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?

Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanOctober 5, 2023 at 12:37 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 5, 2023 at 6:45 AM

      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. pigeonsOctober 5, 2023 at 12:46 PM

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

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 5, 2023 at 1:09 PM

      You have some charming pigeons!

      Delete
  2. magiceyeOctober 5, 2023 at 7:08 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 5, 2023 at 8:22 AM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
13 comments
Read more