They say that when life
gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. This is one of those positive,
life-affirming statements that, when put together with an inspiring, Hallmark-esque picture of a kitten or a baby could make for a very annoying
forward. This is, however, not enough for people who aren’t merely life affirming
but rather life-seizing / life’s throat grabbers, the sort that are always
‘high on life’. For them, the statement was appropriated and modified to “When
life gives you lemons, bring out the salt and tequila”. Personally, though, I
always thought I’d fall into the more cynical category – that if life ever gave
me lemons, I’d confront life and grumble “Seriously? A citrus fruit is the best
you could do???” However, the only time that life did give me a lemon, I was
simply puzzled and wondered why. This was a few years ago, at the end of an
ex-colleague’s wedding lunch in Kerala – everyone was handed a lemon while they
were leaving. Why?
This whole business of
life handing lemons left, right and centre did, however, give me an idea to
look at countries’ foreign policies through the lemon lens:
USA:
When life gives you lemons, befriend life, find out where the lemons are grown
and invade that territory in the name of democracy.
India:
When life gives you lemons, thank life for the lemons but also complain about
the fact that life hyphenated you with Pakistan by clubbing the both of you
together in its South Asian tour and giving lemons to both.
Pakistan:
When life gives you lemons, go to China and complain that life gave India extra
lemons and ask for a few more lemons.
Germany:
When life gives you lemons, lecture the Eurozone on why they’re in the mess
they’re in because they wastefully squandered away the lemons that life gave
them.
Great Britain: When life gives you lemons, help the US when they invade the place
where the lemons are grown.
France:
When life gives you lemons, just to be on the safe side, surrender.
Japan:
When life gives you lemons, take them to your state-of-the-art lab, reverse
engineer the shit out of them and then turn them into square lemons and tell
life “How about that, eh?”
Ok, that last one really
had nothing to do with foreign policy, so I should stop here. On a metaphorical
level, though, life did give Hong Kong a big, juicy lemon in the form of Edward
Snowden recently, so it was interesting to see how the Hong Kong government
reacted to it:
“Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23)
on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel.
The US Government earlier on made a request to the
HKSAR Government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr
Snowden. Since the documents provided by the US Government did not fully comply
with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR Government has
requested the US Government to provide additional information so that the
Department of Justice could consider whether the US Government's request can
meet the relevant legal conditions. As the HKSAR Government has yet to have
sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of
arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.
The HKSAR Government has already informed the US
Government of Mr Snowden's departure.”
In the world of politics
and governments, people don’t go about telling “Fuck You” to each other. Not
officially, at any rate. So for those of you who’ve ever wondered how one
government would express the general sentiment behind “Fuck You” to another
government, this is a very good, if rather long, example. In Bollywood terms, this
is more the cool, insouciant and self-assured, “Tujhe jo karna hain kar le. Dekhte
hain kyaa bigaad lega tu mera.” sort of “Fuck You” as opposed to the more
rabid, hysterical but hollow, “Bahut galat kiyaa yeh tu nein! Tujhe chhodoonga nahin
main! Tera pura khaandaan barbaad kar doonga, dekh lena! Samajhta kyaa hain
apne aap ko? Tu jaanta nahin hain mein kaun hu!” The latter is probably closer
to what the US reaction has been when they learned that Hong Kong had allowed
Snowden to leave the country.
With Hong Kong, you could
still understand though – it is now part of China, which is one few the few
countries that can stand up to the US. What was more surprising, though, was
the role of Ecuador in the whole saga. Here was little Ecuador, a mountainous
country named after an imaginary line and filled with Llamas and Alpacas, that
was standing up to the might of the US. Being neither Communist nor Islamic,
and at the same time not harbouring any ambitions for a clandestine nuclear
program, you did wonder why Ecuador of all countries thrust itself into the
spotlight to take on the US. Sure, many countries would have justifiable
grievances against the US, but common sense dictated that they didn’t mess with
a country whose foreign policy could be summed up by the statement “When push
comes to shove, we’d rather pummel, bulldoze and pulverize.” Even if you tried
to steer clear of the US hit list, there was still the fear that you’d wake up
one day to find yourself falsely accused of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction
and be invaded anyway – so to willingly annoy that country smacked of an
overtly suicidal streak.
Not surprisingly, the NSA
revelations showed that it was the other big countries that were a target of US
spying – the Europeans, Brazil, Russia, India, etc. But apart from a few small,
socialist-leaning Latin American countries no one else seemed to be standing up
to the US. Sure, it is the most powerful country in the world right now, but
you’d still think the other countries would be fairly displeased to know that
they’re being spied upon pretty much all the time. So it was pretty baffling
too see barely a word of protest being registered. Unfortunately, this means
that the US holds the ‘He’s got compromising pictures’ advantage over the rest
of the world. For those unfamiliar, the “He’s got compromising pictures”
advantage is the most popular form of blackmail in use these days, and can be
described as follows:
You’ve seen them
everywhere – if you’ve ever worked for or with any large organization, you’re
bound to have come across one of them. The employee whose sole purpose of
existence seems to be to waste some valuable space in an already overpopulated
world; the employee whose IQ would be lesser than a turnip, a plank of wood and
Paris Hilton put together. At first you might give him the benefit of the doubt
– you might even go one step further and extend this to the benefit of uncertainty,
ambiguity, perplexity, enigma and confusion – but after a while you’d realize that there’s
simply no getting around his utter incompetence. Yet, he's in a senior position and wielding great power! You have no choice but to wonder – here is a
big, prestigious organization full of clever people with big degrees working for
them, and they have the most advanced psychometric tests and rigorous interview
processes in place to recruit their employees – so what gives? You start
questioning if there is any point to Human Resources as a discipline, or at least
the recruiting part of it. Is it all just a sham? How does someone so obviously
incapable manage to get into such a high position?
According to one popular
theory called The Peter Principle, people keep getting promoted until they reach
their level of incompetence, so that after a while all of senior management is
essentially incompetent. But this still assumes there was some level of
competence to begin with. I have come to the conclusion that there is something
far more sinister at play – that there is only one possible explanation for
such an employee – which is that he has compromising pictures of someone big
and powerful. Earlier, it was probably much tougher to get hold of compromising
pictures of someone – you’d have to hire a detective and wait for months. But
with the advent of cellphone cameras anyone can have compromising pictures of
big, powerful people with some amateur snooping. And once you have these
pictures, you can just blackmail your way into senior positions in most organisations.
This, then, explains the
silence of most of the world powers over the NSA revelations – why else would
you be so nonchalant about the US spying on you? The Americans now have
compromising pictures of most government officials across the world! And this
blackmail would form the cornerstone of their foreign policy and consequently guide
geopolitical decisions across the world.
Scary, isn’t it?
