Skip to main content

Terror Tourism 1


Jacob Martin Pathros was enthralled by the ad on terror tourism which promised to take the tourist to the terrorist-jungles of Chhattisgarh. Jacob Martin Pathros had already visited almost all countries, except the perverted South America, after retiring at the young age of 56 from an ‘aided’ school in Kerala. 56 is the retirement age in Kerala’s schools, aided as well as totally government-fed. Aided schools belong to the different religious groups in Kerala. They build up the infrastructure with the money extorted from the believers and then appoint as staff people who can pay hefty donations in the name of infrastructure. The state government will pay the salary of the staff. The private management will rake in millions by way of donations from job-seekers who are usually the third-class graduates from rich-class families. And there are no students to study in these schools because they are all Malayalam medium. Every Malayali wants to go to Europe or North America and hence Malayalam medium schools are obsolete. Only the government of the state and the managements of the aided schools seem to be unaware of the obsolescence of these schools. But both are happy to retain the rotting system because that is how politics is: religion and its institutions bring in more votes than anything else.

Jacob Martin Pathros’s children were all sent to CBSE English medium schools though he and his wife were both teaching in the church-managed aided school of their own parish. They had paid no less than one crore rupees to the diocese for securing their positions as teachers in the secondary school. A lion’s share of that sum had come as dowry. Celina, Jacob Martin Pathros’s wife, was from a rich family that was proud of its Christian origins whose roots went back to Saint Thomas, the disciple of Jesus. They believed that their ancestors were Namboothiris who were converted by the disciple of Jesus himself. Jacob Martin Pathros, like most people in Kerala, didn’t know that the Namboothiris arrived in Kerala only centuries after Saint Thomas did, if he did at all.

“It’s much better than putting all that money in the bank or in business,” Jacob will tell you if you ask him why he couldn’t have done so many other better things with that much money. “At school, you don’t have to do anything. Just sit in the staffroom or the classroom and tell the children to read something or do whatever they wanted. After all three or four children in a class, what harm can they do? They will go to sleep after some horseplay or something. And I get my salary every month. Now I get my monthly pension just sitting at home.”

That’s fantastic business sense. Recently Jacob Martin Pathros’s school wanted some developmental constructions. So the parish priest sent WhatsApp messages to all parishioners to make generous contributions for the modernisation of their own school. No parishioner ever questioned any demand of the parish priest. Faith does not question, they had been taught in their infancy. Jacob Martin Pathros and other infants of his generation were all rocked to sleep by their mothers who sang dirges for lullabies.

Death will come one day, remember you… The lines still run in Jacob Martin Pathros’s veins though he is now a sexagenarian who wants to see everything under the sun before he turns seventy because none of his ancestors lived much beyond 70 years of age. Those ancestors were not teachers in aided schools, of course. They were all farmers who tilled the hard ground in sun and shower and carried the smell of soil on their tattering clothes. They were people who didn’t rush to hospital when they ran a temperature or barked a cough. A few leaves of the Tulsi in the tea or some dried ginger would cure them. They couldn’t afford hospitals. The soil waited for them every morning. Death was a proximate possibility especially for the women who had to deliver children every year or so apart from cooking, washing, cleaning, and working in the fields. The children were inevitable byproducts in a time where social media and other diversions did not exist.

Jacob Martin Pathros had nothing to do in the day. The pension amount was accruing in his bank account. The government will eat it up in the name of income tax and umpteen other taxes. It’s better to spend it on travels. Jacob Martin Pathros loved seeing people, especially women who walked around wearing almost nothing. Don’t misunderstand me, please. Jacob Martin Pathros was not a voyeur or anything. He loved the Arab women who walked around looking like Penguins too. He liked these overdressed women precisely for one reason: it gave his hatred of Muslim men a rational foundation.

When Prime Minister Modiji annihilated the triple talaq affair, Jacob Martin Pathros burst crackers and celebrated it. He nearly wanted to drink some cow urine to prove his nationalist spirit, but Celina convinced him that cow urine was medicine only when it is sold in the name of Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali brand.

Celina did love Jacob Martin Pathros. It is a different matter altogether that he had never uttered a word of affection to his wife in the last many years though he loved the Penguins of Arabia. He had burnt their queen-size bed and bought two single beds so that he and Celina could fart in peace while sleeping. His most recent meditation is about whether he should shift his bed or his wife’s bed to another room altogether. After all there are two empty bedrooms in the house since their children, son and daughter, are both settled in Canada.

It is during one of those meditations that the tour ad caught Jacob Martin Pathros’s attention.

Contact details were given and Jacob Martin Pathros keyed in the given number on his smartphone that was giving a lot of problem these days because of the porn sites he visited frequently. “Welcome aboard, sir,” a sweet husky voice answered. And Jacob Martin Pathros jumped in. He wanted to touch a terrorist. 


To be continued

Disclaimer: This is pure fiction. Any resemblance to reality is unwarranted over-reading.

Caution: I started this as a short story. Now it is threatening to become a novel. Inconvenience is regretted.

Comments

  1. Came to know that how aided-school system is working in Kerala, interesting indeed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Stick with me Murthy saab for a lot more info on Kerala's perverted social system.

      Delete
  2. The same pattern is followed in CMC,Vellore. There the Resident doctors are asked to donate a part of their salary to the trust in the name of faith. Non-Christian patients who are suffering from terminally ill disease(like Cancer) are provided with Bible, So that they can ask for forgiveness before they depart.The institution knows how to take advantage of their helplessness.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's quite terrifying. They should give copies of the Gita in Rama Rajya.

      Delete
  3. Hari Om
    Well, you have me hooked and ready for the next edition! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  4. Did the story start to get away from you? I know how that goes...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Replies
    1. In the next part of this story you'll meet some friendly terrorists.

      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 Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Books and Rebellions

Books become my ideal companions in times of political turmoil. Right now, as you’re reading these lines, there are dozens of active armed conflicts going on around the world. Besides, developed countries like America are asking foreign students as well as others to leave. The global economy is experiencing significant instability, characterised by weak growth projections, persistent inflation, high debt levels, and geopolitical conflicts. Even when a country like India advertises itself as becoming the third largest economy, the living conditions of the poor aren’t showing any improvement. Nay, the world isn’t becoming any better than it ever was. It's when such realisations hit you from all sides, you need the consolations of an abiding hobby. Reading is at the top of my list of such hobbies. First of all, books help us understand current events in a broader context . They can reveal patterns in history: how democracies falter, how propaganda spreads, how resistance movements...