Opinion

A Butcher’s Essay

A Government bank's teller machine spews currency straight out of Monopoly while anti-graft investigators go after a 'liberal butcher'. The black humour in all of this is akin to a Coen Brothers' flick...

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A Butcher’s Essay
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A couple of ATMs in the national capital territory spewed fake currency notes a few days ago. The 2000-rupee notes claimed, in English, that they were printed by the “Children Bank of India” and in Hindi, the “Manoranjan Bank of India.” Sure, this is manoranjan or entertainment had it not meant loss of money for a cussed customer. But you ought to pay for entertainment, don’t you? We, as a nation, seem to be paying a lot for entertainment, particularly for all the practical jokes. These notes were pushed out of the country’s top PSU bank, the State Bank of India’s teller machines in and around Delhi. So, that is a joke, and a brilliant one at that!

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Elsewhere, two former CBI chiefs have been booked for graft: one, for entertaining some accused at his residence and another for his alleged nexus with a deal-making meat exporter. An Enforcement Directorate joint director has also been accused of extortion. Investigators believe that he has made a huge amount of money while investigating a betting scandal worth Rs 2,000 crore and a Rs 5,000-crore hawala fraud. The government bank’s teller machines and the anti-graft investigators put together make for a strange coincidence. They signify the entertainment quotient or the black humour which our system generates.

The meat exporter, in a message to the former CBI chief, according to news reports, asks whether he wants a 500-word essay or a 1000-word essay. Can anything produce greater mirth than this? At face value—one should take things only at face value, lest we be called conspiracy theorists—it means that the meat exporter was going to sit down to write a 500 or a 1000-word essay on the meat he exports or the best cuts he sells or the well-done steak he serves at his parties. It can never be about payment for his meat in 500 or 1000-rupee notes. Essay can only mean an essay.

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Well, there is another possibility. The butcher was supposed to be a great friend of some lobbyists and journalists, who got things done during the UPA government’s tenure. Of course, all of them honourable people, all liberals! After all, being liberal and elite is very expensive, and someone has to pay for the posh flat or the house with a lawn. What if it is a butcher? He has to be “our butcher”, a liberal butcher. Who wouldn’t mind writing a beautiful essay for such a generous butcher?

The most interesting thing in Delhi is how everybody and everything are linked in a strange pattern. There are thieves and then there are cops who are supposed to catch them. But that would be a simple cop-and-thief game played by kids. Adults play bigger games. According to their rules, there are thieves and then there are super thieves in uniform who preside over the business of crime. The super thieves have their men and women passing messages up and instructions down. The messengers and their friends in politics, bureaucracy and media in turn get to have a lot of fun and everybody is happy.

The Enforcement Directorate officer took it to the next logical step by apparently putting a proper price for the accused not getting arrested in the cases he was investigating. Some of the bookies themselves were said to be his middlemen who struck deals with the accused. Could there be a more simple and efficient system? No wonder the officer cleared the tough civil services exam with distinction. After all, he is a worthy successor to the retired stalwarts.

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