O what a lovely war!

ALTHOUGH war may not have actually broken out, there is plenty of action in evidence thanks to the rapid fire performances of our special battalions armed to the teeth — quite literally so — as they display their amazing military capabilities through words, words and more words.

The buff-coats who make up these squads may not have been put through the paces at Khadakvasla and Dehra Dun, neither do they sport epaulettes and uniforms, but that does not deter them in the least from being both bark- and battle-ready.

So let’s do a quick review of our brave men-out-of-uniform who never hesitate, even for a teeny-tiny moment, to get others to lay down their lives for the country.

The first, in my personal roll of honour, is our very dependable squad of NRIs or Non Resident Incendiaries, trained in the intricate weaponry of cyber-rattling. In rather well-feathered fox-holes some 10,000 km northwest of the Poonch sector (as the Boeing 747 flies), they keep a gimlet eye on the enemy and generally prepare themselves to wage relentless battle through their Compaq Pentium-4 missile delivery systems, especially designed to shoot e-mails across the world with the speed of light.

‘‘National honour demands that we teach the ENEMY a lesson it will never forget. So BOMB the bases,’’ they fire away on their laptops, ‘‘If we have to pay the ULTIMATE PRICE and engage in NUCLEAR WARFARE, so be it.’’ Such urgent instructions to countrymen and women left behind in Bharat Mata are inevitably followed by the injunction in bold lettering ‘‘LET US NOT BE COWARDS’’.

Good, soul-stirring stuff, just the thing we need here as we go about our little lives. The only problem though is that when our Non Resident Incendiaries speak of ‘‘our country’’ and ‘‘our national honour’’, one is never quite sure which country they really mean, seeing that most of them have long swapped the Tricolour for the Star Spangled Banner.

Then there is the other courageous lot who brave television lights, and selflessly give of their time and energy, night after night, screaming for the enemy’s blood. Although none of them has seen real action, they usually have an excellent war record, never hesitating for a moment to despatch the army to storm enemy lines the moment the cameras roll. I call them the Prime Time Platoon and their secret weapon is a glass of warm saline solution with which to gargle for 60 seconds once the night’s exertions are over, in order to keep the old vocal chords fitting fit for the next encounter in the studios.

The Bathetic Battalion come marching next. Don’t be fooled by the fact that this lot are mostly poets, or rather versifiers, whose verse seems to get worse and worse by the day so that one is tempted to term them ‘‘worseifiers’’. Yet they can, when the mood takes them and the desire to catch the eye of Poet-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee overwhelms them, stiffen up the sinews, summon up the blood and produce quite a blast. Secretly, they all imagine that they are Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and produce poetry to match.

So one among them says, ‘‘Padosi to naag hai’’ (our neighbour is a snake) and the rest exclaim, ‘‘Wah, wah’’ in appreciation. Which encourages the man to burst out, ‘‘Padosi to naag hia, ise chandan na chadao tum...’’(our neighbour is a snake, let us not offer him sandal wood). Read such verse aloud on a cold wintry night to the enemy lines with the aid of foghorns, and the sheer velocity of its mediocrity is guaranteed to frighten them into abject surrender.

Which brings us to our elite corps, the Trishul Troops, who simply love a war, any war, even a nuclear one, as long as it wins them Uttar Pradesh — on the presumption perhaps that if Ram doesn’t work, Radioactivity might.

You may have noticed something rather curious about this entire lot who measure patriotism by the number of shells despatched across the border. They are either old codgers who have no stake in the future, or young codgers with great lateral mobility who are unlikely to be hit by a loose nuke. But that is precisely what makes them so keen on war.

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