The Dark Of The Night

Lying awake at two in the morning
Unable to sleep
Even thinking about death
Doesn't do the trick.
Not being afraid
Of the endless dark
Beyond the edge of forever
No longer seems enough.
A universe made of electric charges
Quarks and empty space
Seems a stage that trivialises
The mere spark of a moment
That is this life, these dreams, this face.
Hold out your hand, touch me, do -
At this moment I need a moment with you.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2016

Crottled Greeps

Through the thick green-tinted glass of this tank, the room is dark and wavers as the light shifts, so it’s hard for me to see you; but I can safely assume you can see me.

After all, if you couldn’t see us in the tank, how would you know which of us to pick? The light must be good enough for that, mustn’t it?

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m sorry, but I don’t have a name to give you. That’s because I’m a greep, of course, as you must know, since you’re in this place. After all, doesn’t the sign outside say, in huge flickering words of red and yellow light, HOUSE OF GREEPS? It does.

Oh. I’m sorry – I realise that you’re surprised that I know what the sign says. You’re surprised that I can read. That’s no problem; you don’t have to be embarrassed. Just about everyone makes that mistake. After all, I’m only a greep, and we aren’t supposed to be able to do anything more than crawl around a bit.

I know what you’re thinking when you look at me. You see this dome-shaped ovoid of flexing grey-green shell-plates, the triangular black eyes, the short questing antennae, and your immediate reaction is likely mild disgust. That’s all right too; I don’t mind at all. I can live with that.

I mean, I can live with that until I go to the crottling oven. Yes, I know what the crottling oven is; it’s just opposite this tank. Don’t you know that we can all see it quite well? The glowing red mouth of it has already consumed five of my tank-mates today, and if you choose me, it’ll take me, too.

If you don’t choose me, someone else will, today or at the most, tomorrow. HOUSE OF GREEPS does good business.

What? No, I don’t mind. Not really. After all, millions of greeps are spawned in the farms each year, and only the very best are chosen to stay back and survive to breed. I wasn’t good enough to make that grade, which meant I was only fit for the crottling oven. So there’s no point in my fretting. If you were in my place, I’m sure you’d feel the same way.

No, no, please don’t hesitate to choose me. If you want me, go right ahead. Don’t let my talking to you, telling you my story, put you off in the least.

But, as long as you’re still choosing, let me go on with my tale.

I was, as I said, spawned in a greep farm. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a greep farm, but I assume you haven’t. It’s basically a huge, shallow pool, divided into multiple sections by concrete barriers. Water flows continuously over the top, from one end to the other, bringing in nutrients which feed the algae growing on the bottom of the pool. We greeps, of course, then eat the algae. The sections are of different sizes. The spawning pens are the smallest, because each contains just a pregnant greep, or a new mother with her eggs and young brood. Greep mothers take care of their young, even though they know exactly what’s going to happen to most of them. And they don’t hide the truth from their babies, either.

I think I was one of my mother’s favourites; she was a first time breeder, she told me, and so she still had the foolish sentiment to grow fond of her spawn. At any rate, when night fell and the shallow water of the spawning pen cooled, she’d ask me to snuggle up to her side, and tell me the things she knew. Some of it she’d seen for herself, and some she’d heard from her own mother, and some things she’d picked up elsewhere. She taught me how to read, what your letters said. It isn’t difficult. I think if I had the chance I could make a written language for us greeps that would be at least as easy to use, maybe easier. Oh well.

And while I was with her I learnt some things for myself.

I remember listening to the greep farmer talking, once, to a visiting scientist. They were standing by the side of my spawning pen, and their voices were loud enough to carry through the water and the noise of all my hundreds of spawn-mates busily chewing their algae. This was not a surprise; the farmer was a small man with a voice big enough to make up for his lack of size. I heard him complaining that it was inefficient to let greep mothers remain by their spawn for so long – the mothers should be bred and spawned again as soon as one load of eggs was delivered. The scientist told him she and her colleagues were working on it, and that they were hopeful they’d succeed.

They’ve certainly succeeded in other things. You see what I look like; don’t think I’ve missed your involuntary flinch of disgust when you laid eyes on me first. But, my mother says, we greeps weren’t always like this. Once, we were much smaller, long-legged and slender, and our armour plates were translucent and caught the light like rainbows. My mother said we were almost beautiful.

But slender greeps contain too little flesh to be economically viable to raise, and the thin, translucent armour plates burst open in the crottling ovens. Besides, our long legs made us far too active, and prone to escape from the spawning pens. So we were bred to be heavy and slow-moving, with short claws that can barely drag our bulks along, and thick shells which serve as our own serving-platters. That’s the kind of magic they’ve managed; so why shouldn’t they be able to change motherly behaviour too?

I don’t know if you have faith in yourself, but rest assured, I’ve full faith in you.

Then one day they came to shift us out of the spawning pens to the growing section. My mother had already told me it was going to happen, because she’d seen for herself that we were big enough. And the previous evening, the farmer had come to look us over, to see if any were fit to be kept back for breeding. None were, which isn’t a surprise; as I said, most of us are only good for the crottling oven.

So the next morning the farmer’s workers came with their nets, wading in the breeding pen, while he himself stood on the platform by the side, telling them he wanted faster work and greater productivity. I clung to my mother’s shell, unwilling to be taken away from her, but it was no use. A worker inserted a narrow strip of metal between her and me and pried us apart, dropping us into two different nets. I was taken with the rest of my spawn-mates to the growing pens. And she? I suppose she was taken to the breeding pools, which I’ve never seen and know nothing about. I never asked her about them; I’m sure you understand that it’s awkward and indelicate to demand of your parent details of the procedure by which you were brought into the world. It would have been pointless, since I was never going to get to take part in that anyway.

Of course I never saw her again.

The time in the growing pens passed quickly. It wasn’t a part of my life that gave me anything to talk about. In the growing pens, we’re just exposed to other greeps of our own age, who know nothing more than we do, and the farmer and his men hardly even come by except once every few days to see how we’re doing. There’s nothing to do but eat and rest, so that’s what we all did.

Once we were big enough, we were, of course, shifted to the fattening pens. And there we were no longer allowed to graze on algae as we chose. That’s inefficient and takes too long, and the fattening is uneven. So they put us in water that was so saturated with chopped algae that we had no option but to eat constantly, merely to clear enough space to be able to breathe. It’s really a wonderful example of ingenuity on your species’ part; really, I congratulate you.

Twice each day the farmer would come with his men, and scoop up several of us one by one in his net to weigh on a scale, to check how quickly we were gaining weight. The first time this happened, I was frightened, because the scale’s pan was cold and metallic and the man holding me squeezed rather too hard with his heavy glove. But that was the first time. Later I grew used to it, and we gained weight so fast that we were in the fattening pen for a couple of weeks only.

And so the day came when I was scooped out of the fattening pen by a net, along with nine of my spawn-mates. There was a big blue container beside the pen on which was written, in pale yellow letters, GREEPMASTER FARMS. I just had time to read this before they put us all inside and clamped down the lid. It was so constricted inside that we couldn’t even move around, and could barely breathe. I don’t know how long we were inside, but I thought they intended to suffocate us to death. But of course they weren’t; they were only bringing us here, to THE HOUSE OF GREEPS.

So, have you made your choice? If you want me, don’t hesitate, just point. You see that waiter there? Tell him you want me, and he’ll scoop me out of the tank and take me to the table there by the crottling oven. He’ll turn me over, and with a knife neatly cut away my soft lower plates and my legs, before popping me inside the oven. Five minutes later, and I’ll be on your table, still half alive, but succulent and tasty, a dish fit for a king. 

No, don’t worry, I’m not blaming you in the least. It’s going to happen anyway, so it’s better to be unsentimental about these things.

Oh yes; about that waiter. I’ve heard him talking on the phone today. He’s worried about his sick wife and the money he owes for her treatment, and the fact that he’s hardly making enough to cover his basic living expenses. Please leave him a good tip. He deserves it.

What’s that? You’ve changed your mind? You don’t want to eat any one of us? But you want to take us away, to set us free? Are you crazy? How on earth do you imagine we’ll ever survive in the wild? We’ve lost that ability long ago.

Oh. You want to keep us in a pool in your own garden. You’re going to make a little greep refuge, so we can live out our lives in peace and comfort. And you’re going to campaign to stop greep eating. Really. You mean to do that. Do you imagine you’ll succeed? The whole economy of greep farming, and you’re going to overthrow it all by yourself?

If I could laugh, I would.

What do I think about that, you ask. You’re insane, that’s what I think.

I mean, just imagine what the neighbours will say.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2016

Warming Up To War Crime: India and the Invasion of Iraq

I remember 2003.

I remember the build up to the war crime that was the Iraq invasion very, very well. Back then, I was just starting to use the internet on a regular basis, and was yet to purchase my first computer. It’s hard to believe, but I was virtually computer-illiterate till early 2001; even so, by 2002 it was already more than clear to me that Amerikastan would invade Iraq.

Before I go on, let me say something clearly: unlike the popular fiction these days, I do not imagine that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was the Ultimate Evil committed against that unhappy country. By 2003, after all, Iraq had been under constant and starvation-level sanctions since 1990, and the blood soaked war criminal William Jefferson Clinton had been bombing it virtually round the clock since 1995. Half a million or more Iraqi children had been starved to death by the sanctions by the late 1990s, and yet the Amerikastani war criminal and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright got away with saying that it was an acceptable price to pay to “keep Saddam in his box”.  

This same Albright now endorses the blood soaked war criminal Killary Klingon, which is absolutely no surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

So, no, the Iraq invasion wasn’t something that suddenly happened out of nowhere – the basis was laid very carefully by one blood soaked mass murdering Warmonger in Warshington, and another Warmonger in Warshington took it forward. That the two war criminals belonged to separate criminal gangs “political parties” made no difference; a two party system is always and inevitably one single party with two faces, something any politically aware person should know.

Despite all the mass antiwar protests around the planet, then, no sane person could have any doubt that the Imperialist States of Amerikastan would invade Iraq. By late 2002, the marketing campaign for the invasion was in full swing. This was far from unknown even in the boondocks of the planet like India, and this was something that got a lot of people concerned.

I myself had no illusions that the invasion was anything but coming, and on the two or three occasions per week I managed to get online from an internet cafe – as I said, I didn’t own a computer then – I did my best to oppose it on all the online fora that were open to me. Among the things that I did was write a series of skits lampooning Bush, whom I treated as stupid and evil beyond belief. Some of those pieces actually got published in a local magazine, the Eastern Panorama.

Today, I would apologise to Bush for those pieces. I didn’t then know how much less bad he would turn out to be than his blood soaked mass murdering successor, the child-droning Nazi-funding jihadi-supporting war criminal Barack Hussein Obama. I was naive then. I’m sorry.

But this isn’t about me; it’s about the Indian attitude towards the Amerikastani invasion of Iraq.

I believe I’ve spoken enough in the past about the utter hypocrisy of the Great Indian Muddle Class and its looking out only for its own interests. In 2001, the Great Indian Muddle Class had been mindlessly stupid enough to support Bush’ invasion of Afghanistan. The yellow rag India Today (an exemplar of ultra right wing gutter journalism, if there ever was one) had taken up Amerikastan’s cause as its own. When the 11/9 attacks happened, its cover story had been, I remember well, WAR AGAINST THE WORLD. That was the first time I heard that Amerikastan was the world; I’d yet to meet Amerikastanis online and discover that this was actually what the majority of them believe. When Bush’s Northern Alliance warlords took Kabul, India Today – and even the rival Outlook, a better magazine – had splashed the same photo across their covers, and declared that liberation was at hand. The caution showed by left wing media outlets like Frontline magazine was treated almost as traitorous. Bush was god.

This was over Afghanistan, which, actually, had some effect on India. Kashmiri and other insurgents – even Hindu ULFA militants from Assam in east India – found training and sanctuary in the badlands of Southern Afghanistan. The arms markets of the Afghan Pakistan border fuelled separatist movements across the Indian subcontinent. So one might excuse these morons for being deluded enough to imagine Bush’s Afghan adventure might have some positive effects on India.

Not one of these things applied to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein was, by most indicators, not a particularly nice man. But he was the best friend India has ever had in the Arab, and indeed in the Muslim, world. He had, over and over again, blocked anti-Indian resolutions in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. On one famous occasion, when India had faced a fuel supply crisis, he’d ordered all Iraqi-owned oil on ships in the Indian Ocean diverted to Indian ports. Indian citizens living and working in Iraq had never faced the slightest discrimination, unlike their treatment in other Arab nations of the region. He was resolutely anti-jihadi, totally opposed to the people who had (allegedly) committed the WAR AGAINST THE WORLD attack of 2001. And this was not something that even the media could ignore.

By end 2002, therefore, there was a lot of disquiet in the country over the coming invasion. Even the media which had been formerly blindly supportive of Amerikastan’s jihad against Afghanistan became somewhat wary, and one finally began reading articles expressing caution about Bush’s future plans. Then something interesting happened.

I can’t prove this, but I am almost certain that money changed hands to “manage” public opinion, for reasons I’ll talk about in just a moment. The source of the money was obvious: the Amerikastani Embassy in Delhi, later to morph into the virtual control centre of Indian foreign policy for the next decade. And it was spent on getting favourable mentions in the media.

Thus it was that Anita Pratap, once an anti-war centre-left columnist, wrote (in Outlook in 2003, just before the invasion) that Bush had done all he could to avert the invasion and the ball was now in Saddam Hussein’s court. (I emailed her repeatedly about this but quite predictably never got a response.)  Writing in Week – another magazine, which I almost never read – one Manjula Padmanabhan, a particularly self-important woman whom I detest, said that the Amerikastani troops going to Kuwait to help invade Iraq were so handsome that they were “obviously on the side of good and morality” and she could only pray for their speedy and successful return. Yellow rags like India Today and The Telegraph of Calcutta (even more right wing than the British Telegraph) started reporting on the build up to the invasion as though it was a sports tournament, with breathless excitement.

The media offensive, of course, wasn’t necessary to sway much of the Great Indian Muddle Class. Some kind of cricket tournament, maybe a so-called World Cup, was about to start. I remember one unnamed Muddler being quoted as saying that he hoped Bush would hold off “starting the show” until the tournament was over, so he could enjoy them both. Some idiot I recall wrote a letter published in The Telegraph saying Saddam Hussein was a “raving bigot” and needed to be overthrown. I wrote a response, which was of course not published.

Then there was a Hindunazi hero, one Pravin Togadia, who was both a surgeon and the leader of a gang of Hindunazi goons. Togadia – who is so toxic that even the current Modi regime will have nothing to do with him – supported the invasion on the grounds that “Muslims would get killed”. When it was pointed out that Iraq had been a friend of India, he said that he would “look into that.” I suppose he is still looking into it, because I’ve not heard him say a word about it since then.

Back then, the government of India was under the Hindunazi Atal Behari Vajpayee. Unlike the current lot in power, though, Vajpayee was no dictator ruling by Führerprinzip; he led a coalition of disparate parties, and by nature was also a genial old codger more given to compromise than confrontation. This is important to remember, because otherwise things would have turned out rather differently.

Fast forward to the immediate aftermath of the invasion, when the Amerikastanis and their Coalition of the Billing had just occupied Iraq. If you recall, the then government of France, under Jacques Chirac, had taken the incredibly intelligent and courageous course of refusing to join the invasion, to the fury of the Amerikastanis. There was some airy talk of “punishing” France, kicking it out of the Security Council, and so on. And right after the invasion, Amerikastan started demanding other countries send troops to help in the occupation. “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists,” as the blood soaked war criminal Bush said.

Wouldn’t you believe it? India Today and The Telegraph at once took up the line, urging India to send troops. The Telegraph kindly suggested that if a “fig leaf’ was necessary, a UN resolution calling for restoring peace in Iraq would do the job, and also that any Indian troops that might be sent would go to Mosul. Mosul was peaceful, and there would be no fighting there at all.

Mosul? Does that word sound familiar? Yes, that’s the same Mosul which is the Iraqi capital of ISIS. The Mosul that even back then was a bone of contention between Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen. That Mosul.

India Today went much further. It was India’s chance to “sit at the high table”, it declared. France would inevitably be thrown out of the Security Council, and India should seize the chance to replace it. Bush, it averred, was going to “make India a superpower”, and only leftist traitors would object. So, it said, “send the troops”.

Now this is what happened. Even as the government officially denied that there was any plan to send troops, as it turned out later, several divisions had actually been earmarked for the purpose and were merely waiting for the go-ahead. The Hindunazi Home Minister at the time, Lal Krishna Advani, actually promised the Amerikastanis that India would send troops, and told them that this did not require ratification by the Indian parliament. Where he got this idea I can’t tell you; maybe, like the Bush regime, he was “creating his own reality”.

I said that the then prime minister, Vajpayee, was someone who preferred consensus. Instead of merely signing off on Advani’s promise, he asked the other political parties for their opinions. The Congress party, then in opposition – as we shall see, it became fanatically pro-Amerikastani when in power – refused to go along. The Left, too, was opposed. And Vajpayee at once scotched the deal. The troops would not be sent.

As it turned out, there was another dimension to it. The idea was somehow that Amerikastan would pay for India to send and maintain the soldiers in Iraq, pay their salaries and so on. Of course this did not happen. And only the utterly deluded could have imagined this was even possible.

One can only guess at what would have happened if India had sent those soldiers. India’s experience of interventions in other people’s wars has been dismal. It occupied northern and eastern Sri Lanka in 1987-89 and lost a brutal guerrilla war there. The troops it sent as “peacekeepers” to various African countries were withdrawn after repeated accusations of sexual abuse and corruption. In Iraq, as the resistance grew increasingly more overt, with bases routinely hit by mortars and patrols by IEDs and snipers, the casualties would have correspondingly grown in number. Especially with the Indian Army’s fairly primitive equipment, which to this day doesn’t even extend to a reliable rifle or Kevlar helmets or body armour, the casualty count would have been fairly horrendous.

And who would have been blamed when these dead and wounded troops came back home? Muslims and leftists, that’s who. One, because their co-religionists were fighting these troops and inflicting those casualties, and never mind that they were only defending their country; the other, because leftists had opposed the sending of the soldiers in the first place, and therefore must be “celebrating” the bloodshed and be to blame.

Muslims and leftists are already hated enough in India without giving the Great Indian Muddle Class even more of an excuse to hate us all.

There was an interesting sidelight to the whole affair, which shows the mindset of the Muddle Class. The Telegraph ran an SMS poll just after the invasion asking whether it was justified. About 84% of the respondents said no. The very next day the same paper ran a poll asking whether India should send troops to help in the occupation.

Some 80% said yes.

In 2004, the Vajpayee regime lost the elections and the Congress took over. By that time, the Iraqi resistance had already grown so strong and increasingly effective, inflicting every more casualties on the occupiers, that nobody could talk any longer about sending soldiers. But the Congress, which overnight changed its policies once in power, at once allowed ex-soldiers to sign up with mercenary outfits and rush off to serve in Iraq. Former military officers even set up recruitment agencies for mercenaries in Delhi. I can only speculate how much money they made, and what happened to those mercs.

Nothing good, I sincerely hope.

The Vajpayee regime had also banned Indian nationals from going to Iraq; the Congress lifted this ban, and Indian lorry drivers and cooks, mechanics and labourers, at once rushed off to serve the Amerikastani occupiers. This finally and inevitably led to a group of them being taken captive by an insurgent outfit called the Order Of The Black Banner. I recall much palaver at the time, in such newspapers as the tabloid The Times Of India, about how “Entebbe-style” raids should be conducted to free them. As far as I recall the government washed its hands of the whole matter, and it was the lorry company owners who ransomed the captives – who then complained that they had spent their savings to get to Iraq and these jobs, and now had lost them both.

At this same time, there was another way by which Indians were going to Iraq. These were Indians who signed up with the official occupation forces for a stint as a war criminal in return for Amerikastani citizenship. I am glad to say that several of them were exterminated by the Iraqi resistance. An Amerikastani general attended the funeral of one of these worthies and made a speech about how he’d gone to “fight for freedom”. An Indian “activist’ called Subhash Chandra Agarwal, who seems to spend all his spare time writing letters to newspapers, at once wrote a letter to the editor calling this general the “army chief” and saying that Indians should start supporting the American occupation since then Americans would buy Indian goods. I responded saying that Agarwal was entitled to his freedom of speech, but not to his own fantasies; and that whether Americans bought Indian goods would depend on their cost and quality, and not on what India did or didn’t do in Iraq. That was a letter that the local paper here published, albeit in heavily edited form; I was effectively blacklisted soon after.

Then there was when Saddam Hussein was captured. The Telegraph ran a full front page article celebrating this; GOT HIM! or something similar was the headline. When he was hanged, the same rag celebrated it with another full front page with noose shaped headlines. By that time it was openly campaigning for English to be replaced by Americanish in India, and for India to dump neutrality for an alliance with Amerikastan. This was of course not on its own volition; it was also a fanatic supporter of the Congress regime, and especially of the rubber stamp “prime minister”, the spectacularly incompetent Manmohan Singh, who rewarded it with special access to him on his trips.

What was Singh like? I’ll just say this: this man, who has never, in his life, even won a municipal level election, hugged George W Bush and assured him that the “people of India love you”. These would be the people of India who had never voted for him in the first place. As a leftist politician snarked, everyone knew that Singh loved Bush, but why did he have to drag the people of India into it?

There was one more attempt to manufacture consent around this time, and this was for weapons sales. Amerikastan was trying to get India to buy its Patriot missiles. I recall reading a story planted in The Times Of India about how good the new Patriots were. In 1990, they had, the paper admitted, failed to intercept many Iraqi SCUDS (actually, they hadn’t successfully intercepted a single one); but in 2003, not a single Iraqi missile had got through successfully!

Well, of course no Iraqi missile had got through successfully; there were none in the first place. If Iraq had had any missiles then Bush’s WMD tales would have been true, wouldn’t they? I did point this out to the paper; they never published my response. What a surprise.

By the time Bush was replaced by Barack Hussein Obama, a certain wariness had entered into Indian attitudes towards Amerikastan. The fantasies about France being kicked out of the Security Council, of Bush making India a superpower, and so on had of course been long since abandoned. The former cheerleaders for sending soldiers to Iraq were trying hard to pretend that had never happened. When Obama attacked Libya in 2011, there was not a single whimper of support, just frantic attempts to get Indian citizens away. And today, as far as possible, Indian news doesn’t mention Iraq at all. Even Indian workers captured by ISIS are now never talked about; it’s as though they vanished into thin air.

It’s almost as though, you know, the country doesn’t exist anymore.

[Image Source]