Tis the season of conspiracies. Or so it seems. This usually secret exercise has been brought to the public domain by our very own minister for minority affairs, A.R. Antulay. As humans, blessed with the capacity to think, we can broadly be divided into two groups: empiricists and idealists. Empiricists obviously want simple answers validated by facts and numbers to explain why a certain event occurred; idealists are somewhat easier to please; they simply yearn for the idea which gave birth to the specific event. In the absence of either facts or plausible theories, we tend to look for alternatives. The most pleasing one would be to create the subjective, to have your own view and espouse it over dinner conversations, for unfortunately Mumbai has become dinner talk. Chitter-chatter from homes across India to debates in Parliament have been tainted or romanticised with conspiracies; after all, there is a reason why crime fiction is one amongst the top ten on people’s Christmas shopping list.

If judged by sales, the most popular conspiracy theory (accredited to Dan Brown’s popular trilogy and H.G. Wells everlasting success) is the belief in the Illuminati or the Free Masons, now no longer as popular in common language. As average citizens struggled to keep up with the politicisation of the world and the growth in interconnectedness between nations, the Illuminatis of the 16th century took centrestage — with a new modus operandi. This time the term coined was the “New World Order”. Now, behind this supposed NWO is the hand of a few wealthy beneficiaries and a combined government effort to dominate the world, or ensure peace — apparently both are seen to be on the same side of the coin. The foundation of the modern-day NWO is accredited to Cecile Rhodes and to his prestigious Rhodes Scholarship on International Relations. Fortunately for Cecile and his gang they tapped into politics, through the creation of foundations that are commonly used as the most accurate forms of inquiry into politics. These include the Royal Institute for Foreign Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations. Any journalist or politician will cite CFR — from the horse’s mouth so to say — to validate facts and seek the truth. This truth, say conspiracy theorists, is collectively formulated in order to ensure that events progress as they have been planned out, by the “forces that be.”

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