The All fools Day apparently went off peacefully with no noteworthy incidents of fooling. Truly, with the people getting fooled by the slick, street-smart politicians round the year, there is really nothing sanctimonious about April 1.
Election time could perhaps be rated as prime time for mass fooling. This great democratic exercise is indeed the ultimate mockery of the combined sensibilities and judgement of crores of Indians and lays waste the famed saying that one cannot fool everyone all the time. In fact, the people have been getting fooled on this count from time immemorial and are sure to continue to get fooled till time infinite. With the charade becoming an annual feature it has virtually taken the pep out of the April fool day.
The ear and the senses of the voters are subjected to non-stop battering by the politicians and the political parties who promise the sky and in the end just leave them high and dry. The only option the voters have is that they can choose the person they wish to be fooled by. In a way it has become a sort of compulsive fooling because if you do not vote, you get fooled anyway, in absentia. Someone else is sure to proxy for you in getting fooled.
Parliament and the Assemblies have emerged as the primary fooling centres, if recent trends in those hallowed precincts are any indication. The business of governance, which in normal circumstances should take the time and attention of the members, remains a non-starter and has been replaced by the more engrossing pastimes of mud-slinging and shouting wars.
With the elected representatives converting the Legislatures into a ragging den where none including the Speaker is spared from the persistent booing and heckling which have all become accepted Parliamentary behaviour, it is the people of the country who stand collectively fooled by those they voted for.
There are also other Parliamentary methods of fooling. For instance there is the anti-defection law which says that if more than one third of a party decides to fool you then it is legal. There is this technique called abstinence by which members elected to rule the country refuse to do so on the specious logic that their mere presence in Parliament can bring down a government. There is also this equidistance method of fooling that floored the UF and the Congress on the floor of the House, when a confidence vote came up for voting. It was indeed the other of all confidence tricks.
The game of fooling or getting fooled is a favourite pastime of the powers that be in Tamilnadu. The dreaded Surla got his calendar all mixed up when he celebrated April Fool on January 1 itself by pulling the wool over the closed eyes of the cops. He is now back where he belongs to but not before taking the police for a ride up to Mumbai. The authorities and the police are presently engaged in a monumental fooling exercise that is intended to virtually blow up all past records in fooling.
The allusion is to the never- ending bomb searches and hauls in the city, ever since the ruling party’s pet secularists answering to the names Al-Umma and Jihad, sneaked in tons of explosives into the State. The game is now all about finding out how much of the deadly stuff remains hidden and who gets their hands on it first, the police or the terrorist.
The police keep juggling the numbers about as adeptly as those bombers juggle explosives. The people on their part are having a torrid time, virtually living on a veritable landmine that can go off any minute and are in no mood to be led down the garden path, especially after Kovai. The police, of course, keep consoling them that ‘this bomb haul’ is the last, and promptly another cache is discovered in the thick of civilisation, the next day itself.
Absent-minded citizens, who leave their bags behind in a railway station, a harmless sack of potatoes left unattended on a sidewalk or even a tyre burst in a crowded bus stand, besides the incurable pranksters who revel in making hoax calls to offices, meanwhile, add to the jitters, Though most such alarms turn out to be false, the nervous Chennaiite does not want to risk getting fooled into becoming a corpse. Getting fooled is anyday better than getting blown up, goes the nervous argument. The flourishing bomb civilisation has no doubt converted the State from a peaceful haven to a fools’ paradise. Or is it fools’ hell?
There is indeed a surfeit of such tricks up the government’s sleeve. To name just one, there was this surrender drama of the media-savvy forest brigand that ended up as the biggest damp squib of the century. The revered poacher is still at large, busy with his favourite avocation of fooling elephants of their tusks, besides relieving the tormented Mother Earth of the weight of sandalwood trees.
He does kill occasionally when gun-toting, khaki-clad intruders from the officialdom dare to tread on his territory, but is ever soft on moustached journos armed with video cameras who visit him frequently. These brigand media men also, sometimes join the fooling spree with spine-chilling stories of their adventures in the thickets and their face-to-face fooling encounters (they call it negotiations) to lure the brigand into the mainstream getting beamed on all satellite channels.
The All Fools Day could at the most be symbolic of the round-the-clock fooling that goes on with impunity. In a country of fools, where fooling is a national habit and getting fooled is national weakness, it is always April 1, all through the year.
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