Every year throws up new words or old-new words. Like shells, they gleam and resonate on the sands of a dying year. Each word colourcodes the year for you. Each embedded word waves a flag of the times. It was a year that Saddamned not just Saddam Hussein but an ancient civilisation on the banks of the Tigris. A year, which began with weapons inspectors looking for the missing WMD in inscrutable desert sands and the murder cry ‘‘Whack Iraq’’ echoing through UN chambers, ended with the former Iraqi president getting his head examined by the Pentagon’s immaculately gloved hands. We’ve got him, they said, out of his rat hole. But the jury is still out on who the real rats were, because it was year that saw a great deal of of sexing up, lies, and duct tape. They flattened Iraq sufficiently to ensure that Halliburton would roll in greenbacks for all eternity. These indeed were the real targets of opportunity, which continue to shock and awe. When the museums were sacked, it was dismissed in Rumsfeldian — ‘‘Stuff happens.’’ Indeed stuff did happen. George ‘Dubya’ Bush even got to eat a rubber turkey in Iraq during Thanksgiving while looking for a hot meal — and a second term. As they say in Xanax cowboyspeak: you are either with us or you are cheese eating surrender monkeys who are part of the axis of weasels and you won’t get lucrative contracts, so there! Elsewhere they fought another war, call it SARS Wars if you will, with China and Southeast Asia being trundled to a hospital bed, masks and all. Where it came from, nobody knew, but people quietly died by the hundreds. Somewhere between heaven and earth, there were other deaths too as space shuttle Columbia disintegrated into grey streaks in the sky. It took the life of a remarkable woman who had rocketed her way from Karnal to Cape Canaveral. Kalpana Chawla fired the imaginations of thousands of Indian schoolgirls. Her quest for the unreachable recalled another quest undertaken 100 year earlier: the Wright quest to fly. And then there was the conquest of the Everest. The world celebrated the Hillary-Tenzing assent 50 years earlier with champagne and celebratory climbs to the fabled peak and somewhere it was also a celebration of a universe that scientists informed us was exactly 13.7 billion years old. Meanwhile, back home, Mayawati discovered that power was really all maya. One day, you have UP in your hands and a three-tier birthday cake to cut, on another you are walking through the Taj Heritage Corridor of notoriety, accused and alone. But speaking of cakes, Hanumanji was obviously pleased with Uma Bharti’s baked offerings and brought her to power in MP. But the God, they say, who really mattered was the BSP God, or the presiding deity of bijli, sadak, pani, who brought a female trinity to power in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Another, the Amma of Fort St George, not content with having poor Vaiko in her dungeons, tried to get the editors of The Hindu in there too — fortunately with less luck. There were others, too, who groped their way to famous electoral victories. Terminator Schwarzenegger proved that even robots with overactive gonads can become California’s governor. It was a year when Loh Purush was pitted against Vikas Purush, and the Heterosexual Man got competition from the Metrosexual Man. A year when the nation’s Bahu No 1 found the ground shifting from under her feet and when Baby Noor Fatima got herself a happy heart. It was year when India proved that it could Cancun and play the global trade game and when Goldman Sachs decided the country could even emerge a economic powerhouse. But Shining India lost some of its shine when it was learnt that there was a stamp paper scam, so enormous that it was unfathomable and a cash-on-camera scandal involving a Union minister, no less. If the Judeo-Jogi moment marked the private squalor of the country’s public life, the murder of IIT-trained Satyendra Dubey after he had exposed the dirty deals that marked the execution of the Golden Quadrilateral, the prime minister’s pet highway project, underlined just why the system hates its whistle-blowers. But you can’t keep a good man down. Somewhere, it was Satyendra Jayate. The message of the moment was: that if we don’t clean up, we get cleaned out. Today. Kal ho naa ho.
