Borderline Crazy

As Catalonia prepares for a referendum on whether to break away from Spain and be a separate country, a lot of important questions cloud the mind. Would the new country be a part of EU? Would this benefit the people of the Catalan region or just see a rise in ultra-nationalism with little economic progress? Would big businesses flee the Catalan region if it weren’t part of EU? Would this encourage the Basque separatists or the Andalusian nationalists and lead to a further disintegration of Spain? Would Real Madrid and Barcelona; the only rivals for the Spanish League titles, now start winning their respective national titles for the rest of eternity without each other for competition? And finally, if they do vote for a separate country – could they PLEASE make sure they get their borders right?

One of the toughest, yet most critical parts of being a country is getting your border right. You may have the finest natural resources, rich tourism potential, a highly productive population, great reserves of oil, but if you don’t get that border right all your energy would go into squabbling with that pesky neighbor over a border dispute for the next 50 years or more. You may think that messing up with maps is Apple’s forte, but look around and you’ll see a lot of countries have got it wrong and been involved in bitter border disputes – India, Pakistan, China, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Turkey, Egypt – the list is endless. You may think that if they could put a man on the moon, getting the borders correct should not be an issue, but it is. Sadly, rocket science is overrated – there are so many things far more difficult to do – understanding women, peace in the Middle East, mastering calculus, agreeing on national borders, unarmed combat with a Bengal tiger, building a Large Hadron Collider in your backyard, obeying traffic rules on Indian roads – once again, the list is endless.

But coming back to territorial disputes – as Indians, we may think we’ve seen it all – after all we not only have territorial disputes with Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and Nepal, we also have territorial disputes between various states in the country! The recent ASEAN summit, however, made me realize how little I really knew. I’d thought that India – Pakistan, Iran – Iraq, Israel-Palestine – was about as complex as it got, until I heard of the South China Sea dispute. Here was a region that had 8 different territorial disputes involving 7 different countries – and I had no clue about it! To help you better understand what this means, below is a matrix that I’ve prepared listing the disputes and the countries involved.

So, what is it about the South China Sea region that’s got 7 countries throwing tantrums and refusing to talk to each other like gentlemen? Firstly, it has oil – although the estimates are wonderfully enigmatic over whether it's a huge amount of oil or a fairly small amount. A Chinese estimate puts it at over 200 million barrels of oil, whereas an American one puts it at 28 billion barrels. While both are amounts that are not to be scoffed at, it does make one wonder - isn’t one of them terribly wrong here? Like, terribly, disastrously, insanely and unbelievably wrong? I mean, it’s ok if you say it’s 230 and it turns out to be 250 – but if you say 28 and it turns out to be 200+, or the other way round, you’ve done a very bad job, haven’t you? And these are people who would study this stuff for years to come up with these estimates, and then get it so badly wrong. Someone ought to be fired – imagine, it’s like telling your shareholders you’ve made sales of 200 million at the AGM, only to call a sheepish press conference next week saying that your sales figures were slightly off the mark – that instead of 200, it’s more like…umm…20! It’s understandable if it’s all part of some propaganda – like North Korea telling the press that their economy is so prosperous by lining up 20 fat people to pose for the cameras while the rest of the country is starving, just to show what a good job The Great Undisputed Leader Is Doing Foiling The Evil Imperialist Designs Of Western Capitalism. It was the same when I read about shale gas reserves in India – from an initial estimate of 300-plus trillion cubic feet; it came down to…6 trillion cubic feet! Who made the initial estimate and why did people believe him? Did he just randomly wake up one morning and cook up that number?

But coming back to South China Sea, whether 200 billion or 28, it’s enough to have the countries fighting over it, so at least the consequences were irrelevant. And it isn’t just oil – the area is rich in fishing potential, and we’re talking of 7 countries that absolutely love seafood here. And it’s also a very busy shipping lane, so there’s plenty of money to be made there as well. For those curious about India’s guest appearance – Indian navy vessels sailing in the South China Sea received an “unscheduled escort” by a Chinese Navy vessel for a good 12 hours. I have no clue what that means, but I’m guessing “unscheduled escort” is being used in an extremely euphemistic manner here. I shudder to think what's going to happen if I ever walked up to a girl and offered to "unscheduled escort" her!

So you can imagine the plight of poor, neutral Cambodia when it hosted the ASEAN meet this year. According to Reuters, Cambodia spent all its time “batting away repeated attempts to raise the issue about the disputed waters during the ASEAN Meeting.” It must’ve been worse than any of those family gatherings where an uncle/aunt or two have had a drink too many and the secrets start to spill out. If Cambodia had a thick head of lush, black hair, it would’ve turned listless and grey by the end of the ASEAN Meeting.

“Listen, China – I don’t care! You must learn to share your things, ok? Otherwise no Satay for you!”

“And Vietnam – look at you – you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You promised you’d only fish in your territorial waters!”

“Brunei, you too??? I expected better from you at least – squabbling like a baby over maritime boundaries!”

“Taiwan – I always thought you were the smart, sensible one – that you’d be above all this and keep yourself occupied making all those consumer electronics. What’s gotten into you – 7 border disputes???”

Needless to say, the ASEAN Meeting ended badly – but it just raises the question – if bilateral disputes have been simmering for over half a century – can a seven-way one EVER be resolved?  You may not have that many borders, Catalunya, but make sure you get it right!

It's the Hope that Kills You

For years I’d thought that the Indian cricket team lacked the sort of killer instinct you’d often associate with other teams when they’re on a roll. That they didn’t have the sort of ruthless streak that would see them crush the opposition by 200-odd runs, or chase down a 50-over target in less than 20 overs. You’d often hear about the ruthless Aussies thrashing the English, or the Sri Lankans running rings around the hapless Zimbabweans, or the Pakistanis walloping the Kiwis into submission. But with India, that was never the case – our cricket team would never mop the floor with their opponents as if they were a dirty rag cloth, or make mincemeat out of them in an unparalleled lesson in butchery, or take down their pants, press it neatly and return it to them to show them how it’s done, or steamroller them in a manner reminiscent of someone using earth-moving equipment to paste wallpaper, or pulverize them right down to a sub-atomic level, or…well, you get the drift.

Think about it – if we ever scored 300-plus while batting first in an ODI, did you ever feel safe? Or were you biting your nails in fear that Ajit Agarkar and Ashish Nehra might be generous to the extreme, with a regular and timely supply of leg-side half volleys and a dozen wides down the leg side, and contrive to gift the opponents a victory? I remember a match where we scored some 410-odd runs against Sri Lanka, yet somehow managed to end up winning that match by a mere 5 runs!

It was not that we always snatched defeat from the jaws of defeat or anything. Well, we did that sometimes, but more often than that, we would be in this position where we would appear determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and just when the jaws of defeat were about to close in on us we would get right out and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, although the jaws should ideally have been of victory in the first place anyway. If that sounds a little confusing, let’s go back to the Sri Lanka match where we scored 410 or so. Jaws of victory! But instead of ruthlessly crushing the Sri Lankans, we allowed them to canter to 310/1. Jaws of defeat! That’s when we woke up, fought back and finally won the match by about 5 runs or so. See what I mean?

I always wondered why this was the case? Perhaps it was the lack of a killer instinct – Indians have often been accused of that since the time we started playing sports. Or maybe it was just that we were really good sports – we wanted to give the other team a fair chance – let them make a match of it, so that it felt more like sport rather than, say, someone using a machine gun to kill a mosquito.

After our latest test victory over the English, however, I’m convinced that neither of the above is the case. In fact, the Indian team is actually far more devious, cruel and ruthless than we give them credit for. The answer to this lies in the John Cleese quote “I can take the despair, it’s the hope that kills me.”

Imagine this: you’re an average English cricket supporter that’s resigned yourself to a lifetime of mediocre performances from your national cricket team. Every two years your team lines up to have their asses handed back to them by the Aussies in the Ashes, sub-continental visits lead to predictable debacles as your batsmen cannot handle spin and you stumble from one disappointment to the other – crashing out of world cups, suffering spectacular batting collapses, and so on. And then, all of a sudden it all changes – your team has suddenly started winning, you’ve reclaimed the Ashes and you’re now World No.1, having dethroned the Indians from their perch by thrashing them 4-0 and foiling the BCCI’s dastardly plot of world domination. Suddenly, there’s hope – the India tour may not be so bad this time, you think your team has a chance. You’re no longer sullenly watching the match expecting India to score 500 and then bundle your team out for under 200. But wait – that’s precisely what happens. So you give it up – yeah, your team had a good run, but maybe this is a frontier too far to breach. So you get comfortably numb as you watch your team being gently taken apart by the Indian spinners. You know there’s no chance in hell of saving the test, you know that everything’s already assumed the shape of a pear, but you still watch it out of sheer loyalty, even though it’ll probably test your capacity to inflict self-harm.

But…hang on, what’s happening here? The Indians have suddenly stopped taking wickets after enforcing the follow-on, your batsmen seem comfortable at the crease and you still have 5 wickets in hand going into the final day? Could this really be? Your start dreaming, recollecting past instances of dogged rearguard actions and thinking that this might just be another addition to that collection of fond cricket memories. You start hoping…only to see your team bundled out by lunch the next day as the Indians canter to victory. Isn’t this whole roller coaster far tougher to deal with than a match where a crushing defeat seemed a foregone conclusion from Day 1?

And this is what the Indians have specialized in; against all teams – they would never win in a straightforward manner – it’s always about dangling that little carrot called hope before cruelly yanking it away. It was all part of a great, evil master plan, a plan that’s so much more soul-destroying and spirit crushing than a hammering where you never stood a chance. 

Of course, if you’d prefer your aggression to be more upfront, ruthless and carried with a touch of arrogance, there’s always the BCCI to fall back on.

A Text from the Government

“Marry at an early age. Delay first child. Have sufficient gap between first and second child.”

Now, if someone were to tell this to you, who do you think it would be? If I were to take a shot at it, here are some plausible guesses:

1. Your parents.
2. One of those meddlesome relatives that always transpires when there’s talk of marriage in the family.
3. Your newly married acquaintances that are still in that phase of enthusiasm that distinguishes an early convert from a weary veteran.
4. A Karan Johar movie.

On the other hand, here is a list of entities that are quite unlikely to ever tell you something like this:

1. Al Qaeda.
2. Your unmarried friends.
3. Deodorant advertisements.
4. A James Bond movie.
5. The government.

So imagine my surprise when the government gave me this matrimonial advice via the admittedly modern (for a government) medium of text messaging. As any single Indian person in my age group would know, once you’re beyond a certain age, you pretty much prepare yourself for everyone around you to be trying to convince you to get married – whether it’s parents, grandparents, random relatives, friends or acquaintances. What you're not prepared for, however, is for the government to also join the “get married” chorus. You pay taxes to the government, the government fines you if you’re drunk while driving, the government takes you through endless layers of red tape whenever you need anything from it, the government randomly digs up certain stretches of the road on your way to office – these are the sort of things you’re primed to expect from the government. Marital advice from the government, however – now that can completely throw you off-balance.

I suppose for the government, this is the perfect sort of reply to a lot of its detractors that have been complaining that the government has not been doing anything much at all ever since it took oath – that policy paralysis has meant that the government has just sat and twiddled its thumbs while the economy went for a lazy stroll downhill, or that the only thing the government was active in was corruption. Well, for all those detractors, I’m pleased to say that the government has been quite active when it comes to texting. It’s not just personal marital advice that the government has been giving me – it has given me helpful tips to avoid dengue, it has asked me to design a mascot for the Income Tax Department so that I’m perfectly fine giving away chunks of my salary as long as there’s a friendly smiling mascot present, and it has also asked me to pay service taxes just in case I’m a food business.

As is customary with a lot of the things that the government does, this whole business of the government sending texts does not make any sense. Think about it – it was the government that came up with the regulation in the first place to ban commercial SMSs so that ordinary consumers were not troubled by pesky texts through the day. And what does the government do once those texts stop – send texts of their own!

At the same time, however, this does raise a lot of interesting questions. Who in the government first came up with the idea of sending text messages to citizens? Is this the government trying to keep up with the times and be ‘with it’ by showing that it can also communicate through texts?

More importantly – is there a centralized government department that just deals with texting? I’m guessing there should be – otherwise if all government departments started sending their own texts willy-nilly, things would really get out of hand and we’d be inundated with 50-odd texts every day. A centralized texting department also fits in well with the government’s fondness for regulation – it would mean that the texting department gets applications for sending texts from all other government departments, which are then duly processed by a committee that decides what messages are approved to be sent, which ones are rejected, if any amendments need to made to the copy, etc. In which case, how does one get into this department? It kind of sounds like a fun job!

And it could be made even more fun if the texting department started using texts as a tool for foreign policy. Instead of wasting time in state-level meetings, it could begin communicating foreign policy in the form of text messages. Here are some possible texts that could be sent:

To: Government of Pakistan

Being best friends with the Taliban is like leaving your child in the custody of a grizzly bear. It could only lead to disaster – ha ha.

Ministry of External Affairs, India.

To: Non-Aligned Movement

Just checking – why are we still in existence? Didn’t the Cold War end like 20 years ago?

MEA, India

To: Government of USA

This is all very confusing. Are we strategic allies, regional allies or key allies? Also, what’s the difference? Oh, and Osama found in Pakistan!!! Lol! Told you not to trust the Pakistanis!

MEA, India.

To: Kingdom of Bhutan

Of course we haven’t forgotten u! What nonsense! Tell you what – how abt we make your king the chief guest for the Republic Day parade? Warm Regards.

MEA, India

To: Government of Mongolia

Fresh spices, high staple-length cotton and the finest iron-ore – these could all be yours, in exchange for some weapons-grade uranium. If interested, please get in touch.

MEA, India

Ok, I think I should stop now, before one of the copywriters for the Idea ads gets a brainwave out of all this and creates a typically daft ad about governments across the world bringing about world peace by sending each other friendly text messages.