure path to heaven. When the 1527 bubonic plague hit, Martin Luther – the father of Protestant Reformism – refused calls to flee the city and stayed back to minister to the sick. Martin Luther articulated the Christian response to pandemics clearly. He proclaimed that “the plague has turned the sick into crucifixes, on which we must be prepared to impale ourselves and die…” As a consequence, his daughter Elizabeth fell victim to the plague.

Christianity’s brother religions, Islam and Judaism however didn’t buy into all that altruism. They simply said,”Hey it’s all God’s will. We can do jack-shit about it. Only God can handle pandemics, so let God take care of the scourge. We should just sit tight, remain faithful and finger our prayer beads.” You don’t see many Jewish or Muslim missionaries running charitable hospitals, do you?

If that Bedouin in Medina had come to me instead of Mohammed, I would have told him, “Tether your camel, Allah is taking a long vacation.”

—————————————-

“Simba, being brave doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble…” – Mufassa (The Lion King)

—————————————————

You must have seen it in the news. For a week in March 2013, it merited page-1 on most digital news sites….“Swiss female tourist, 39, gang-raped by six men in dense Indian forest while her husband was beaten and made to watch…”

Here’s how it went down. The woman and her husband were on a “cycling tour” of India somewhere in the vast province of Madhya Pradesh. Let’s take a deep breath here and pinch ourselves to ensure we are actually reading about someone, a foreigner and a woman, biking through India for fun. There, I just pinched myself and felt it. So, unless I am in a Matrix-like state, this must be happening.

So there they were, the Swiss woman and her husband, all charged up, adrenalin pumping when they decided, why not just turn north and keep cycling for another 250kms and go see the Taj Mahal? Hey, these are just pitiful little illiterate coloured people, what harm can they possibly do to us?

And besides, why the fuck not? Miss Swiss and her hubby liked to be known as adventure tourists, brave folk who liked living on the edge, whose idea of a fun vacation was attempting something potentially life-threatening, in only those places on earth from which they might not make it out alive, places they have never been to before.

As it turned out, it was a decision that they would live to regret.

At the end of the first day, they decided to stop and spend the night near a village that was surrounded by dense forest. Around 9:30 pm a group of men popped out of nowhere and broke into their tent. First, they beat up the husband real good and tied him to a tree. Then the men made him watch while they gang raped the woman repeatedly through the night. When they had had enough, they robbed the couple of everything they had and melted into the night. The couple were lucky to be alive and except for bruises, physically undamaged.

The route the Swiss couple had chosen took them through a region that is acknowledged as one of the ten most lawless places on earth – Chambal, in Central India, an arid and underdeveloped stretch of land as large as Quebec, that is riddled with poverty, corruption and patronage. It has a regional legislature where the line between the law-makers and the law-breakers is so blurred that you’ll think you have cataract when you look at them. The rich landowners rig elections and rule like feudal lords. Geographically, Chambal is as remote as Timbuktoo, in 1700AD.

The lawlessness has bred a certain demographic that is found in abundance at Chambal – dacoits. Bollywood has made movies on them. “Mujhe jeene do(1963), Mera gaon mera desh(1971), Pathar aur payal(1974), Dacait(1987), Bandit Queen(1994), Paan Singh Tomar(2012), Sonchoriya(2019)…. need I list some more? Should I be biking along tra la la la, in joints bandit movies are made about????

Trust me, if Donald Trump wanted to find a true example of a “shit-hole” region, Chambal would be numero uno, no question about it. If you are a tourist, you would have to be an imbecile with an IQ less than 2 to attempt a bike trip without checking out Chambal as a route to cycle through, even if you happen to be male. There are folk over there who would bugger you just as soon. Just to confirm, I cursorily googled Chambal lawlessness before I began writing this post. The first article that popped up was “The curse of Chambal” – The Telegraph, April 07, 2013. There was enough material there to make the hair at the nape of my neck stand up in horror.

If I listed all 195 countries of the world according to “bike-for-fun” security in descending order, India would be very near the bottom of it, rubbing shoulders perhaps with Mali or Chad. The hazards that I am likely to face biking in India are very real. No one has ever heard of separate bike paths. If I am female, specifically female and white, there will be creepy local males stripping me naked with their stares. The exhaust pollution from decades old ramshackle lorries overtaking me will be choking. The potholes are so deep that if my bike and I hit the bottom, a Mexican farmer on the other side might hear the thud and cry out “Hola!!” And there’s of course the free-for-all traffic ethos among both, the educated and the illiterate.

—————————-

Mathematical genius and philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) wrote in his “Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” began by saying…..

“The power of judgement, which is called ‘reason’ or ‘good sense’, is of all things among men, the most equally distributed, for everyone thinks he is so abundantly provided with it, that those who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already have. The diversity is in the way we utilize the reason we possess.”

—————————-

I always thought that the Swiss were really smart folks, not only possessing in abundance René Descartes’s ‘good sense’ and ‘reason’ but utilizing them to their maximum. Stealing millions in cash, gold and art that had been originally confiscated from Jews by the Nazis and left in Swiss bank vaults at the end of the Second World War, that took real smarts. Pioneering the concept of a repository for no-questions-asked ill-gotten gains from around the world, stashed away in numbered accounts, that was brilliant. Switzerland is not a rogue criminal state. It is just a bunch of poor white guys being resourceful.

What takes the Swiss into the realm of pure genius beyond anything that even Descartes could have imagined is the way they project themselves as a pink-cheeked, cute and cuddly nation with it’s picture-perfect hills, it’s Bollywood film song and dance locales, it’s chalets, it’s cheeses, it’s pastries, it’s chocolates and all those other innocent things that we associate with only the Swiss. Man, that requires brains, oh yeah, real brains.

———————————-

I am wondering what Miss Swiss’s next adventure ‘project’ is going to be. Maybe she’ll want to cycle from Pakistan, across the Hindu Kush into Taliban-controlled Kunar in Afghanistan where she’ll strip down, discard her bike and streak across downtown Kunar in the nude. My eyelids promise to remain unbattable in her honour.

Am I being insensitive? Yes I am, but not to the general plight of women who are victimized in spite of trying their best to be safe. I am being heartless toward the stupidity of some thrill-seeking alpha folks.

The gang rape was unfortunate and nothing can justify it, not even stupidity. But it was entirely avoidable and in that, she does not deserve my heart-bleed. After all, wasn’t it the thrill of a lifetime that she had been after? Yes it was. The sensation of getting out there into the great wide unknown and inadvertently having her pussy stretched was an acid trip that she had chosen to have and she got what was coming to her, period.

There are many others like the Swiss woman and her husband – like those inexperienced, untrained accountants, gym instructors, librarians and ex-policemen, all of them trying desperately to prove they are worth something when they doubt it, those who liken themselves to real alpinists and throng the slopes of the Everest in May each year, only to die of either pulmonary edema or from being squashed under crashing seracs or simply disappearing into a crevasse, never to be found again, left behind as permanent frozen monuments to stupidity.

————————

——————————

Okay, that’s enough about dumb Swiss tourists. Let’s go to dumb Hollywood stars.

In 2014, hackers, aware of an iCloud security issue found in the Find My iPhone app used it to access the phones of hundreds of celebrities. A Python script, posted on the net, allowed bad guys to target any iCloud account with a brute force attack – a hacker jargon for a rapid barrage of attempts at endless combinations to guess the password of an iTunes account until the right one is found.

Apple has apparently patched this security issue since then. Now the brute force attack will stop after the fifth unsuccessful login attempt, leaving the owner of the iTunes account unharmed as long as the password isn’t discovered in the first five tries.

As to those celebs, here’s how they reacted when images of their private parts that they had willingly posted and texted were plastered all over the internet  –

———————————-

“It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it.

——————————-

“It’s so beyond me. I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside.”

————————————-

“To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.”

———————————

“This is obviously an outrageous violation of our client’s privacy. We intend to pursue anyone disseminating or duplicating these illegally obtained images to the fullest extent possible.”

———————————

“It has come to our attention that our private moments, that were shared and deleted solely between my husband and myself, have been leaked by some vultures. I can’t help but be reminded that since the dawn of time women and children, specifically women of color, have been victimized…..”

———————————

Sure, my heart bleeds for them. What kind of imbecile would text her nude photos through an internet that is known to leak like a sieve? We now know the kind.

Or are they really being dumb? Maybe they want to be discovered. Celebs thrive on discovery and sensation, no matter how shrill their complaints may be about their privacy being intruded upon. Narcissistic and insecure, they enjoy taking sexy pictures and showing themselves off.

In the entertainment industry, any publicity is good publicity. Celebs repeatedly barter their nudity on hundreds of movie screens in front of total strangers and that does not bother them even a bit since it is art and their looks and their other physical assets are commodities in a lascivious marketplace.

Before all this broke I knew not a single one of these stars, except maybe Jennifer Lawrence who is a middling star at best. Now I’ll remember most of them. They are now guaranteed at least face recognition, if not by name. If I see a movie poster that has one of them, I am not likely to turn away. I am likely to buy the ticket and walk in. They have achieved what they all aspire for. We are the dumb-asses feeling sorry for them.

Non-celebs do the same thing but here lies the difference – they are mostly teenagers who haven’t gotten to know any better. Peer pressure, combined with some kind of brazen and rebellious innocence drives them to show themselves nude online. And if they are not teenagers but older, invariably they bare themselves with a clear intention to titillate. Here are some of their reactions……

———————————————–

“I like the feeling of knowing I’m desired, by strangers even. It’s empowering. When I post naked pictures of myself, I rather enjoy the thought of my boyfriend or fuck-friend jerking off looking at my photos. Ha! The best is when they admit to it”.

———————————————

“Wanna know why I do it? Because it gives me confidence in myself and it makes me feel good and it does not always lead to a difficult situation.”

————————————————

“I don’t know what religion you are, but if you’re Christian you should be willing to share. Asked over and over again, Jesus said that our primary objective was to “love one another”.”

—————————————-

Yeah right. A celeb veers off toward racism and victimization and a non-celeb sees Jesus in all this. If I try hard enough maybe I can connect all this to Higgs Bosons.

Sometimes I am tempted to let it all hang out myself. You know, post nude pics of me on the internet. If I wasn’t 65, with a weatherbeaten richard, I probably would have. No, I’m kidding actually. I’m a bit too straight-laced for that sort of thing.

“Meanwhile, Jennifer, I loved your photos though I don’t go for your kind of baobabs. They resemble pyrus communi (European pears). Melopepo are my favorite fruit. Oops that was Latin again, for melons. I break into Latin when I am turned on. Your nudity hasn’t changed the way I see you and your other celeb pals – as nothing but a bunch of “amentes mulieres”