Saturday, March 2, 2013

The Ludlum Bullshit

Something written a long looong time ago....just thought would be apt for the moment. Had to bribe a policewallah to lodge an FIR

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Funny ain’t it….as some of us Indians who’ve grown up reading Ludlum or Tom Clancy or for that matter any B grade author who talk about spies, espionage, under cover agents, covert operatives come to terms with the stark reality that stares in our face today…..

Jason Bourne, one of the more famous Ludlum characters, is an under cover CIA agent, part of some Treadstone or Blackbriar program…..gets attacked by amnesia, is one deadly assassin and is wanted by police all over the world. Wherever he goes, people follow to kill him…which they don’t..because he’s that good.

Can u imagine our very own special undercover agent Jaikishen Burnwal (a very pathetic degrading of Jason’s name)….who has infiltrated the ranks of any of the trillions of jihadi outfits and succeeds in killing their top man. Then, he runs all over the world with fake passports, huge amounts of cash deposited in numbered SBI or UCO bank accounts which freeze if you are unsuccessful in opening them in three attempts???

The very simple reason is you can’t. Because there isn’t any Jaikishen Burnwal who is out there risking his life to save us fools. Although you might find countless Jaikishen Burnwals (JB…just to avoid typing this typically Indian looooooong name) at the traffic signal chewing gutkha or smoking a bidi…probably taking a hafta from the panwaala and thinking that he would get biryani for his wife today.

Why only Ludlum, take Hollywood movies for example..The Recruit, James Bond series, The Bourne Trilogy, The hunt for red october, or any other spy-action movie for that matter. Agreed, most of it may be the writer’s vivid imagination but there must be some fragments of truth in it? Why can’t we assume that atleast there’s an undercover agent in atleast the local municipality if not the ministry of defence.

The people who join the police or the CBI here, do not join to fight crime. They join so that they get a government flat, a fat pension package and countless other perks. There are no undercover agents. Who would want to be that when you can lead a normal life just sitting in the office gobbling up samosas and leave the office at 5 p.m.
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