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Here’s your daily routine when you come in for work over here. You go to your locker. Punch in the combination (you know it by heart). Step back immediately, because the door springs open and if you’re around 5ft10in, the latch hook will strike you right between the eyes leaving a painful blister. Of the 7 billion people in the world, there must be a sizeable percentage with that bruise on the knocker by now. It’s our badge of honor.

So you’ve just opened your locker door and stuck your head in. Hazardous act. Your steel-toed shoes for the shop floor reside there, along with cotton socks that haven’t been washed since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s niece forgot to wash hers. 

You flap the locker door this way and that, to let the insides of your locker deodorize. The process is slow since the whole locker room stinks and therefore diffusion from higher to lower concentrations is retarded.

The best thing to do is beat it from there as fast as possible.

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Soon as you emerge from the locker room, you head for Oasis (the cafeteria) for your morning 100% Columbian Moka and muffin. And a chance to take a closer look down the counter girl, Pierrette’s, T-shirt. And that’s one thing I tell all my male friends. If you start your work day with baobabs in your mind, you’ll breeze through and have everyone eating outa yore hands, I swear.

Propulsion Department, aka ‘Jiggle City’, population 45, 88% female, 12% wimpy male. Female boss, Nurse Ratched she be called. Jaws rectangular and chest flat, like Sasketchwan. Imagine, they have a boss whose chest looks like a Canadian province.

Propulsion dept is also known as Gossip City – three out of four words you’ll hear there are ‘whatever’, ‘totally (pronounced ‘toatly’)’ and ‘like’ –  

“And I was like, toatly blown last weekend.” 

“Ooooh! Did he, like, finally make a pass?” Excited ripples in voice.

“Toatly. He like went even further…” Giggles.

“Whatever”. Envious, doesn’t want to show awe. 

Propulsion is a good venue for meditative regeneration of brain cells, aided of course by visual stimulus.

But I digress. 

After Pierrette, you walk briskly into your own department. Strolling in is frowned upon. Long purposeful strides if you are male. Dainty, quick, prim steps if you’re female (jiggles, if you’re equipped to jiggle). High heels going tack tickety tock. Vague, vacant, glassy smiles.

You head for your tiny cubicle.

You click on your pc and laptop and survey your tiny table, coffee in hand. Your family photo was on the left of the WO files. Now it’s on the other side. The stickies you left on the monitor appear rearranged.

You’re certain Mitch McPuck has been there sometime during last night.  

No one has ever actually seen or met Mitch McPuck. But we all know he exists. How he got his name is a mystery. The Irish surname may have come because statistics since the early 1960s show that he lets us be and doesn’t finger anything over the St Patrick’s Day weekend, every year. Other days, we’re all fair game. He steals in at night and snoops through people’s drawers.

Mitch pays special attention to female employees’ drawers, it is rumoured…….

Barbara in Critical Parts, says that the thought of Mitch McPuck going through her drawers turns her on and has greatly improved her sex life at home. She has even started calling her husband Sidney, Mitch, while having sex, she says. Sock it ta me, Mitch! Harder! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Sidney doesn’t give a fuck whom Barbara fantasizes about as long as he is the one fucking her. There, see? That’s the difference between you women and us men.

Stephanie in Experimental has started leaving panties in her top drawer. They’re gone by the next morning, she claims. Oriana at GasGen is positive Mitch McPuck can fly and that he zooms off to his Timbuktoo warehouse every morning to inspect the night’s worldwide panty haul. The story goes that Mitch is making a giant patchwork solar sail out of the panty stash. He is planning to fly to Neptune on it. 

Be that as it may, you settle down, flick on the overhead light and survey the 100 or so emails waiting to be dealt with. There’s the morning contact meeting in a half-hour. You’ve been to zillions till now. They’re nothing but a load of crap. Analyses of last night’s hockey game between the Habs and the Philadelphia Fillies, while 15 pairs of male eyes ogle the stockinged legs and low altitude décolletages around the room. Sighs, yawns, burps and stray farts are punctuation marks as the boss briefs you on all the stuff that’s happening around you. 

After twenty minutes it’s over and you disperse. That’s when the place erupts into action. All hell breaks loose. Phones going off every second. Folks hurrying around, cell phones ringing.

You look at your computer clock. Its 5 minutes to 8am. Got that meditative regeneration thingee coming up.

Venue- Jiggle City. In five minutes. 

The first thing that a guy at my work learns is how to sling a rubber band across the room and hit a designated target. His training is considered complete if he can sling a rubber band right across, from the loading docks to the female employees’ locker room.

Like any large organization, ours is awash with rubber bands. From thick, tight small blue rubber bands to long, thin, stringy beige rubber bands. Rubber bands are used, not only for handling stationery but also for holding together padded envelopes containing small loose engine parts such as screws and washers.

Here’s how you zing. Stretch out your left hand in front of you, index finger pointing out. Hook the rubber band over the thumb, close to its tip and pull it taught.

And then let go. The rubber band will zing away to the target. The velocity and range will depend upon the thickness and circumferential length of the band.

And do remember, zing is a verb, like sing. You can say, “I zang her real good” and I won’t bat an eyelid. The rubber band is the zong.

Zinging zongs is a multi-faceted science. You gotta know projectile motion, parabolic trajectories, integral calculus, do what you have ta do. At work, remember to take a zing break every half hour and zing only those who are likely to zing you back. That way, your rubber band stock level will not be depleted.

Sometimes, rubber bands are slipped into handbags and taken home. Mandy, at warehouse, does that all the time. She steals the tiny thick blue ones and takes them home. She claims that, ever since she started filching that exact size, her husband, Otto, has never had a problem maintaining his erection.

Our in-house Japanese-Canadian, Asahi, has devastating aim and his zingers really bite, so we’ve named him Yammy (after the WW2 Jap C-in-C, Yamamoto). Likewise, László, our resident Hungarian-Canadian is ‘Otto’ (after that Nazi special forces guy, Otto Skorzeny). László can get you right on the earlobes. More than painful, it’s irritating. If you hear a sudden scream “Ouch! László, you m—–f—-n’ SOB!$%*”, it means someone just got his earlobes zung.

Of course ‘zung’ is a word. It’s the past participle, silly.

Sometimes, skirmishes break out during the lunch break. Or when the boss is called away to a meeting. We stage our own little OK Corrals. Sudden Son Tays. Merry Mai Lais. And once in a while, a Guadalcanal. Rubber bands zing all around you like zipping hornets. They sting if they strike open skin. Once Francois hit Sandra over at Manutention and soon their men folk came to exact revenge. They met with a barrage and had to do a Dunkirk. And just like the Germans in ’41, we let them leave.

One rubber band has even made it to China and back. Steve was dueling with Gaetan when he sent one zinger way over all the cubicles and right into Tonya Salerno’s open attaché case. She was packing papers for her trip to Harbin and didn’t notice. When she came back after 15 days, Steve dropped by to pick up his rubber band. He produced evidence that it was actually his. She laughed. They talked. He laughed. They dated. They’re expecting their second child anytime now.

To my young, unattached male friends, don’t try zinging any girl over there, just because I said it’s fun, OK? And don’t do it at work either.

Always don’t do the things I do or write about doing.

“The whole world will hear of me.” – Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a Carlos, The Jackal, 1970.

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Homo Homini Lupus

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Muridke, Punjab

Islamic Republic of Pakistan

October 2000

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’’جہاد میں گزارا ہوا ایک دن بھی سو سال کی عبادت سے افضل ہے۔‘‘

“Even one day spent in jihad is better than a hundred years spent in worship.”

The words, spoken in chaste Urdu, were delivered in a flat monotone, devoid of emotion, the voice soft but slightly high-pitched, almost effeminate. The man who spoke them sat cross-legged by the window, on a red and black striped rug that covered the floor, wall to wall.

It was the voice of Lashkar-e-Taiba(LeT) chief, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, a.k.a Abu Hafiz, a.k.a Emir. The LeT is a particularly murderous Government-backed terrorist outfit in Pakistan. The US, the UN, India & Canada have officially designated the LeT as a terrorist organization.

Ailing from the after-effects of six high velocity APS rounds he received while planting an IED years back near Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, he leaned against some large cushions to support his back. From time to time, he grimaced as he twisted his torso to his right to pick up the cup of heavily scented cardamom tea that he drank in gallons throughout the day.

Yes, he had known and fearlessly courted pain. He had exulted in suffering as no one in the Afghan War ever had. To his faithful, he was known as the Emir. The name on his birth certificate – Hafeez Mohammad Saeed.

Well into his 60s, the Emir was short, overweight and entirely humorless. His perceived faith, Islam, did not take kindly to any kind of humor. Laughter, jocularity, amusement or pranks, these were frivolous…….. haram.

“Haram” – In Arabic or Urdu, the word means abominable, unlawful, or sacred restriction. It is also the direct opposite of “halal”, which means permitted or lawful. Islam brands a 1000 times more things condemned as haram, than halal. In predominantly Muslim-inhabited areas of any city, one finds the word ‘halal’ on the fronts of restaurants to assure Muslims that it is safe to eat their food. Likewise, butchers serving those locales display the word on their fronts. But I digress.

His pig eyes barely open in slits, the Emir’s eyelids flickered constantly every few seconds, the way that the eyes of someone trying on contact lenses for the first time, would do. True to the stereotype of an Islamic fanatic, he had a beard, though it was moderate in length and his hair was long and unkempt, most of it hidden under a pakol, a round-topped Pashtun cap that is made of wool and looks like a round bottomed bag when not worn. The wearer usually rolls up the sides nearly to the top, forming a thick band, which then rests on the head like a beret.

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A few feet away from the Emir, a heavyset and heavily bearded man sat on the floor in the shadows, by the door. Everyone here was bearded. If you were clean shaven, there is a chance you could receive a 7.62mm projectile, exiting the barrel of a Kalashnikov at 715 meters per second, right between your eyes, before you could even begin to explain yourself.

The hulk’s eyes were half closed, appearing to be in the midst of grabbing a shut-eye. He was actually wide awake and extremely alert, the fingers of his right hand only inches away from a 9mm Mauser automatic which lay flat on the rug next to him, it’s safety off.

Known as just ‘Suleman’, the mountain of a man was the Luca Brasi to the Emir’s Don Corleone. Like Luca he didn’t say a word, didn’t even nod, but unlike the Godfather heavy, Suleman accompanied the Emir wherever he went, like a shadow, staying with the Emir, from dawn every day, right until he retired for the night.

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Suleman’s loyalty to the Emir was total. It is easy to be ready to give your life for a man to whom you owe it. Two decades prior, a Soviet fragmentation grenade shrapnel had removed a part of his brain that powered long-term memory. But it was the one day that Suleman would never forget…..

It was late 1986 and the writing for the Soviet forces was on the proverbial wall. Morale was low and frequently Soviet infantrymen had to be threatened with execution if they didn’t stand and fight the fanatically committed Mujahedeen. How could you fight a culture that was willing and ready to die? The Soviet economy in shambles, the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, would soon make up his mind to withdraw from an unwinnable war. But that was still months away.

Late one night in November, outside Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan, Suleman was sitting at the wheel of the Toyota Tundra, waiting for the Emir (he was known only as Abu Hafiz then) and six of his Pakistani jihadis, who were putting the finishing touches to the camouflage over an IED on the dirt road that Soviet replenishment convoys frequently took, when entering through Tajikistan. Abu Hafiz was one of the few Pakistanis who were fighting alongside the Ahmed Shah Masood-led Northern Alliance. Masood, the Tajik-born ‘Lion of Panjshir’ had taken to the young Pakistani Mujahid who would one day be known as the Lion of Lahore.

Maybe they were upwind, because they didn’t hear it coming. Suddenly they came under withering fire from a Spetsnaz platoon that had materialized out of nowhere over a knoll just yards away, dropped off by an Mi-24 Hind and the next thing he knew, a fragmentation grenade came crashing through the windshield and skittered around next to his foot.

Suleman dove but unfortunately not far enough. When he came to, he felt himself moving, slung over someone’s shoulders. It was Abu Hafiz and he was staggering under Suleman’s 220lb weight and trying not to lose his footing as he slipped and slid over the rocky terrain. All the others died that night, but not before wiping out the entire Spetsnaz platoon. The Mi-24 had tried to back-track and beat the hell out but that was a mistake it would regret – the sharp turn slowed it down and got blown out of the sky by a CIA-provided infra-red homing Stinger that one of the Mujahid had had ready.

“Leave me here, Abu Hafiz, go while you can. Inshallah, I’ll make my own way back if I can,” said Suleman, his words hoarse with pain, jerky with the bobbing that the Emir’s shoulders did as he ran.

“If I left you here, how would I be any different from those infidel animals, Bhaijan?” panted the Emir.

It was only after they had reached the tiny hamlet of Kamshar, that Abu Hafiz collapsed and let the tribesmen take over and nurse them back to health. No one really can tell how he was able to cover that distance with a 220lb load and six rounds in his back. It was seen as a miracle and Abu Hafiz was elevated to Emir, a status which was considered a hair-breadth short of Prophet.

Since that day, Suleman has made protecting the Emir his mission in life. If you wanted to take the Emir down, there was no question that you would have to kill Suleman first.

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After  9/11 and the consequent paradigm shift in the security environment of the world, Pakistan’s security establishment could no longer openly patronize terrorist organizations.

But prior to that, in October 2000, they could and they did. It was the time when the Lashkar-e-Taiba could still operate openly with impunity. It’s minders, the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, ISI, restrained it from carrying out those operations that might precipitate a full-scale war with India.

Meanwhile, with American funding arranged by a misguided Texas Republican congressman named Charlie Wilson, the ISI had set the Emir and his followers up in a sprawling 1200-acre compound on a picture-perfect countryside just outside Pakistan’s cultural capital, Lahore.

(Charlie Wilson(1933-2010) resides in infamy, hopefully in hell, now known worldwide, thanks largely to the 2007 Tom Hanks film, “Charlie Wilson’s war”).

Back in those days, The Lashkar-e-Taiba had a different, far more deceptive, name – Markaz Daawat Wal Irshad (Center for preaching and guidance). The then Pakistani President, Zia-ul-Haque’s Islamization of Pakistan had laid the groundwork for the channeling of millions of US aid dollars to the Muridke compound which boasted a state-of-the art security system operated by the ISI. It had schools, farms, factories and all sorts of facilities within it.

The Emir’s aim had been to create a Medinat-al-Tayyiba, a pure city that would reflect life inside Prophet Muhammad’s 7th century Medina – an environment where there would be no music, no images, no TV, no movies, nothing – just prayer. The only ‘entertainment’ would be barbaric Islamic warrior songs played over loudspeakers and available in music cassettes. Women would be subservient, human but not entirely human. There would be no divorces and no such thing as a sexual abuse complaints.

One could easily liken the Muridke compound to an accurate image of what hell really looked like.

Inside this ‘utopia’, the Markaz would enforce the Ahl-e-Hadith school of thought, a particularly virulent strain of the Saudi Wahhabism, which believed that there was no such thing as love, peace, democracy, secularism, multi-culturism and universal brotherhood. The only form of existence was in armed struggle, until the following were achieved……

• Mass conversions to Islam
• A gradual ‘purification’ until the whole world was Muslim, with the formation of one state, the State of Islam, with one single religion and one single system of justice and governance, the Sharia.
• During the interim period, when the process of the said purification was ongoing, non-Muslims would have to pay a jizya, a ‘protection tax’.
• There would be no challenges to the establishment of the new Islamic world order and therefore every able-bodied Muslim man and woman would have to undergo compulsory military training. Democracy would seize to exist.

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There was a tiny paradox here that the Emir might have failed to recognize – since only non-Muslims were required to pay the jizya tax, I should think that it would be in the Muslim rulers’ interests to let their non-Muslim subjects remain non-Muslim. The state would no longer be able to collect the jizya tax once they were converted, no?

But hey, to expect Islamic militants to make sense is insanity in itself.

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The Muridke compound still exists and nothing has changed. It is still a nation within a nation. Like Waziristan, the north-western border region of Pakistan, the normal laws of the land do not apply to the Muridke compound. Unlike Waziristan, it is situated in the heart of Pakistan and wholly sponsored by the Pakistani state. It is like a black hole with an event horizon that no one who enters ever leaves.

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That evening, the Emir had a visitor, a white man, an American, who sat a few yards away and it was to him that he had directed those words about a day in jihad being better than a hundred years in worship.

When the visitor sat down, he did attempt but failed to cross his legs, not being used to sitting on the floor. He sat instead, on his butt, his arms folded over his knees and he listened to the old man, rapt.

Yes, even though he was soft-spoken, the Emir commanded total attention when he spoke. Swaying ordinary Pakistanis into putting their faith and their lives into armed struggle and martyrdom, propelling them into a pattern of blind hatred that is incomprehensible to any westerner, required charisma and the Emir had oodles of it. He had demonstrated it in fact, when the American had walked in. He seemed to know everything about him – his marriages, his kids in the US, his drug smuggling escapades, his arrest with the 2kgs of pure heroin at Peshawar, the brief incarceration, the sudden born-again-Muslim awakening and finally, the release by the ISI into the custody and care of the Emir.

The American felt like a child, being told after he had been naughty that it was all right, everything would be fine.

“Islam,” the Emir spoke,” means submission, to the will of Tawhid, the one God and to his sole messenger, Hazrat Muhammad, our Prophet.” His beady, blinking eyes settled on the American. Then, noting the American’s wildly charged-up eagerness, he launched into another diatribe….

“Look at it this way – Even though there are five oceans and as many seas and all have their own currents, there is technically actually one ocean in the world, one body of water. The Pacific may not know that it’s waters might wash up at the shores of the Atlantic. Similarly there is only one religion in the world – Islam. It is just a matter of time before Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jews and all those others, realize this. They don’t know it now but they were all actually born Muslims. We all belong to one faith and one God and we follow one Prophet – Hazrat Muhammad. Our job, yours and mine, is to accelerate that process of Islamization of the world. We have to work toward the day when there will no longer be any infidels, because every human being will then be a brother of the faith.

With that, the beady eyes opened a bit wider and rested upon the American, the gaze reptilian, devoid of emotion. He was expecting some sign of comprehension.

“Point me, Emir,” stuttered the American, his Urdu not as fine as the Emir’s,” Show me the direction you want me on. I am ready.”

“Stay here tonight. Suleman Bhai will show you to your lodgings. Tomorrow, there will be a man, a fauji (military officer), who will explain what needs to be done. Upto now, we have never attempted anything spectacular, like multi-target, multi-operative, large-scale strikes that stretch over days. Having you with the brothers could change that. Inshallah, you will be one of our greatest jihadis, one whose name will be spoken in awe, for years from now. Allah Hafeez, Bhaijaan.”

The American saw the man called Suleman rise and approach the Emir. As he passed by the American, he paused for an instant, to give him a look that said – I am going to watch you every millisecond, asshole.

Suleman stopped by the Emir, stooped and with a gentleness that would come as a shock to anyone who knew what he was capable of, helped the old man rise and followed him through the door, out of sight.

The American too made to rise but the man named Sajid placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “Please, remain seated for a while – a normal security precaution.”

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Ps:

The Muridke compound still stands, untouched till this day though, thankfully, the Emir’s vision – that one day the whole world would emulate the Muridke ‘commune’ – hasn’t yet become reality.

Muridke boasts some very high profile alumni….

Ramzi Yousef – Kuwaiti-born militant responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in Manhattan. Status – apprehended in Islamabad, Pakistan and extradited and incarcerated in the US, serving life without the possibility of parole.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad – Pakistan-born 9/11 mastermind. Status – Extradited and incarcerated in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, no way he will ever see freedom again.

Anwar Al Awlaki – American-born Yemeni bomb-maker and terrorist master mind. Status – vaporized by a Hellfire missile from an American MQ9-Reaper drone in 2011, when his convoy stopped for refreshments while driving through the Yemeni desert.

And now, the American I referred to in this post – David Coleman Headley (aka Daood Sayed Gilani), Pakistan-born son of ex-Pakistani diplomat and white Christian American mother, drug trafficker, FBI informant, 2008 Mumbai terrorist strike planner. Status – incarcerated in the US, scheduled to be released in 2048, when he will be 87-years old.

If David Coleman Headley’s crimes had been against the US instead of India, I am certain he would have fried or at the least, received at life without parole.

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One hopes and prays that some day, there will be an MQ-9 with a Hellfire and the name, “Hafeez Mohammad Saeed” on it. He has flipped the bird for too long.

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“I’ve been here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. I’ve nurtured every sensation man has been inspired to have! I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him! Why? Because I never rejected him, in spite of all his imperfections.

Who, in their right mind could possibly deny that the twentieth century was entirely mine?”

– Al Pacino, as the Satan, in “The Devil’s Advocate”

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In architecture, a frieze is the wide central section of the inner walls of a hall or large chamber, usually a public place, that is decorated in panels, with bas-reliefs or even paintings (frescos). It is situated usually above eye level, way up, just below the cornices.

Friezes were popular with ancient Roman and Greek architects, glorifying the exploits of their rulers and their Gods, the Parthenon Frieze being the most famous and perhaps the most elaborate. Sculpted between 443 and 438BC, it is a high-relief marble sculpture that once adorned the upper part of the Parthenon’s inner walls. About 80% of the Parthenon frieze still survives. Not in Greece – at the British Museum in London.

Yes, if you steal, put your loot on public display in your most prestigious museum (or the crown), charge an entrance fee to anybody who wants to see it and say brazenly to the actual owners, “finders keepers, so fuck you”, then you must be British.

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Another frieze, this one sculpted in 1935, exists around the inner walls of the highest seat of justice in America – The US Supreme Court, the place where all judicial bucks come to rest. The frieze glorifies men who, through history, were known to have formulated laws and advanced the cause of justice as they saw it being relevant in their time.

In case you are a frieze freak, you might like to check out my post on The US Supreme Court frieze

The South Wall Frieze has figures of lawgivers from the ancient world. It includes Menes, Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus, Solon, Draco, Confucius and Octavian. The North Wall Frieze shows lawgivers from the Middle Ages onward. It includes representations of Justinian, Charlemagne, John of England, Louis IX of France, Hugo Grotius, Sir William Blackstone, John Marshall and Napoleon.

The sculptor of the friezes has attempted to remain as secular as possible. The Moses frieze depicts him holding only six through ten of the Ten Commandments, the ones that are usually considered the more secular commandments.

There is another figure on the North Wall, a bearded man cloaked in a flowing robe, his feet encased in the curved sandals worn by men who inhabit the Middle-East even today. In his left hand he holds the Holy Quran, it’s pages open and in his right hand, he has a long curved scimitar which he is holding, not by the haft, but by the upper blunt part of the blade, next to the hilt, the way a seasoned warrior is expected to hold it.

It is the figure of the Prophet Mohammad.

He is seen sandwiched between the Eastern Byzantine Emperor, Justinian, to his left and the Western Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, to his right. The frieze is positioned in the US Supreme Court Chamber depicted above. It is one of the two friezes on the sides that are not clearly visible.

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In 1997, six decades after the frieze panels had been carved, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked for the frieze of the Prophet to be removed from the façade.

While appreciating that Muhammad was included in the court’s pantheon of 18 prominent lawgivers of history, CAIR argued that Islam discourages depictions of the prophet in any artistic form. CAIR also took exception to the fact that Mohammad was shown holding a sword, which they thought reinforced long-held stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant conquerors.

This is notwithstanding the fact that the Prophet was known to have his scimitar by his side at all times, he and the faith he propagated being essentially a warlike culture. The Salafists, Wahabis and the Deobandhis actually believe that there is no such thing as peace and tranquility, forgiveness and mercy. To them, these concepts themselves mean giving in, submitting to something other than Islam – the very name a word which suggests ‘submission, to the one and only God and his Prophet, Mohammad’.

A prominent US-based Islamic Law scholar then stepped up and declared that the sculpture was in fact a great honor bestowed by non-Muslims and should be appreciated. Subsequently, Chief Justice William Rehnquist rejected the request to sandblast Mohammad, saying the artwork “was intended only to recognize him, among many other lawgivers, as an important figure in the history of making of laws. It is not intended as a form of idol worship”.

The court later added a footnote to the image on its tourist brochures, calling it “a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor to honor the Prophet Mohammad”.

After that one 1997 blip, nothing more has been heard from either the CAIR or Muslims worldwide, fanatical or moderate, about Mohammad’s presence on the US Supreme Court frieze.

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(Phew!)

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The dispute shows how opinions of Muslims on images of the prophet can get real petty and monolithic. The view that all representations of Muhammad are banned, not just those deemed blasphemous, obscures a more nuanced past, before the rise of those militant strains of Islam that ultimately influenced a group of desperados into trying to bring down the Jyllands Posten and the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine.

In comparison to the US Supreme Court frieze, I have to admit that the Jyllands Posten lampoons of the Prophet were in poor taste, though that still didn’t justify a fatwa and wholesale murder.

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A few years after the Jyllands Posten controversy, a 26-year old cyber security whiz named Edward Joseph Snowden settled down to work as a contractor for the computer giant, Dell, which managed computer systems that handled highly sensitive data for multiple government agencies in the US.

In March 2012, Dell assigned Snowden to the NSA’s Hawaii office which focuses on the electronic monitoring of China and North Korea. Then, for some reason, just three months before he fled to Hong Kong, he joined the security consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, where his job was to break into the internet and telephone traffic around the world for the NSA.

It was around the time that Snowden was settling himself into life in Hawaii that one evening, he happened to switch on the TV and heard the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, blatantly lying under oath to the US Congress that the NSA was not tapping the phone calls and internet traffic of ordinary Americans illegally, without a warrant.

Snowden claims that that was when something snapped inside him and he decided to reveal everything. In May 2013, he took a leave of absence, telling his supervisors he was returning to the mainland for some medical treatment. Instead, Snowden caught a fight to Hong Kong, where he met with two reporters from the British newspaper, The Guardian.

In all, Snowden revealed the contents of 1.7 million classified documents, 160,000 email and text messages and 11000 classified online accounts, that he had managed to download, while at Hawaii.

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Some of the Snowden cache revealed a new, previously hidden layer in the saga of the 2008 terrorists attacks, carried out on Mumbai by militants from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militant group. It showed that, months before the massacre, the British counterpart of the NSA, the GCHQ (General Communications Headquarters), had managed to hack into the laptop of a guy named Zarrar Shah, who turned out to be the technology chief of the LeT (Lashkar-e-Toiba) and one of the key plotters of the Mumbai attacks.

Soon, the British engineered trojan, that had inserted itself into the Shah’s laptop, spread like wildfire into all the other computers that it communicated with, inside the LAN network that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had set up for the LeT, in an apartment that was situated in a quiet upscale neighborhood of the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Now, every comma and semicolon, every image and video, every communication between the Pakistani establishment, the LeT leadership, the ISI and the Karachi terror cell, was laid bare to the British in real time.

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In the early days of the intelligence coup, the GCHQ learnt that Shah was looking for someone, a man who could pass himself off as a western businessman without raising any suspicion. He would have western citizenship and a passport whose authenticity would be unquestioned, since it would be completely genuine. He would get out there on the ground in Mumbai and conduct extensive reconnaissance of India’s financial capital, for the planning of the logistical aspects of a possible strike.

The scout would try to ascertain which was the best way for a group of militants to enter Mumbai, whether by land through Nepal (a long risk-frought over-land route) or by sea, direct to a deserted beach at Mumbai. The metropolis had a 60km long coastline and there were hundreds of beaches available. He would acquire maps, GPS coordinates – information that could lead even a blind man into Mumbai.

The scout’s main mandate would be to help identify a list of possible targets that would convey the maximum symbolism to the world. He had to record directions, traffic patterns, available transportation, etc, anything that would help the team get from A to B and then to C in a swift, seamless manner, expending as little time as possible.

The scout would also be mandated to figure out the best possible escape route after the mayhem but that was not a priority since the LeT didn’t expect the militants to survive and make it back to Pakistan.

Here is the innate hypocrisy of Islamic terror – The LeT did not believe in suicide terrorism, deeming suicides as anti-Islamic. But dying in a hail of bullets was perfectly acceptable and the LeT mandated it’s killers to ensure they gave their lives away in that manner.

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Meanwhile, unknown to Shah, the LeT had already found such a scout – an American with a Pakistani Muslim father and a white Christian mother. Fortunately for him, he had inherited almost all his mother’s genes and was therefore indistinguishable from other white folks.

That man went by the name of David Coleman Headley, son of Sayed Salem Gilani and Alice Serill Headley. He had chosen to have his mother’s surname.

To Headley’s Pakistani father’s family, he was actually Dawood Sayed Gilani.

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(Watch this space for Part-2)

“In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if other people notice any of your smelly gas.”

This useful bit of advice, for young courtiers in the early 13th century, appears in “The Book of the Civilised Man”, by a Daniel of Beccles. It is the first English guide to manners.

Ian Mortimer, a historian, argues that this and other popular works of advice that began appearing around the same time represent something important: a growing sense of social self-awareness, self-evaluation and self-control.

The ancient Romans were the first to use mirrors made of glass. Mirrors made it possible for men and women to see themselves as others did. It inspired them to be more presentable and in turn, be better prepared for success in their lives.

With the gradual demise of the Roman Empire, aesthetics, etiquette and other finer aspects of day to day living vanished. The hordes from the north, the Huns, didn’t believe in them.

But the barbarism didn’t last too long. Around 1200AD, mirrors were back in vogue all over Europe. One can take this as people once again waking up to their persona.

By 1500, mirrors were cheap, and their impact had spread through society. Europe seemed to be recovering from the Huns.

However, all that most of us see in this era of revival is a time marked by violence, ignorance, superstition and centuries-long pandemics that decimated populations.

Many historians believe that this time in history, from just after the fall of the Roman Empire to around 1500 AD, saw considerable social and economic progress. It laid the foundation of the modern world. Inventions such as gunpowder, the magnetic compass and the printing press, all found their way from China to transform war, navigation and literacy in Europe.

For Europeans, the horizons expanded. In the 11th century Europeans had no idea what lay to the east of Jerusalem or south of the Nile. By 1600 there had been several circumnavigations of the globe.

Law and order was another frontier. Thanks to the arrival of paper from China in the 12th century and the advent of the printing press in the 1430s, document-creation and record-keeping, which are fundamental to administration, surged. Between 1000 and 1600 the number of words written and printed in England went from about 1m a year to around 100bn.

In England, a centralised legal and criminal-justice system evolved rapidly from the 12th century. Violent deaths declined from around 23 per 100,000 in the 1300s to seven per 100,000 in the late 16th century.

In the fields of science and math, the Arabs introduced Europe to Algebra, including linear and quadratic equations. The now common byword “algorithm” was born out of the name “Al-Khwarizmi”, a pioneering Persian math wizard of the early 10th century AD.

Another “horizon” was speed and the sense of urgency that went with it. By 1600 a letter bearing important news could be carried 200 miles in a single day, thanks to people starting to use relays of horses at staging posts. Over the course of the 14th century mechanical clocks were developed, allowing time to be standardised and appointments to be kept.

The period was also marked by growing personal freedom, with the banning of slavery within England by the English church in 1102 and the rapid decline of serfdom after the Black Death of 1348-49, when nearly half the labour force perished. Political power expanded to include a growing land and property-owning yeoman class.

All over Europe, great military leaders ruled even-handedly, gradually bringing order everywhere – William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Justinian-I, Richard-I (the Lionheart), Louis the 14th, Henry-V and Edward-III were some of the pillars on whose shoulders modern Europe was built.

Why then do we insist on calling the period between 800 to 1500AD the “Dark Ages”?

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Ps : The Dark Ages is a Europe-centric thing. There were no such identifiable dark ages or period defined in any other history anywhere else in the world.

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Citations :

– The Reformation – Will Durant

– The Crusades – Zoe Oldenbourg

Amazing how one can bump into interesting people on a park bench. 74-year old Titus Kastner is one such guy I met one Sunday last summer.

Kastner is a first-gen Cretan immigrant from Arkadi, Crete, having received his landed status in 1976. His father had been SS Hauptscharfuhrer Franz Kastner of the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the Death’s Head Unit of the Waffen-SS, a sledge hammer-like division within the SS during WWII, which followed behind the regular Wehrmacht troops and dealt with townsfolk, rounding up Jews, as the German armies marched through conquered lands.

A Kastner from Crete? It’s like a VHP member having a name like Lashkar Kumar Toiba.

If you aren’t too busy, I can explain…..

20yr old Franz Kastner was a member of a Totenkopf SS squad that was parachuted into a field 20kms north of Arkadi, Crete, one winter’s night in 1941. Leaping from the Junkers-52 at 9000ft, Franz and his comrades drifted through the highly humid, still air for a while.

While the others were floating down bunched up together, Franz got carried further north by a sudden freaky gust and landed at a spot roughly 10 miles from the rest of the squad. 10miles on hilly terrain can be a very long distance to cover, especially when it is pitch dark and you’re blundering over jagged rocks and can’t switch your flashlight on.

Staying put till daybreak would invite capture by the partisans, so Franz began picking his way through the rocky valley floor. After 50 yards, his right foot snagged under something, snapping his ankle in two. With a shattered ankle, Franz dragged himself for days, slithering beneath rocky ledges at night for shelter.

He was found under a rocky overhang on the fourth night, delirious with fever from the onset of gangrene, by a 15yr old girl who half carried, half dragged him to the nearby farmhouse where she lived, with her parents and brothers.

Her name was Lorenza and she promptly proceeded to nurse the blue-eyed, flaxen-haired young German back to health.

There is this titbit Titus shared with me that has stayed…..

First, a background. The Totenkopfen were hand-picked men who underwent extensive training, to disable all macros such as emotion, remorse, pity and empathy from their brain cells. This was important for them to be able to function normally and carry on their day-to-day lives, ie: slaughtering Jews during the work day and then going home, playing with the kids, watering the roses. That sort of thing.

The Totenkopfen had to be able to switch from the Satan to the dutiful husband in the course of 24hrs. Evenings, they would do the dishes, help the children with their homework, enjoy a leisurely late evening smoke with kamarads and laugh at some silly joke about how fat the base commanding officer’s wife was. Mornings they would butcher little Jewish children by holding them by their feet, swinging them around over their heads and smashing their little heads against the trunks of trees.

The young Totenkopf, Franz, was probably no different. As she nursed him back to health, Lorenza paid no attention to his mirthless blue eyes and complete lack of any humor.

Cretans have always had this urge to make outsiders feel comfortable, tourism having been the mainstay of their economy before the war. This had been another reason why most Cretans spoke passable English. Titus’s father too knew spoken English, having been trained in it at the Totenkopfverbande. Important, since the invasion of England was in an advanced stage of planning at the time.

One day, when the delirium of gangrene had passed and Lorenza was wiping the sweat from his face, Franz reached out and grasped her wrist. Pulling her close till her lovely hazel eyes were inches away, his blue eyes brimmed over.

“Why?” he asked, his eyes frantically surveying her, for a moment disregarding the pain in his ankle, “Why do you help me? I’ve done nothing good my entire life.”

“Funny,” she replied, “When I look at you I see nothing bad.” She couldn’t see the Totenkopfen in Franz.

Titus’s Dad hid inside that farmhouse till the allied forces took back Crete. Then, when the time came, he gave himself up to a passing British patrol and was incarcerated for 6 months, before they let him go.

Late 1945, as he was making plans to go back to Hamburg, Franz got news that both his parents had been killed in the allied bombing, their house completely destroyed. He stayed back in Crete, and began working in Lorenza’s father’s orchards.

I’d love to tell you that Franz and Lorenza fell in love, married and lived happily ever after and that is what indeed happened, but not right away. It took a few years. And many tumbles in the barn. On Titus’s grandfather’s hay.

One such tumble created Titus.

Since it was a given that they’d eventually marry, Lorenza’s parents and brothers didn’t mind all the barn sex. The Cretans are in fact a very lusty people. Easy to see why. Their women are the loveliest in Europe. Wish I had been born a Cretan. (Maybe the Holy Spirit did give me my wish but his secretary missed the typo …..she typed an ’i’, instead of an ‘a’.)

When they were bored with all the tumbling, Franz taught Lorenza to make franzbrötchen, a pastry that his mother would make on Sundays before the war, and frikadelle, meatballs made from pork, beef and onions, then popular in Hamburg. Lorenza began adding spicy pickled zuchinis to the frikadelle. Franz loved it. As he did, her Apáki, a kind of marinated, spicy BBQed pork, and Tzatziki, a Turkish yoghurt with cucumbers and garlic peppers.

Parachuting and paragliding were a passion for Franz and so it was natural that he opened a club and operated it profitably, for tourists who were in Arkadi to visit the famous orthodox monastry there.

Just a few days shy of Titus’s 11th birthday in 1973, Franz went for a practice jump. His chute didn’t open and he was found just a few feet away from the spot where he’d landed 30yrs prior, as an SS Hauptscharfuhrer.

Franz was laid to rest right beneath the same rocky ledge where Lorenza had first found him.

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The moral of this story is….. Always open a conversation with the person sitting next to you on a park bench.

Collective euphoria (Image courtesy : Dreamdis)

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On the morning of 14 August, 1945, 21-year-old Greta Zimmer, reported for work as a dental assistant on Lexington Ave, New York City.

All morning, Greta had been hearing rumors that the Japanese had surrendered after being hammered by those two atomic bombs. Two months prior, in May, Nazi Germany had surrendered and this meant that World War II was finally over.

When the announcement finally came over the radio, businesses across New York (and in fact all over America and the world) downed their shutters and countless men and women left whatever they were doing and spilled into the streets in giddy, chaotic revelry.

Mass euphoria is a fascinating, spell-binding thing, a cathartic release. It is a moment of intense emotional high, usually brought about events like victory in war, as in this case. People will collectively go overboard by other events too, such as sports competitions, music festivals, religious gatherings or even the toppling of a brutal dictator. Singular events of awesome human achievement, like the moon landing, also bring people out on the streets. 

Mass euphoria can go the other way as well. In Orwell’s 1984 or Hitler’s 1939 Reichstag address, the mass euphoria was not spontaneous joy, but an engineered emotional state, manufactured and weaponized by a totalitarian power. It blinded the revellers to suffering and injustice.

Sigmund Freud called mass euphoria a temporary disconnect or reprieve, from reality, which in this case was the crippling economic depression raging through America at that time.

On that August day it was a sudden release from not only the pent-up anxieties and fears of six years of brutal warfare but also the bottled up anger over the previous two decades of economic meltdown that had come to be known as The Great Depression.

Sigmund Freud called mass euphoria a temporary disconnect or reprieve, from reality, which in this case was the crippling economic depression raging through America at that time.

Greta Zimmer’s joy was sobered by her recent past – she had landed in America as a Jewish refugee who escaped Austria in the nick of time in 1938, leaving her parents behind. As of that euphoric day, she hadn’t heard from them and feared they hadn’t survived.

Nevertheless Greta took off. In a happy daze, she wandered aimlessly west toward Manhattan. At the Times Square, which was – as it is even now – ground zero for spontaneous celebrations, thousands had descended, having left their hotels, offices and apartments, to be in close proximity with each other, some openly crying, while others hugged or shook hands.

At the very moment when Greta Zimmer was wandering into Time Square, 21-year old US Navy Ensign, George Mendosa was inside a cinema with his date, Rita, watching a war movie with Robert Mitchum in it. All of a sudden the show was halted and the lights came on and over the theater’s PA system came the announcement that the war had ended. Those inside the theater, George and Rita included, sprang up and rushed out into the street.

They couldn’t find a bar that wasn’t jam-packed, so the couple decided to simply mingle with the crowds that meandered around Time Square and soak up the historic moment. George had been enjoying the last few days of his shore leave and now he was overjoyed that he may no longer be redeployed in the Pacific.

If you had been a woman on Broadway or Times Square that day, chances were good that you would be scooped up and kissed by random strangers and most likely you wouldn’t mind it even a bit. Still, Greta Zimmer was shocked when she suddenly found herself jostled and then before she could gather her wits, she was grabbed and kissed by a brawny young man in a sailor’s uniform – Navy Ensign, George Mendosa.

Navy Ensign, George Mendosa, kisses nurse, Greta Zimmer, on a euphoric impulse. Greta has her left arm up, perhaps in instinctive defense.

Every man was kissing every woman that day, so George’s date, Rita, wasn’t even a bit ruffled when he scooped Greta up. In fact if you check out the photo closely, that’s Rita, visible over George’s right arm, with a grin on her face. (pic courtesy Life Magazine)

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This photo is a different one, perhaps taken seconds after the previous one. I figure this one was a few moments after because the nurse no longer has her left arm up in defense, resigned perhaps to the sudden assault. The kiss must have been a sloppy one, because Greta’s fist is clenched in cringing, grudging acceptance.

Judging by the reactions of others in the photo, the action has universal approval.

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I am sure the feeling among most women in America that day must have been one of gratitude, like they owed the men in uniform a debt. Letting themselves be grabbed and kissed (aka sexually assaulted) was seen by them as a gesture of that appreciation perhaps.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the two kissers, noted Life Magazine photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, had captured the moment. The photo was published a few weeks later but both, Zimmer and Mendonsa, would go years without knowing about “the photo that ended the Second World War” and of their newfound status as icons. The sailor kissing nurse photo has since spread around the world, as an iconic representation of the power of collective euphoria.

I recall sensing that same euphoric feeling once, in 1983, when India won the Cricket World Cup for the first time. The whole city of Pune – at least a million folks – had gathered around the Lakdi Pul and girls were out dancing with abandon, letting themselves be hugged, squeezed and cuddled openly, by total strangers. Straight-laced as I am, I found all that open rub-a-dub very gross, even though I remember having hormones that were barking like a Doberman pinscher, urging me to grab some of the action.

Later on I walked into a store to buy cigarettes and gestured at the still running commentary and on-pitch interviews on TV, saying to the store keeper – a young Muslim woman in hejab, “Wasn’t that simply awesome?”

“Mubarak ho! Mubarak ho!” she replied and smiled, as her hubby looked indulgently from behind her. The woman, someone who had probably been schooled to not speak with male strangers, was bubbling with the desire for release.  Historic moments seem to break barriers, peel off those layers of social norms that we wrap around ourselves.

I am sure that this dropping of all inhibition would hold true for even doomsday events of biblical proportions. Just suppose an asteroid the size of Greenland was a week away from wiping out all life on earth and any hope that it would pass us by had evaporated. You would be able to walk out into the streets and make love to just about anybody right there and then, wouldn’t you?

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George Mendosa later married Rita and stayed that way until 2012, when George passed on, at 90. Greta meanwhile lived to be 92, passing away in September 2016. Folks who knew both are unanimous that they lived happy and healthy lives.

But here’s a piece of advice to all my male readers – don’t get carried away thinking the moral of the story is – grab and kiss any random woman and she’ll grab and kiss you right back and you’ll live happily ever after. Remember that it works only if there’s just been a World War and your side won or if the world is about to come to an end.

On all other occasions, you’ll end up with a knee in your nuts.

“The things you did that haunt you the most…they were the things that you weren’t ordered to do.”

– Clint Eastwood’s character, Korean War vet Walt Kowalski, in “Gran Torino”

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Before I start, let’s watch this clip from the 1989 Oliver Stone film, ‘Born on the 4th of July’. The movie is a true account, based on the life of paraplegic Vietnam vet, Ron Kovic, skilfully played by Tom Cruise…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhZ3H18ynTA

In the clip, Kovic is being given a hero’s welcome in his hometown after return from a tour of duty in Vietnam. Asked to say a few words, Kovic begins warming to his speech, waxing eloquent about how America is doing the right thing in Vietnam and will surely win the war in the end.

As he gets to the part about his experiences in the war, a baby in the crowd of spectators begins bawling loudly and Kovic’s voice falters. The voices of crying Vietnamese kids blanket his consciousness and he is overwhelmed by the sheer untruth in the rosy picture he just presented. The stark sounds of Nam, the thaka thaka thaka beat of a Huey’s turbo-shaft engine, come back and swamp him. Kovic just sits there on his wheelchair, trying to form the words but can’t.

Ron Kovic’s sudden meltdown from simply hearing a baby cry was a reaction known as ‘intrusive recall’, an anxiety disorder which in those days hadn’t yet been recognized as an injury that needed treatment.

Ron Kovic had what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a psychological scarring that is characterized by anxiety, panic attacks, nightmares and horrific flashbacks, all of these arising from witnessing unspeakable events.

Fighting the scourge of PTSD is the other war on terror.

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Here’s another classic example of PTSD……

“…Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge. Back here I can’t even hold a job parking cars, man! I had all these guys back there, my buddies. Out here there’s nothing, man, no buddies. Where is everybody?

Remember Joey Danforth? He was always talking about Vegas and he was always talking about this big fuckin’ red ’58 Chevy convertible. ‘We are gonna cruise till the tires fall off, man’, he’d say.

Then we were in this bar in Saigon and this kid comes up, this little kid carrying a shoe-shine box. And he says “Shine, please, shine!” I said no. But he kept askin’ and Joey said “Yeah, okay.” And I went to get a couple of beers. The box was wired and the kid opened up the box, fucking blew his body all over the place. And Danforth, he’s layin’ there, screaming. There’s pieces of him all over me and I’m tryin’ to pull him off, you know, my friend, he’s all over me, man! The guy’s fuckin’ insides keep comin’ out and I keep tryin’ ta hold him together! He’s repeatin’ over and over, “I wanna go home, Johnny!” He keeps calling my name! “I wanna go home, Johnny! I wanna drive my Chevy!” And I’m lookin’ at him and I’m thinkin’, “With what? I can’t find your fuckin’ legs!”

— John J Rambo, Green Beret, in the 1982 film ‘First Blood’

The above may be fiction, but it is a very close representation of the senseless mayhem that is war. Combat veterans always say that it is hard to make civilians understand what they have been through. The following account is of a real Vietnam Vet, taken from a 1971 issue of Time Magazine that I chanced upon….

“The noise, the confusion, the suddenness of the shelling, the deadly invisible snipers, the dank heat, the incessant rain, the terror and with it the desire to stay put even though that could cost me my life. The nearest cover is a large rocky outcrop about a hundred meters’ straight sprint from where we are.

There’s pin-drop silence but we know they are there, behind those trees to the left with their heavy machine guns, waiting. I turn to look at the guy closest to me inside the hollow. Its the Captain. The Captain I looked up to on the parade ground is cowering down there, a flesh wound somewhere on his left arm soaking his tunic through.

The Captain is just a kid out of West Point and he has defecated in his pants. I can tell, because in the close quarters of the ditch, the stench of his filth is intense. He is just sittin’ in there, trying to form words but he can’t get them out. I nudge him impatiently and he lets out a hoarse whisper,” I want to see my Mommy. I want my Mommy…”

I remove his army-issue Colt from his holster and put it to his head and order him to pull himself together and issue the command….“

Close your eyes and try to imagine what it must have been like for the GI who wrote this account. You’ll find it hard if you have been a civilian all your life. Most would look at the captain who had simply snapped, with derision.

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Fast forward to now……

340kms northeast of Moscow is a town of 250,000 called Kostroma. In the early morning hours of the 5th November, 2022, a Russian Army soldier named Stanislav Ionkin walked into the packed downtown Poligon Café and set fire to it with a flare gun. In total, 15 died in the blaze which required 50 firefighters and seven hours to put out and still razed the café to the ground.

Ionkin had been wounded near Mariupol, Ukraine and shipped back a week prior. In the first police interview right after the incident, Ionkin seemed disoriented and couldn’t quite put a finger on why he did what he did, except to say…. “I was looking for enemies. No one understands, so I wanted to go somewhere, kill someone”.

Stanislav Ionkin was diagnosed with a different kind of PTSD, one that comes from guilt, known as “Moral Injury”. Usually associated with combat veterans who had been engaged in unprovoked acts of aggression, moral injury is the damage to an individual’s moral conscience and values. Guilt, shame, contempt and rage at the society at large, are common emotions that a person with moral injury deals with.

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I have an American colleague, Stan, whose late father had been a navigator in B-24 Liberators during the Second World War. He flew over forty sorties and bailed out twice over German territory. The first time, it was very close to the Swiss border and he managed to slip across to freedom and find his way back to his squadron in Malta.

His second jump was in December, 1944. His squadron was on a bombing run over Ulm, an industrial town deep inside Germany that had several large lorry manufacturing plants, belonging to the auto major, Deutz. These factories were believed to be churning out armored personnel carriers for the Wehrmacht.

It was December 1944 and Stan’s dad’s squadron had been told that the Luftwaffe had been completely wiped out and therefore the bombers were flying that night without fighter escort. The planes were carrying 2-ton ‘blockbuster’ bombs that were meant to churn up the air and cause turbulence over the city’s boulevards. The blockbusters would be followed by white phosphorus and thermite incendiary bombs that would then set the rushing air on fire, incinerating everything.

A pair of Messerschmitt-109s suddenly appeared out of nowhere and tore into the lumbering B-24s with their 20mm cannons. The plane that Stan’s dad was in took multiple hits. Both right engines and the complete right wing were chewed up and the fuselage and tail section ripped to shreds. They were going down.

As the big plane tipped its nose for the downward spiral, Stan’s father jumped directly over the city. He suffered a cracked ankle as he hit a stretch of ground that was covered with jagged rocks, right next to a street that was paved with asphalt. It was a grotesque sight straight from hell.

The asphalt had melted and was boiling in the heat of the white phosphorus. Flames were licking up from the bubbling black tar. Here and there, people were stuck in the tar. They were on their hands and knees, trying to extricate themselves. They were stark naked, their clothes having been blown off their bodies by the blast of the firestorm.

Stan’s Dad was immediately spotted and captured and he spent the remaining months of the war as a POW inside a nearby prison camp run by hardened SS-Totenkopfen. Tortured and deliberately starved, he lost 60lbs in the six months that he was incarcerated there. By the time he was liberated at the end of the war, he was barely alive.

Despite being brutalized in the prison camp and witnessing horrifying scenes of death and destruction for five long years, the Stan’s dad survived, regained his health, settled down to a solid family life, went on to build a successful business and finally passed on peacefully in his sleep at the ripe old age of 94, last summer. He had never shown any signs whatsoever of post traumatic stress.

Why does one man succumb to PTSD while another is able to shrug off the horror and move on?

Let me take this a bit further. If one were to compare the horrors of the Second World War with the Vietnam War, there is no question that the WWII was far more horrific. Yet, the surviving Allied military personnel of the Second World War appeared to have weathered it more ably, since we never heard of a rush of PTSD cases among WWII veterans.

I posed this to Stan and he said his father and his buddies saw WWII as a “just war”, one that America had entered reluctantly, only because its allies needed it’s support. The American GIs knew who the enemy was. They knew what they were fighting for and they were proud of that noble goal. The war galvanized and united America and when it was over, it paved the road to unprecendented prosperity and power.

In comparison, the Vietnam War was very different. At the height of the Vietrnam War(1967), the US Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara commissioned a top-secret study that would cover the entire history of American involvement in Indochina, right from the end of WWII. Maybe he wanted to record it for posterity.

The resulting 47-volume document, now famous as “The Pentagon Papers” described in vivid detail an infamous 1964 plan to create NSA-doctored radar images that were made to look like North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacking a US Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. The goal was to conjure up the justification to launch military attacks inside North Vietnam, a sovereign nation that had never done the US any harm.

That NSA subterfuge is now infamous as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It started the Vietnam War.

Deceit doesn’t remain under wraps for long and by 1971, The Pentagon Papers was being serialized and published chapter and verse by the New York Times and the Washington Post. (Check out the 2017 Steven Spielberg movie “The Post” which is centered on the Pentagon Papers).

The exposé left Americans feeling cheated. GIs returned home defeated, riddled with guilt, from the realization that they had been directly involved in the killings of thousands of innocent civilians in a sovereign nation half a world away, one they had no business being in.

When they returned home from Vietnam, veterans were universally reviled. Shouts of “Baby killer!!” followed them wherever they went. Homeless shelters turned olive green, with men in tattered uniforms, wracked by additions. The following excerpt of a 1982 Don Hill song encapsulates the agony that the veterans faced. It is the theme song from the Sylvester Stallone movie, “Rambo – First Blood”……

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Iraq took the Vietnam deceit one step further. Not only did the US participate in a subterfuge designed to fool the world about a non-existent threat, but it showed America to be capable of harboring leaders who might otherwise have been prosecuted and even convicted as war criminals, had they been from another nation, if the existing international treaties on war crimes were allowed to be applied.

In terms of the number of diagnosed cases of PTSD, the 2003 Iraq war has even larger numbers which, according to a study, is expected to cost the US exchequer billions to treat over the next two decades.

If weapons of mass destruction had indeed been found in Iraq and if Saddam Hussein was found to be really in bed with Osama Bin Laden, would there have been less PTSD cases among Iraq war veterans, since the 2003 invasion could then be termed a just war?

I don’t know, to be honest.

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“Be the little guy. That way, they don’t see you comin’.”

“Judges, lawyers and congressmen have a license to steal. We don’t need one.”

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to better, but when there is nothing left to steal”

– FBI wiretap transcripts of Don Carlo Gambino, giving sagely advice to a newly ‘made’ rookie mafioso at his initiation ceremony.

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Do you play Scrabble? If you play it with family and friends casually, that’s okay, but if you play competition, it pays to be aware of some two and three letter ‘hook’ words that you never knew existed. These are words that hook the letters in your tray onto a string on the board, sometimes leading to a big score. In a competition, it is those little words that decide if you’ll win or you’ll lose.

(Did you know that ‘ed’ is a word? I bet you didn’t. No, it doesn’t stand for ‘Erectile Dysfunction’. It means ‘specialized’.)

If a human could be likened to a scrabble hook word, then there was once such a man in America, far more powerful than any President. For a while in the 1940s through the 1970s, he ruled America as the head of a vast criminal enterprise larger than America’s largest business enterprises.

If I may draw a parallel, this man managed his affairs in some ways similar to the Roman Emperor, Claudius, quietly, away from the spotlight. Historians say that Claudius was the most consequential of the Julio-Claudian emperors and so was this man. He was from the same part of the world as Claudius, only he was born 1800 years later, in a dirt poor household in Palermo, Sicily. In 1919, unable to get work, he stole away in a freighter to the US, aged 17.

Meet Don Carlo Gambino (1902-1976).

Like Claudius, Gambino too went on to become an emperor in his own right. Only, in his case it was not a country, but a tightly-knit, murderous fraternity. The members of the fraternity didn’t just call him an emperor, but as a sign of respect and fear that he generated, Carlo Gambino was known as the Capo di tutti Capi (boss of all bosses), the most powerful American mobster in history.

And the most respected. Carlo Gambino gained the trust and confidence of his peers and this borne out by the fact that he was one of just a handful of mafia bosses who managed to die a natural death, of old age.

A diminutive man with beedy eyes, a large nose and a mild, pleasant and deferential demeanor, Gambino was anything but imposing in stature. He never made his orders sound like demands. He issued them as requests that were deferential in tone. A compatriot of his, Joe Bonnano, one of the powerful heads of the five New York crime families of the 50s, once called Gambino a ‘squirrel of a man’. Maybe he did have the looks of a squirrel but he was anything but that. In fact Don Carlo Gambino had what he exhorted his men to acquire – the heart of a lion, speed of a cheetah, cunning of a fox and venom of a viper.

To rise through the vicious world of the mafioso right around the time organized crime was coming of age in America and be able to reach the very pinnacle, keeping at bay and earning the respect of the legends of the time – Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Colombo, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky – needed a special kind of nerve and only Don Carlo had it in him.

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Gambino had the rare ability to see two moves ahead and act without hesitation when he saw an advantage. His mantra was……’when you want to get at the other guy, first make him believe you are giving in to what he wants’. When the ambitious Vito Genovese tried to grab territory that belonged to him, Gambino laid a trap for him. He knew that Genovese was heavily involved in drug trafficking, an activity that was still in a nascent stage and frowned upon by the mafia bosses of the day. He also knew that three other bosses – Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano – hated Genovese.

Gambino saw an opportunity. He roped the other three in and put together a lucrative drug deal that was too good for Genovese to pass up. Then Gambino paid a Puerto Rican drug dealer $100,000 to rat on Genovese to the FBI. The dealer was small fry and could not possibly have had access to mafia bosses. Besides, his testimony should have been struck down as hearsay. But the FBI wanted Genovese so bad that they swallowed the Puerto Rican’s account as authentic and managed to win a conviction. Genovese was put away for 20 years, eventually dying of a heart attack while still incarcerated.

In the film “The Godfather”, Michael Corleone says to his lover, Kay Adams, “My father is no different than any other powerful man. He’s like a President or a Senator, any man who feels responsible for others, his friends, his family, his people…” That would aptly describe how Carlo Gambino saw himself. It was a sentiment that played large in his psyche – that he was the savior. The author, Mario Puzo, created Don Vito Corleone, the character of the Godfather, from a melange of real life mobsters but the most striking resemblance is to Carlo Gambino.

While the other New York mafia bosses would lead ostentatious lives – owning palatial mansions, flashy limos and strings of mistresses, Don Carlo was a singularly unpretentious man who was content living in a modest 2-storey brick house in Brooklyn that he shared with his wife of 40 years, the only difference being that the house was at the end of a heavily guarded cul-de-sac with a single entrance and exit, surrounded on all sides by thick reinforced concrete and guarded round the clock by armed patrols with orders to shoot at sight. All the other buildings inside the cul-de-sac were occupied by trusted family members, his underboss and his capos. You would need a battalion of M1A2 Abrams to breach that security.

Find a similarity with “The Godfather”? I bet you do. Don Vito Corleone and Don Carlo Gambino are like mirror images of each other.

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At the height of his reign as Capo di Tutti Capi, Carlo Gambino is said to have amassed a fortune that was worth upwards of $50 billion. His underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, once quoted Gambino exclaiming exultantly,” Well, what do you know, we are bigger than US Steel!” (The line was later used by the character, Hyman Roth, in the Francis Ford Coppola hit The Godfather- Part II).

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Gambino could bear a grudge too, as was evident by the Scialo killing…….

A feared soldier of the Colombo crime family, Dominick Scialo, was once at a restaurant when he spotted Carlo Gambino and began to harass and insult him in front of others. Gambino kept his cool and did not say a word.

Scialo was not touched, not a hair on his head bent. Instead, some time later, he was grabbed as he was entering a Colombo family social club, driven to Brooklyn and gently set down inside an open space that had a flat concrete surface, enclosed by vertical wooden slats that stood upright.

It was the foundation of a high-rise under construction and as Scialo stood there trussed up like a chicken, concrete was poured over him. Gambino is reported to have stood over the guy and watched. Then, while his head was still clear, the gooey concrete now lapping against his chin, Gambino stooped and placed a cigarette between his gasping lips and said,” Here, have a drag. It will calm you down.”

Concrete shrinks as it hardens and sets. A human body placed inside concrete when it is still wet, would be crushed by the contraction caused by the drying, shrinking concrete. After Scialo’s execution, leaving victims untouched and alive inside setting concrete became the disposal mode of choice for the American mob.

(If you are walking by a construction site in Queens and you see the concrete churning on its own, inside the setting molds and you happen to hear wails and moans, like “Glub..glub… help..”, chances are good that the mixer operator is from Sicily.)

In 1969, Gambino became the ‘Chairman of the Board’ of what became known as the National Crime Syndicate or simply “The Commission”. And then in the early morning hours of Oct 15, 1976, he died of cardiac arrest at his home. The excitement of watching the New York Yankees winning the previous evening had gotten to him.

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Don Carlo Gambino lay in state inside a Brooklyn church for two days, so that thousands of ‘the faithful’ could come to pay their respects to the little, soft-spoken man. At the time of his death, the Gambino crime family was raking in $40-50 billion a year.

Don Carlo left his mark even at his own funeral. A number of unmarked cars stood on the opposite curb with FBI agents inside, filming the people going in and out. The FBI agents waited, shivering in the chill of the fresh October rain, unable to even get out to relieve themselves.

That’s when members of the Gambino crime family brought trays of lemonade and sandwiches to them and afterwards invited them in, to use the outhouse toilet at the back of the garden. Don Carlo had always reminded his men that the “FBI are doing their jobs, feeding their families, seeing their kids through school, just as we are…”