Night comes mourning the death of the day and sits brooding over the huddle of the forests and undulating fields. It embraces treacherous mountains and settles on the babbling brooks, it ravishes the gigantic seas that cower beneath it and complain in a mutter of waves.

Night comes in a silken caress and strokes the aching limbs of swollen lovers, who arch one more time to the heaving music of its velvet shadows.

 Night comes in an arrogant stride and falls back as the lighted streets cast neon glares on empty streets and drives it back to the edges of the barren plains and misty hills.

Night comes in blotches of pitch to hide the murky shame of nocturnal haunts, the cracked laughter of audacious whores, the blessed inebriation of compulsive drunks and the diseased wounds of homeless waifs. 

Night comes like an avenging messiah to protect its minions, the army of life that crawls and creeps and glides and hops to its celebratory tunes and toasts.

Night comes as an inky accomplice to shroud the dark deeds of those whom the light indicts as anti-social, criminal and base. They transact in cloaked cunning, sharpen their tools, and sell their wares in stealthy glee.

Night comes howling with storm and rain to applaud the witching hour for ghosts and ghouls and their companion  bats, rats, cats, owls, snakes and roaches. It greets the netherworld of vampires, voodoo men, banshees and jasmine laden yakshis in placid moonlit groves.

Night seeps in, casting cobwebbed shadows of fatigue and fitful smudges of sleep on minds weary of the day’s sore labour. Night soothes the ear with the music of crickets and the rhythmic croak of toads, relieving the mind of the clamour of the day’s plastic sounds.

NIGHT! Black as ink, as ebony, as pitch, as despair, as guilt, as sin, as death.

Guy Fawkes Bonfire Night. Krystal Nacht.  The Parting of the Yamuna. The Burning  of Holika. Halloween Night. The Trojan Horse. Nav Ratri. Alexander kills Poru. Silent Night Holy Night.

Night the only Mother of the New Born Day. 

I have had so much negative crap in the last two days that I need to heal. And the only way to heal is to give. Let  me share with you  all something that I had devised recently to help the reluctant child writer. Those of you who have children or know of people who have children, might want to use some of these ideas. This, after all, is who I really am.

I dedicate this post to fellow blogger Sarath Chandra despite my many differences with him, he remains a person I have enjoyed knowing.

Love me or hate me, my blog page is the only one that consistently generates discussions amongst my ilander friends who enjoy a good discussion/debate. I am proud of the fact that these men and women are great thinkers and we share a great comraderie despite our many differences. Difference is often the key to a good discussion, not consensus. Consensus is the larger good that happens when we have trashed out all our differences. It is generally a mindset that has altered because it has been exposed to other angles. It cannot go back to being the same again.

What happens on my blogs may be unique but it is not particularly praise worthy, because it is just an extension of one of the things I do in life with children and young adults. A discussion is meant to see all sides of an issue and is based largely on facts and valid supportable opinions. A debate that crops up from the discussions where two different people take opposing stands is fought to win. The rules of debating are very different. The side with the best arguments, and the most powerful way of expressing them, wins.

But a debate is a civilized argument. Its first rule is politeness where one may not indulge in name-calling, personal insinuations, sulking, making blanket judgements, or harbouring feelings of rancour and enmity after the duration of the argument.

Debates help us see all sides of an issue, organize thoughts and express them clearly, listen attentively and argue politely, take turns  and allow everyone to have a say, use language as a powerful tool, convince and persuade, think quickly on our feet for rebuttals and get a powerful sense of team spirit.

Debating is a life activity. Whether it is about what to order in a restaurant, or who will be Cricket captain, or why India should do the nuke deal, we argue all the time with other people when we have to make group choices. Advertisers, politicians, salespersons and lawyers are some professionals who use arguments to make a living.

Debates are not always benign. The opponents do provoke a counter argument, they do slight and nudge the other team to clarify, explain and defend their points of view. As a structured activity, it is not for the faint-hearted or the fragile. Intellectual alertness, quick thinking, resourceful argument, and tenacity are expected traits to win an argument. You also need to have a way with words, to be sharp and slicing without resorting to foul language or getting personal. Wit is a great aid in this.

A lot of children whine after thy lose and accuse the other team of cheating, bullying, personal grudges etc. These are a result of their immaturity. The way to deal with these problems would be to point out to the opponent the flaw as they see it during the debate and not afterwards. For example: You are being personal, your argument is targeted at slurring my personal image and not at the issue on hand, you are being facetious, your arguments seem to be hollow you need to support them, dismissing my argument is not enough, please supply us with more facts etc.  Once you teach them the fallacies of argument they are empowered to say you are resorting to ad hominem or you are slippery sloping etc.   Anyone leaving the platform in a huff is not likely to win the gold. And so it is in life, folks. Anyone leaving the arena is not likely to make any changes. If you leave the battlefield, you become a non-entity.

 Debating is not part of our school and growing years as part of a life- skills curriculum and therefore as adults we Indians, often do not know how to debate. You will often find people taking umbrage, indulging in vituperative battles, abandoning the issue in favour of  personal mudslinging and violence. This happens  in the parliament, in any meetings where Indian adults congregate to discuss an issue, we fight like cats and dogs and all of us talk together on TV interviews and chat shows. And shamefully, we carry grudges after that. It is ridiculous.

A good discussion tempers debates. When the format is of a discussion, with debates within, it allow the debators to move out of the ambit of the debate and accept the views of others, or even if they win, to acknowledge the contribution of thought of the other. As adults even if we are in a pure debate we need to do this.

A debator never leaves the field at a loose end.  So in my debate with Sarath (Pro-Life Or Quality of Life blog)  where the scale of destruction on the planet due to global warming was the issue, this is my clousure.  My understanding  was that 2/3 or 66%  of the population was at stake, which to me is what it must be if what we hear of ‘catastrophic’ gw consequences is true, and Sarath’s  was that it was only ‘fraction of one percent’.  Two extreme and opposing numbers.

Sarath asked me to look up the site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report

Amit supplied the original IPCC site:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf

Then the debate turned sour and personal with Sarath ready to resign and crying ‘unfair’ and feeling judged.

But, armed with these  sites, when the debate began to turn sour, I did a good read of both sites, especially the 22 page IPCC report. To my surprise, there was no mention of any of Sarath’s arguments in these two documents.

His claims were:

1. GW not "anywhere near as catastrophic as you seem to suggest here (2/3rds of us die?)".

2. Food production increase for 4 degree raise.

3. Many disadvantages that are well known and overblown.

4. GHGs stabilizing in 2050.

5. 1% in casualities (not "affected", but "deaths").

6. Talk about disadvantages of GW to reduce emissions, and not use "against nature" argument.

Not one of these 5 points is mentioned in the report. The sixth point is linked to the larger debate of nature vs science and is irrelevant to this context - though it is the  original thrust of the blog.

On the contrary, the report takes the opposite view.

The report said exactly what I had read randomly several times. I have also read reports where the writers dismiss gw as ‘gw my arse….’, so its not that I am unaware of a lobby that says gw is all bunkum and alarmist.

However this one speaks of:

Agricultural land aridity, shrinking  and water logged forests, water resources, heat, flooding and droughts, malnutrition, diarrohea, cardio reperatory illnesses, morbidity and mortality, ocean acidification and marine life destruction, heat waves and overload on health services, coral bleaching, eco system imbalances and species lost, low produce in agriculture and fisheries, storms and 30% loss of wetlands, flash floods decrease in snow cover and glacier retreats, polluting megadeltas and escalating aridity. The ill effects of over population, urbanization, economic crises in this web of natural disasters following climate change is predicted throughout the document.  

World hunger is a big concern. In fact a 50 % decrease in food in poorer countries by 2020 is predicted. Water stress is a major problem with either flooding or droughts that will be widespread.

To my mind, this kind of interconnected disaster scenario is more likely to see deaths and damage in the vicinity of 66% than 1%. As I said, at the first stage of this argument, rising sea levels will leave people nowhere to run. (Nature punishments are likely to outrun human ingenuity and science) We have not colonized mars or moon to send people out there either. I reckon fraction of 1% which Sarath says is 100million is presumably at 12 b population which is double our present population.  100 million in our 6 and a half billion, is probably lost even now every year to disease, old age and wars. Can those be the death figures post GW disasters?

To clear my doubts and support my hypothesis, I  researched global poverty to see how many of our present population could be at risk.

The global poor constitute 80% of world population that is a whopping 4 billion who have less than $ 5 a day as disposable income. (Harvard Study) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5529.html

Given the damage to the environment and the various disasters, waiting to happen, these 4 billion will be the first ones to go. When pushed to the wall, where Nature does not discriminate between the rich and the poor, I do not see a lot of altruism flowing. In fact, when put to a crunch, men have a tendency to be most selfish, pugnacious and defensive for their own survival and comfort. This is often witnessed in post earthquake areas, before aid begins to trickle in and order is restored.

So, I conclude that none of Sarath’s claims hold water. Debates, I reiterate must stay with facts and issues and not deteriorate into emotional parts where we accuse one another of skullduggery and bullying in order to avoid research, deliberation and debate. That would amount to intellectual laziness and avoidance.  To defend one’s stance with proper evidenced backup is to truly honour the spirit of debating. Not having any rancour afterwards is to be able to say we are not merely grown up but truly mature.

Indian law needs to be amended. We have problems that must not be given a verdict on the rules laid down in 1820. The world we live in is not the same. Technology has progressed at a rapid rate in the last 100 years and each year has add-on dimensions to this that are mind-boggling. For example, we had no surrogate motherhood or test-tube babies then. We now have a surrogate baby whose Japanese parents are divorced, the mother has disowned the child and the father (now single) cannot adopt a female child. The baby stuck in a Jaipur hospital is all set to be India's first surrogate orphan.

We now have a battery of tests to detect fetal defects and such knowledge of deformity can be devastating. One would imagine that the testing itself precludes the opportunity to make decisions as opposed to earlier times when we just prayed for a healthy child. The age of the foetus when it can be legally aborted is 20 weeks. The basis for this is not clear. By week 6 the baby has even grown rudimentary eyes, ears and digestive tract. It is only in the first two weeks that it is a clump of cells with potential life.  By the 13 weeks called the first trimester, when abortion is legal, the baby has all vital organs and a brain to respond to reflexes. So what exactly is legal about killing that life as opposed to 25 weeks when the child has a face and nails and a more developed brain where it becomes worthy of a court battle on the national stage?

The right to life lobby argues that any feticide is fetal homicide or murder. The Pope extends this to the ban on contraception in the assumption that the egg and sperm are potential life. One can then extrapolate to a ban on male masturbation as sperms are lost in ejaculation. If they could control the unconscious reflex of nocturnal emissions, I wonder if they would make a anti wet dream pill mandatory for men?  The problem is always about where we draw the line and whether our reasoning is in tune with the laws of nature.

Then there should be a right to 'quality of life' for which there seems to be no group fighting the cause. Ironic. You fight for the foetus and abandon the child. If one were to look around at beggar children sniffing glue and in a state of complete neglect, malnourished, diseased and abused on a daily basis and reflect on the complete lack of groups like the Greenies and Pro- Lifers or even Animal- Rights or Save the Tiger or Global Warming activists to help them,  you again come to the question  of what moves us and what does not move us as human beings.  There is no 'Save the Child' campaign, no opposition to the Pro- Lifers by a group of Quality of Lifers, who demand the right for children to basic roti, kapda, makan or the duty to not have them at all. I have discussed this before in my blog ‘The Parent Trap’ under Parenting.

Once again if we were to pick up the issue of euthanasia or mercy killing there is tremendous reluctance for legalizing this as we see it as a tool of abuse and extortion or corruption by relatives who might bump off an oldie who is ill but not fatally so. In our earnestness to protect a few we end up putting a large number of terminally ill people who are not only too old but also in great pain from terminating their agony. Again, we choose the rights of some over others. Who gives us the right to do that?  On what basis can we as humans stand on judgement over someone else’s problems when it is not our own?

Hence, the suffering of humanity goes unchecked and unabated. Our amazing capacity to ignore their pain allows us to shake our heads, click our tongues in mock sympathy, and move on. Farmers commit suicides, the girl child is raped, the anemia of  multiple pregnancies in women, horror stories are told of unsupervised orphanages, unrealistic adoption practices keep babies in emotional want even as childless couples yearn to love them, hole-in-the-wall clinics make a killing and corrupt administrations bless them and we have no lobbying, no placards, no sustained media page, no Rights movements to protest.

Actually when I am on the subject of neglect let us look at more killers out there who Protest groups have missed. Passive smoking, noise pollution, road rage, pesticide poisoning; anger, isolation and depression, unbridled urbanization and loss of values, speed and obnoxious economic growth – they are all killers. Anyone heard of groups for these causes?  Sure we fight their end results which could be anything from food poisoning, global warming, infrastructure shortage to terrorism at a bleat level.

We enjoy looking at symptomatic cures like Alcoholic Anonymous, anti –tobacco campaigns, Ban bar- girls groups, anti prostitution laws etc. We are reluctant to look into the deeper malaise that lies at the heart of problems which are given our quick-fix solutions because they are difficult truths to face and require more work than words to be yelled out.  And that, is the essential difference between a Pro-Life and a Quality of Life Activist.  There is a  difference between giving birth and bringing up a child. The difference between an automatic right and an earned privilege.

When I introduce the topic ‘Law’ to 8 year olds I often ask them, if there was anything in the world you could do and no one found out and there were no consequences to your actions,  what would you do? The answers are often innocently mischievous and sometimes out-of-the-box and amusing.

On chat, I find some real answers with real people to that question. Chat is action without consequence and so you can indulge in any form of verbal banter, abuse, diarrhea and slander without anyone finding out who you are.
And the results are amazing. What fascinates me is how this adheres so closely to life.

The community of faceless, nameless people base their words/ moves/ actions on the basic premises that all human communities use: Power – Sex – Clan. The transient nature of the chatroom where a click of the mouse gets you out and away forever, or the ignore button allows you to hide the a person even as he/she  exists for everyone else, (like in science fantasies) adds dimensions to this fundamental areas of human engagement.

Masks allow the person beneath to be of any form or hue. He/she could be snarling, amused, lecherous, bored, wily, conniving but he could put forth a face that is the opposite. The lack of body language and voice allows for gullibility and for misunderstandings galore. In between these, creeps in attitudes and stances that foster groups of dominant and submissive chatizens who prey and are preyed upon. Personal slander, intellectual snobbery, cowardice in appeasing the bully, kowtowing to the verbally astute, envy of those who appear unfazed by the rest, relentless, unbridled propositioning, and brazen soliciting go on with such in-your-face candour that the whole narrative of reticence and self-restraint is written in a new script.

The chutzpah of chat is outrageous and shrouded in cowardice. This gives free rein for every tall claim to be made. Graphic details of what a man is going  do to a female chatter as abuse is spread out before a numb-to-shock audience. The irony is that these are everyday people who are  characters in a charade of make believe. However, the anger, lust, frustrations, envy are palpable and real. Because these nicknames bond and form cliques there is the ‘us’ and ‘them’ syndrome that is operational in chats. Newcomers or purposeful chatters, in order to be noticed and engaged with at a sustained level, therefore dole out more outrage.

There is a reputation to be maintained as personal slander, especially where say-what–you-please is the norm, can amount to grand scale calumny. The irony is that no one really cares. The vain avenger therefore brandishes his whip, uses his caps lock in a shout mode and virtually draws blood to no avail. For people who watch helplessly, what we have here are masks and  handles to cover the real people, who then have virtual identities and  reputations which they attempt to protect by playing safe and avoiding confrontations.

Not even a mask can get the man/woman to be honest about a bully. Fear of bullies is so endemic that there is no hope in real of anyone standing up to obvious evil. Don’t we know that!

Chat is obsessed with age and looks. ‘Old’ and ‘ugly’ are terms of abuse as if such people have no place there. So then, is it a pick up joint? Most men and women would deny that about themselves till they are blue in the face, considering they are there most waking hours,  but still use it as a put-down amongst themselves. The ‘I am Ok but everyone else is a whore or pimp’ is rampant. Many people in life have this problem. The hypocrisy of it is disgusting at worst and amusing at best. The truth about chat is it is not a pick up joint. It is just a place where a lot of bored men and women take a break and yes some get picked up, some actively look to pick up and still others hope there is more to life than their present stations.  

There are serial abusers who are often put on ignore. These men and some women come to vent spleen. They are perhaps marginalised people either in their workplaces or homes who desperately need to be vituperative. Their abuse is like a man standing in the middle of a busy square and screaming  out loud. The strange bit here is those who indulge in this manner do not respect the rights of others to kick them back. They expect the other to be ‘decent’ even as they flaunt their malice. I see such double standards in public and political life.

The power game is played out by the intellectually superior, by those who live abroad and talk down to the desis, by those who are ‘perceived’ to be all male or all female kind, the young against the old, the educated against the not so educated  and so on. Power games with masks are lethal. Most often it is just an obnoxious rant and often pathetic despite the apparent advantage.

Finally men and men and women women in stereotypical contexts. Exceptions to these are resented. Men have sex on their mind and will lure, cajole, flirt and flatter to that end. All roads lead to Rome. Men who are masked certainly reveal their unmasked persona. Again the hypocrisy of: I don’t care what you look like, how old you are, what you do etc is a standard script written  without any cross-referential training. It is like it’s programmed in their genes. It is laughable. The assumption that women on chat have unhappy marriages or are there to mingle is what most men hold as truth as this makes the women easy targets. The conservatism in the Indian male is paradoxically very visible once they are masked.

Some women are vain and soppy, play hard-to-get and when got become clingy, sentimental and needy and once hooked are often ill-treated. Women who stand up to men are either called men in disguise or ugly and old. Therefore, there is a pettiness that is sad.

Often men who come across as sensible and non-abusive will remain silent in the face of others who abuse. They will even befriend these to avoid confrontations. The chivalrous or courageous male is almost non-existent. Life does not throw up many of these either. The dominant alpha male kind who is aggro and spewing invectives is feared by men and women who kowtow to them with a lot of ingratiating lolling (laughing out loud) and yes men ship. The very same people will decry them behind their backs. In real life, it is the same or would we be in this state of moral and ethical penury as a nation?

If you are a people watcher, you will enjoy watching chat. If you observe, you will see many trends in human behaviour that will reflect what you already know from life. What is different is you get to view a stage of men and women interacting on a daily basis and see how they shape up like dramatis personae in a tragi-comedy called Life.  They are masked and this reveals a great deal more than they would ever let you see in real life. So the value of chat to study human psychology, especially the male/female kind, has been under-utilized.

‘Second Life’  is a parallel  virtual world  created on the web where, as expressed in its title, people can have a second life – one in which they play God and choose for themselves identities and personas that have been hitherto only  dreamt of or achieved by  dint of hard labour or genetic happenstance. The lame can walk and the mute can sing. One can get married have kids, do business, own a house and do whatever in the virtual space. To what end? Psychological of course – the feel good factor, the delete button that will erase all flaws of now and allow the person to morph into the stud, the superman/woman, the sex bomb, the whiz kid, the millionaire and have another go. Virtual identities and interactions create real feelings and that is the core substance on which these worlds are sustainable not only in terms of interest but also longevity of engagement.

The computer revolution in India as far as the common man was concerned, began in 1993 – fifteen years ago, when only a smattering of corporate men and women could afford it – thanks to the multinationals they worked in. Then the only function was the email and a few sites which offered what I shall euphemistically call the ‘forbidden’. Today we have so much technology and communication that not only have all things clandestine become possible, but they have also become blasé.

 The chats began in 1996 and again it was for those savvy to the extent possible in a nascent field, where others were still struggling with one finger typing, who could be on the forum and enjoy the luxury or banality of spending hours with a community that must have seemed like second life seems today.

Chatrooms morphed into many things for many people the most common being the presence of women shrouded by tanatalising nicks, never mind some were men in disguise, who could raise  the interest of men who filled the gap with their fantasies. This must have been huge titillation to a lot of repressed men who had little interaction with women socially, especially if they were married, middle aged and adipose. Why even the young, the shy, the reticent would have sought to find that elusive man/ woman in the midst of the crowd stalking the rooms in veils that beckoned.

To be fair there were amongst these people, those who were there to simply meet other people. Though not averse to other pleasures that might serendipitously come their way, they were basically looking for contacts in business or like minded people, be they men or women, to talk to at an intellectual level.

When there is anonymity, the human is a different animal. Like rioting and pilfering when the law is dysfunctional or crisis hit, the masked entity is capable of the kind of culpable behaviour, the kind he would have denied even to himself before the virtual era. The mask unravelled a whole host of desires, behaviours, instincts that were hitherto concealed by the need to be socially accepted in a real world, the id was ready to raise its head.

So, cyber sex, chat rage, power games, serial abusing, cross-dressing, manipulation and in some cases confidence tricks, blackmail and exploitation came to rule chat more than its innocuous label intended. With this, the assumption that only the proverbial loser would be part of chat - be it the pervert, the wastrel, the idle woman, the unemployed man, the sexually starved or the fiend cum manipulator preying on the less fortunate - actually kept most people away from chat rooms.

Yet there was no denying the attractions of escape and sublimation that these rooms made possible. For many who discovered the joys of chatting it was a routine to a full time activity. Many people log on to chat rooms even as they open their mails and remain with chat till the end of day. The new generation of IT young at call centers, BPOs and the like, when put on the bench, bored housewives with time on their hands, young students and retired old men found chat a haven for fulfilling connections.  

The community that emerges from such intermingling that happens on a frequent basis, sometimes everyday, becomes a ‘real’ part of the individual’s life. Sometimes this is a mild interlude that is shrugged off as soon as one logs out and at other times it is a devastating intrusion into thoughts and interactions in the real world. Such individuals experience addiction which forces them to go back to the room and engage in the game of blind man’s buff, sitting for long hours and neglecting their responsibilities to real life. Like all addictions, there is a drain on time, money, energy and emotional well-being.

With this blog I begin my second year on rediffiland. I have enjoyed this experience and built in a year a body of reflections that I am proud of, but more importantly I am delighted by the astonishing number of minds I have met here and interacted with. There is something to be said of the virtual world where one has both the banal and the profound. Like the pond that has the muck and boasts the lotus in its midst, it is in the end what we choose from whatever media that is to our profit. I thank all of you who have engaged with me in this past year for giving me moments of enlightenment, joy and laughter.

Rajesh Talwar will be released today for lack of evidence.

After the lull in the spate of murder stories, the press now has fresh fodder for a few more days with a new angle. And the Talwars will witness the brunt of the collective hypocrisy of our media. Suddenly, overflowing tributes will be paid to their stoicism; their tragedy will be highlighted with an eloquence that will put Sophocles to shame. The Press are likely to jostle, nudge, elbow, shin, kick, shove, beat and do what ever it takes to be ‘breaking news’ an ex-pression akin to and apt in context with ‘breaking wind.’

Yesterday one already saw a preview of that with one channel herding together all the close members of the family for airtime and questioning them on how they coped! A couple of months back they had wondered what the parents “felt” on seeing the dead daughter!! The curiosity of the press is indeed breathtaking when it comes to such cunning investigative questioning and observations. Now they are talking of how they could not imagine what Talwar must have gone through in 50 nights in that cell without the space to mourn for his child!

There were occasional bleats of ‘accountability’ but they were not enough to pepper an egg. The façade of the free press in India exercising its power of being the people’s voice in full-throated glory is alive and well. Thank you.

The main issues ofcourse remain unanswered. The ‘show’ quickly moved on to display  Arushi’s scrapbook beginning with  baby pictures in what they thought was a rare tribute to the dead child. Belated yes, but now is the time to do it for who knows two months back how the whole thing would have turned out. Now it is time to underline the tragedy of the parents and exploit their privacy further.  All of this allows us to walk the sensational path without grappling with the larger question of what should be done with the UP police or the CBI or whoever else investigated this crime and botched it to the point where an innocent man was given a double tragedy in one go.

No research was done on what happens to these agencies in other countries. No comparisons  were drawn.  Is there a law on what should happen next? Don't we need a law to rap the ‘protectors’ of law for their ‘carelessness’? Ofcourse when there are strict guidelines for scientific investigation in developed countries, as opposed to kitchen gossip theories, the fact that it may not be necessary for them to have any measures against failures, is another matter. Here the CBI feel that they can exonerate themselves by saying Krishna the compounder ‘misled’ them and sent them on the wrong track. Hello? That kind of investigation surely my dhobi can do? I wonder what the national exchequer pays to keep these goons in business!

We were subjected to the Director of the CBI – a man who I am sure would have been as bad in Hindi as was in English. His ‘waj’ (was) and hij’(his) and ‘the Arushi’ – was the only thing I could use at the moment to uncharitably jeer in the absence of any kind of punishment that he is likely to come across. His lack of intelligence, his floundering, his indifference to the responsibility that should have been shame-faced were all symptomatic of an apathetic government officer who knows he is never likely to be hel