11 Just Men.

Edgar Wallace wrote in 1905 what went on to be accorded the status of a prototype or benchmark of the modern English mystery thriller, The Four Just Men. It was about four vigilantes who killed people in the cause of justice. To promote it, he launched a competition. The challenge was to guess the method to murder the Foreign Secretary that they would employ if he were to ratify an unjust law. This got The Daily Mail, the newspaper where he worked as a sub-editor into deep trouble. Wallace did not put a limiting clause in his competition rules to restrict the prize to a single winner. As it happened, there were several correct guessers. He did not have the money to pay them. To protect the good name of his newspaper, the owner had to loan £5000 to Wallace. He took it without a whit of gratitude and contrition and showed no hurry to repay the loan. His attitude and approach were far from just, to state the obvious. Money, I guess, does that to a lot many people. Did not The Bible warn us that the love of money is the root of all evil? Now it is doing likewise to Wallace's compatriots, the English cricket team. They have thrown caution to the winds and defied logic as many, including Pakistan's former skipper, Shahid Latif, feel, because of the big bucks BCCI has in its coffers. http://digbig.com/4xymq. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, as the French say. Translation: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In other words, nothing changes much. So, what else is new? P.S: The English Team decided to give 50% of their match fee to the victims of the Mumbai massacre. Are they just or what?

To be or not to be.

That’s the question the Indian State should be pondering deeply right now. To be or not to be a client-state of the United States of America, to be precise. Thank the Comrades for bringing it to our notice. At the latest count http://faculty.washington.edu/majeski/decline-pap-5.pdf, i.e. as of February 2005, the self-appointed Leader of the Free World had 81 client-states (43 per cent of the countries in the world). This list is based on the US State Department information on Treaties in Force and Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Justification. Around 1945, Great Britain, France and Russia had about 50, 30 and 20 colonies/client-states respectively. The vacuum created by the decay of European Imperialism was filled by the US propensity to acquire and maintain client-states for strategic reasons of its own including its self-determined roles as the Leader of the Free World and the Global Peacekeeper. It is in this community of 81 would-be peers that India is likely to lose face were it to try to renegotiate the 123 Nuclear Treaty. That’s a fate worse than Death, I guess, if one were to judge from the headlines in the Indian Press. When India chose to remain “non-aligned” and Pakistan enrolled as a US client-state after partition, we know what happened. As is well-known, the relationship between the “central star” (the US) and its satellites (say, Pakistan) is identical to the mother country (Great Britain) and her colonies (say, British India) under Imperialism. The leader of the pack offers the satellites goodies (Green Revolution in Pakistan in the fifties, two decades before India got hers) in return of flooding her markets cheap made-in-the-US goods. This involved large-scale mechanization and capitalization of the agricultural sector and the generation of a huge market for the based-in-the-US agribusiness (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides). Our brush with WTO has already taught us what to expect in the future. Even then, I wonder why the US wants to add to its liability by getting hold of one more client-state. All the biggies among US businesses have already made it to the Indian shores. Having got into the habit of acquiring more and more clients, maybe it just cannot deny itself the pleasure of getting one more. I’m being facetious, of course. The US white culture is a culmination of its history of stealing land from the Native Americans, slave trading, dehumanization, exploitation and Imperialism, as even a casual observer of history can vouch. In view of this backdrop, Imperialism may now almost have become life blood for the Leader of the Free World. And, the supreme imperative to be the ultimate arbiter of Truth, Justice and the American Way to the rest of us lesser mortals, most likely.