Skip to main content

Orr’s Crab Apples and Modi’s ED

Image from cleanpng.com


The latest raid by India’s ED [Enforcement Directorate] on NewsClick and the arrest of its founder remind me strangely of Joseph Heller’s character named Orr in the novel Catch-22.

Orr and Yossarian are both in the US Air Force. Now Yossarian is in the hospital undergoing treatment. The war is going on and hence Yossarian, like most other soldiers, would love the treatment to go on endlessly. Yossarian’s pain in his liver refuses to become jaundice. “If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him.”

Orr is Yossarian’s roommate. When Orr was a kid he used to walk around all day with crab apples in his cheeks, he says. Yossarian wants to know why. Orr says it’s because crab apples are better than horse chestnuts. Yossarian repeats his question. Why would anyone walk around all day with anything in his cheeks?

“I didn’t,” Orr says, “walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around with crab apples in my cheeks. When I couldn’t get crab apples I walked around with horse chestnuts. In my cheeks.”

Yossarian thinks Orr is crazy. But then everybody in the regiment knows that Yossarian is crazy because he has an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy.

Just then Orr says that he walked around with crab apples in his cheeks because he wanted apple cheeks.

“Why did you want apple cheeks?” Yossarian demands.

“I didn’t want apple cheeks,” Orr says. “I wanted big cheeks. I didn’t care the color so much, but I wanted them big. I worked at it just like one of those crazy guys you read about who go around squeezing rubber balls all day long just to strengthen their hands. In fact, I was one of those crazy guys. I used to walk around all day with rubber balls in my hands, too.”

“Because rubber balls are better than crab apples?” Yossarian asks.

No, to protect his reputation, Orr says. “With rubber balls in my hands I could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I’d just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with…”

Yossarian gives up He doesn’t even answer when Orr asks him, “Do you want to know why I wanted big cheeks?”

Why did this episode rush to my mind as I was reading about Modi’s latest assault on journalists who questioned him? Modi has put a few hundred journalists behind bars. Many more have been thrown out of jobs. ED and CBI are Modi’s crab apples and rubber balls. But why is he doing this? Like Yossarian, I’m losing interest. I don’t know who is crazy. Modi, me, the journalists? All of us?

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    😀 I enjoyed Catch 22 - and this conclusion honours it well! But of course, it begs the question, is the whole point of such enigmatic actions on the part of Modi's minions precisely to have us all shrugging our shoulders and simply letting things pass as "it's just that ***** is crazy"...??? YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, Yam, these actions cannot be written off as craziness. On the contrary, they have a clear purpose: to make India a Hindu Bharat with Modi as its Emperor. Hindus will be Pandavas, the rest Kauravas. The dharmayuddh is on already.

      I'm using posts like this as a kind of balm for my troubled soul.

      Delete
    2. if you are a pets lover then visit my site https://saboor.rankbrainmarketing.link/

      Delete
  2. Sad but true and scary commentary on the state of affairs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Blasphemy in Brahma Muhurta

Dr T S Shyam Kumar: courtesy Pachakuthira At Brahma muhurta this morning, I was reading something profane if not blasphemous. Well, I didn’t even know until I was reading it that Brahma muhurta was the most auspicious time of the day and that it lay in the fourth yama of the night – that is, from 3 am to 6 am approx. Sleep eludes me these days in this period of the night. I wake up in the Brahma muhurta and then I am unable to go to sleep, for some reason beyond me. So I pick up my mobile phone and go to Magzter App. The magazine I chose to read this morning happened to be a Malayalam literary periodical, Pachakuthira . An interview with Dr T S Syamkumar, Sanskrit scholar and teacher as well as author of many books and recipient of some notable awards, caught my attention. This interview was something unique for me and one of the many things I learnt from it is that Brahma muhurta is the auspicious period that begins roughly 1 hour 36 minutes before sunrise and lasts for about...

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...