Column

Last Sunday, a five-year-old boy proved that all you need to bring a nation to standstill is a 53-ft hole! Three cheers to Prince, the brave kid from Kurukshetra, who got to eat more chocolates in that hole than his parents would have ever let him at home.

But apart from this story of human triumph, these are times of tremendous confusion across the world. And in the larger interest of mankind, I will try and make sense of a few of the confusions and complications reported in the media…

• For starters, President Kalam returned the Office of Profit bill to the Parliament because of a simple spelling mistake. When Kalam saw the note attached to the bill, which said ‘proof it’ he promptly took out a pencil, proof-checked every word and sentence of the bill, made the necessary grammatical corrections and sent the bill back.
• Then there’s mild-mannered Manmohan Singh, who’s fuming over Jaswant Singh’s claim that there’s a mole in the Prime Minister’s office. It’s quite apparent that this was just another plan by the opposition to create confusion within the government. But it certainly drove the PM nuts, considering he had personally checked every staff member in his office for a mole. And when he finally found one of them with a mole right under his chin, Singh immediately sacked him!
• The anti-terrorist squad, which is still clueless about the identity of the perpetrators of the July 11 bombings, has ended up rounding up as suspects anyone who hadn’t shaved for three days. To make matters worse, Narendra Modi walked into Mumbai with a three-week old beard and started talking about the strict anti-terrorist laws in the US, the same country where he was denied entry not so long ago.
• And now, 37 years after he first landed on the moon, 73-year-old Buzz Aldrin suddenly remembers he had seen a UFO during their flight. What he doesn’t remember is sipping a cup of tea on Apollo 11 and dropping his saucer, which instead of falling down, floated past him in zero gravity like a flying saucer.
• Lastly, the government introduced the Right to Information Act and slowly discovered that the information people sought wasn’t right at all. Thus forcing it to consider stopping this wrong information from falling into the right hands and becoming a bureaucratic boomerang!