Putin’s creativity: The Yin and Yang of Exodus

Two neighbouring countries, speaking same or similar languages, writing in the same script, and owing allegiance to the same church, having family ties and many inter-marriages – in short like brothers. Well, brothers fight; remember Anil and Mukesh of the Ambani name and fame. They landed up in the Supreme Court. The judges were, for a change, in a good mood. They told the combative, rich brats to go to their mother who will spank their bottoms for being bad boys and make an equitable division of the marbles they were fighting over. Neighbouring countries are always bad boys, a little less so if they are democracies.

Democracies open their borders and then all the walking-on-two-legs pigs intermingle leading to the Orwellian confusion – which is which? Rest of the neighbouring countries, where either or both are not democracies are perennial bad boys. Unfortunately, such brother countries’ mother died long ago in the process of their birth; her heart was plucked out and her body was divided between the new-born brothers. The heart is verry useful as divine food, as the Aztecs had found out. They went to war with neighbouring, brotherly tribes with whom they had no dispute. These Flower Wars had just one goal; to grab a lot of “flowers” to be offered to the Aztec deity, the blood-thirsty Huitzilopochtli. The flowers, actually the PoWs, were marched up the steps of the temple, stretched on a stone, a tecpatl, the obsidian sacrificial knife, was plunged in the chest, the still beating heart was plucked out and fed into the gaping mouth of the deity.

Thus it is that Mother India was split and its heart fed to the god of war, who has been blessing the three parts ever since with fratricidal wars. Of late, Sheikh Hasina went on the democratic path that ensured that she always wins and that the Indo-Bangla frontier witnesses the continuous intermingling of the two-legged pigs, with blessings of ever-welcoming Mamta on this side of the border. The quest to answer “Which is Which?” becomes impossible when the intermingling of Bengalis takes place, leaving only tussles over rashogullas and Nazrul Islam. Nobody minds wars that produce juicy, poetic outcomes.

Yugoslavia, however,  was Balkanised with no trace of democracy  and the brothers born out of the mother’s parts have been on a killing spree ever since. None of them spoke in Bengali and they indulged in some similar but mutually incomprehensible chatter, which was ideal for giving offence to each other. Mother Russia, who married Marx and changed her name to USSR, was also slaughtered and her body produced many brothers, writing in the same script and basking in similar dictatorships. Some of them were adopted by Mother Europe. They became democratic and had intermingling of pigs with democratic neighbours, that allowed any amount of squealing and jostling at the “Common” feeding trough but nothing beyond that. The borders of these democracies with their dictatorship brothers, were as usual, another story.

But we have digressed from the theme of the creative Putin and the Yin and Yang of exodus. Putin loved Mother Russia so much that he now calls his reduced country also Mother Russia and himself the Big Brother that the USSR was. He keeps coaxing and cajoling the smaller brothers to rejoin  so that they can together once again enjoy the Cold War in this era of global warming. He has partially persuaded Georgia, fully convinced Belarus and now he is persuading Ukraine. It is this last persuasive endeavour that gave Putin the opportunity of showing his creativity to the world.

Before Putin too there was an exodus, the first ever, caused by another dictator, the Pharaoh, who chased the Israelis and the sea had to part to frustrate his efforts. Men, women, old, young, all participated in the exodus led by Moses and that has been the rule ever since. Exodus is by divine inspiration and hence discrimination based on gender or age is a sin. But Putin thought there is room for creativity in this theme, his Patriarch Kiril of Moscow and all Rus’ gave the nod and he started his experiment in February this year. As he played the Pharaoh on the Ukraine border, there was no sea to part. Instead, the families parted, as the artist in Putin had planned. Able-bodied men led their families to the border with neighbouring Poland, pushed them across, steeled their hearts and turned back even as the women, now across the border, wailed and and children screamed as their dad walked away. The men promptly reported for military duty to hammer Putin’s forces and the rest is history.

Putin’s friend “without limits”, Xi Jinping had once lectured him on the Yin and Yang principle, the opposites that combine to make the whole. Putin is very scientific and he turned to the physicists in his manger called the Russian Federation. They confirmed that for every particle, there is an anti-particle as is there for every idea. Putin was happy, fed some more goulash to the scientists and came back to his canvas for creating the anti-exodus to the Ukrainian exodus. Alina Kabaeva, his girl friend, who had been morose since the US sanctioned her and froze her visa and properties all over the world, is as creative as Putin. She was an Olympic gymnast and is good at contorting facts and opinions to keep Putin in good humour. “Scare the men into running away, leaving their families behind,” she helpfully suggested. Putin, who always marvelled at her brilliance, promised to compensate her losses by making the biggest villa in the world for her, in Siberia.

The conscription order was promptly issued. Russian men screamed, “We do not want to get killed” and that became the national chant; it had been already practiced by the Russian troops on the frontline, though ineffectively, as they got killed nevertheless. Women folk joined the chorus with their own variation, “We do not want our husbands/ sons/ brothers killed”. Putin’s agents were already descending on the communities with enlistment orders and as they grabbed the few men who were in two minds about the exodus, their women folk wailed, sobbed and screamed, in a repeat of the performance at Ukraine-Poland border. Children stretched their arms for the dad being hustled into the army truck. The agents could get their hands only on a few, as Putin had intended, to see his Yang, the male exodus complement the Yin, the earlier female exodus.

Russian men were driving, flying, cycling and even walking to borders, even with Finland, undeterred by approaching winter’s long night in the arctic. Some hesitated at the border, contemplating going back to their families. Putin ordered black vans to be stationed at the borders, with the word “Enlistment” emblazoned in fluorescent red. The vans reminded the men of the black vans in which the bodies of their friends had arrived after being martyred and were decisive in clinching the decision for the fence sitters.

As reports poured in of Russian men pouring into Turkey, Georgia, Finland, even Albania, wherever they could go without a visa, Putin had the smile of a tiger who had just eaten the lady of Niger who went for a ride on him. The reports spoke of 15 kilometres-long car-queues at the borders, as were there at the other border a few months earlier. As expected, the Yang exodus was opposite of the Yin; in this male exodus, there were no women helping the elderly cross the border or pushing prams with howling babies.