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It happens only in India: We see "Hands" everywhere

For a change, let me actually try writing a good post. This is in relation to something contemporary to the two day old housefly that has been pestering me in my room until my heart hardened enough to turn on the UV light attracting it into a 340VDC mesh, where it rests in peace. Actually, the post may also be considered contemporary to the two year old dog that keeps befouling my hostel wing, who loves to sleep outside just one particular room in the wing. Also, this is a move towards fulfilling a promise that I had made on the 21st of March this year, when I started the It happens only in India series.

I shall refer to the latest book that I am reading I have been forced to read through my Reading Fiction course, and that is Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. A motif in the book is the pointing finger that Salim Sinai keeps seeing everywhere. Of course, 30 years since that book has been written, the finger has to evolve into something bigger.

And that is the hand. Some people keep seeing hands everywhere, even if they are actually putting their feet in their mouths. They come up on national television (I shall refrain from denigrating news by associating news with the content on Indian TV, look again at the post that I have referred to at the start of this post), and start alleging all sorts of hands in everything that seems to go against them. But is it really just the people who are big enough to appear on national television that suffer from such hallucinations, or is it a problem that every Salim Sinai in the country suffers from?

Should I use a stack or a queue? I definitely cannot use linked lists, they have been patented, but I shall refrain from ranting about the misuse of the laws supposed to be promoting development by protecting intellectual property. That is the subject for a later post. Even as I write this paragraph, I realize that many of my readers would not be familiar enough with computer data structures to understand the extremely nerdy connotations associated with stacks and queues. In plain old English, what I am wondering is do I start my rant with the most recent event first or in a chronological order?

I think I shall stick with the stack, that is I shall relate the most recent event first, then the previous one, and so on. This is because my memory is fresh with the recent events in the papers (I hardly watch certain channels on TV, Gossip channels and Fashion TV are sometimes more informative than the unmentionable channels). The event that irked me enough to write this post is related to the excellent recognition of agencies by their hands. When a certain person decides to protest against a well established system in the form of governance, which involves a lubricant on the quoted word in the title, then we suspect a foreign Hand behind that person but when a certain diplomatic cable sent to a place attributed to the Hand in the previous accusation describing someone as an egomaniac is leaked onto the wild wild web (www), we see the Hand of the domestic opposition! Bravo! We sure have a knack for identifying these Hands. In fact, one popular joke on the facebook world (one of the many that exist in India, the world of the people deemed important enough to run this country is just made up of many Hands and is as removed from reality as possible) claimed that apparently, QIF saw the Hand of the EFF in the flag of the P. No, I am not going to explain rot13. Find a Hand to do it for you.

What I find disturbing about this whole business of finding Hands is that we are so ready to blame others for anything that does not happen our way. A child comes home with an F on his test claims that it is just because the teacher hates him, and the parents, who share the same world as the child, readily agree with the child, and petition for the teacher to be sacked, in a country where one of the worlds finds too few teachers to teach, and the people living in other worlds create an uproar in a certain circular building somewhere around (28.618451N, 77.207429E) when someone living in the former world points out some facts from his world. We see hands lubricated in some muck that is used in industry, but do not see the persons who apply that lubricant. Our own hostel mess probably uses hands too young to work, but easily passes them off as older hands. What hand brings all these hands on deck?

A more serious implication of this activity about looking around for non-existent hands is that sometimes, we draw focus away from the events at hand. This has happened so often in recent history, that I would not dare to recount the occurrences. I am trying to be as obscure about events as possible, while still being specific, and this is definitely not easy when it comes to certain events. Moreover, some of the events which I refer to are definitely painful to remember, like the one in which someone found a hand not of the person who had been caught red-handed by the police, but of a certain group... no, I would be accused of irreverence if I tried to mock such events. I shall be content to conclude my post here.

If you allege that some hands were involved in writing this weblog post, I am duly contrite. I have to employ two hands to type on my Dvorak keyboard.

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