The most dangerous place?

I AM not too sure whether I agree with Old Bill Clinton that we are living in the most volatile region in the world. But there can be absolutely no doubt that we are living in the most voluble region in the world.

People in these parts move around with the constant fear that some loose adjective or noun, some expression of eloquence or a shard of some couplet, will in an unguarded moment neatly decapitate them or sock them in the solar plexus.

So much wind, in fact, is being created in the process, that energy experts should now seriously consider this committed source and plumb for the wind energy option to solve the on-going power crisis.

On one side of the border, we have a General-President — or is it President-General? — of Pakistan, who has come to rather mistakenly believe that he is a television star and has oratorical capabilities that can stand up to Julius Caesar’s, on a good day.

On the other side of the border, we have a Prime Minister-Poet — or is it Poet-Prime Minister? — of India, who doesn’t believe in keeping his thoughts to himself and has, very erroneously, come to the conclusion that his musings are worthy of a Kalidasa and of being translated into extremely long newspaper spreads.

Caught between the rock, of Musharraf’s rhetoric, and the hard place of Vajpayee’s poetics, are the poor citizens of both nations wondering what had hit them.

This is a perilous, hazardous, risky arraignment, make no mistake. Not only is the fourth largest army in the world in battle formation against the fifth largest army in the world. Not only is one nuclear state poised against another nuclear state. Not only is Uncle Colin Powellji flying off and leaving us in the cold, not to speak of Uncle Georgieji choking himself on pretzels and getting himself into a blue funk.

All this is bad enough, but what makes the situation truly unstable is the imminent possibility of someone or the other on both sides of the border shooting their mouths off and leaving us, not in an eyeball-to-eyeball face-off as some excitable newspaper analysts have stated recently, but a vocal-chords-to-vocal-chords confrontation which, in my humble opinion, is extremely dangerous too.

Musharraf, if you haven’t been warned, is already threatening to Address The Nation for another couple of hours very shortly — even before his unfortunate compatriots can get their reflexes working and rush to the market to equip themselves with some durable ear muffs. Vajpayee is not a television man, as you may have noticed.

He either falls asleep before the startled eyeballs of his nation, or — if he manages to drone on and on — puts everybody else to sleep.

Either way, there is a sorry breakdown in communication which doesn’t help his cause. But I have it on excellent authority that the Muse of Vajpayee’s Musings has just armed himself with a dozen free-flo ceramic tipped ball pens to capture his master’s voice and then have it translated into printers’ ink splashed over the front pages of an estimated 45,000 newspapers in the country.

Both leaders, it seems, have translated their right to freedom of speech into state policy and have, in the process, stood the old Shakespearean dictum, ‘‘give every man thine ear, but few thy voice’’, on its head. For them it is ‘‘give every man thine voice, but few thy ear’’.

One of them, you would have noticed, begins his fusillade, with the benign words, ‘‘My dear fellow countrymen (the women are taken for granted as usual)’’ and then proceeds to work himself into quite a lather before ending rather grandly with the words ‘‘May the Almighty give us strength to redeem this resolve’’. The other begins smoothly with, ‘‘Pakistani Brothers and Sisters...’’ and then proceeds to blather on for a long while before descending down to earth with some help from — you guessed it — the Almighty. ‘‘May God guide us to act upon the true teachings of Islam...’’

Actually, if the Almighty has to help anybody it is the hapless people of both nations who need every assistance, natural and supernatural, to negotiate this tide of words without getting drowned. It is my belief that what they need, most of all, is a verbal missile shield, with early warning systems — possibly the Arrow series of anti-rhetorical ballistic missiles if the Americans will relent on this — to cope with more spiel coming their way. Or, if they cannot manage that, they should get their respective leaders to enter into a ‘‘no first use’’ agreement. Or, if even this cannot be ensured, they must get them to come up with a less verbose way to appear honourable.

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