The soda pops

The US did not release photographic evidence of Osama bin Ladens mutilated body out of concerns that it could be inflammatory. Instead,whats being revealed is another picture of the bin Laden who was alive,holed up in a safe house in Abbottabad. As the US administration puts out little details from the huge cache of documents and disks seized in the operation,a carefully calibrated exercise is set in motion where the aim is to unravel Osama and in the process strip him of much of the mystique that surrounded him over the years.

After the initial release of five soundless videos which showed a greying Osama,wrapped in a blanket and stroking a beard,watching himself on television,details have emerged of his domestic life in Abbottabad. Of an ageing man who lived with his many wives and children,whose world was restricted to two rooms and walks in the courtyard and whose couriers delivered,along with thumb drives loaded with information,goats and sheep and,curiously,bottles of Coca-Cola. For a man who so vehemently hated the US,there were incidentally a few American things that he enjoyed: sodas,Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carters book on Palestine.

Osama was extremely careful of the image he projected in the videos relayed to the world: his soft-spoken Arabic and the bearded,messianic face a foil to his message of terror and bloodshed. One of the recently released videos too shows him in a gold robe,with beard dyed black and against a pleasant blue backdrop. However,this new image of a Coke-sipping Osama is hardly the larger-than-life emblem that jihadists would rush to rally around. And this is how an image gets quietly demolished and insidiously replaced by another image.