Vote to Boot

The general elections in India are fast approaching and they will decide which MPs get booted out of the parliament, in fact the process may have already begun with two of our MPs already getting "the boot" last week. While this form of protest seems to be fast gaining popularity since the attack on President Bush during his Iraq visit, the origin of "shoeing" away one's opponents may be traced back to 18th century France.

It is believed that during the Industrial Revolution in France workers employed at power looms used to express their dissatisfaction with work by throwing their wooden shoes called sabots at their machinery - this used to lead to a temporary disruption of work or in the worst case, to the failure of the machinery. This act of using sabots to cause a deliberate disruption in a system came to be known as sabotage. So in a way Mr. Jarnail Singh and Mr. Rajmal Singh Saharan have to some extent sabotaged the efforts of Mr. P Chidambaram and Mr. Naveen Jindal in the run up to the elections. While Mr. Chidambaram handled the entire incident rather gracefully, the flying footwear did lead to a brief unrest in Mr. Jindal's meeting. It is interesting to note that both Mr. Jindal and Mr. Chidambaram are MPs from Congress which dates back to as far as 1885 and saw its first split in the 1907 Surat session. During the Surat session, the Congress split into moderates and the extremists and one of the first victims of the extremists was Sir Pherozshah Mehta who found himself sitting in the trajectory of an airborne footwear. Sir Mehta however was not the sole target of the projectile as it had apparently brushed Mr Surendranath Banerjee as well.

It would seem that people's ability to guide the shoes towards their intended victims has grossly deteriorated since 1907, which I feel is a blessing. For, though this form of protest is rampant in most parts of India and the recent attacks on our political leader has only popularized it further; this sort of vigilantism is unacceptable and laws should be made to deter individuals from using this form of protest as a popular means of venting out their frustration. At the same time having laws to prevent a common citizen from throwing objects at other citizens and politicians will smell of hypocrisy if we continue to see scenes of flying mikes and chairs and bleeding ministers in our parliament and state assemblies. Though as a democracy we enjoy the freedom of expression, one also needs to realize that flinging a shoe at someone will not solve our problems and that is the reason there are elections every five years - to give us the opportunity to express our unhappiness with the incumbent and elect someone who will deliver. In the end the ballot is mightier than the sneaker.

Crime and Penitence: The mind of a murderer

Humans have recognized the need for protection from as long as they have recognized the need for survival, which is to say forever. However as the human brain evolved, people realized that to be protected, they need not constrain their own movements, they can rather restrain the movements of those from whom they seek protection. So in the process of evolution, man discovered that caves provided good shelters; invented traps that kill and traps that facilitated taking prisoners. With prisoners, came the need for cages and prisons.

Prisons were effective in restricting the movements of the ones who posed a threat, however the prisoners behind the bars had a brain of the same size as we do and hence orchestrated prison breaks which exposed the lacunae in the system. Higher walls were built, however prisoners also found innovative ways of scaling them. This game of constant one upmanship led to the present form of prisons - a sort of high security detention camps. Halliburton built one such camp at Gitmo and if they felt that putting it together was a challenge, they should wait and see what a challenge it would be to take it apart. President Obama, however seems resolute in his decision to close Gitmo, in fact during his recent visit to France he has also received support from President Sarkozy, who has offered to take in one of the prisoners connected with France.

Science has progressed a long way since the caveman invented the rudimentary traps. Tranquilizers, truth serums, pepper sprays have been used as effective agents to momentarily subdue our opponents, thus providing us the window of opportunity to rein them in. The field of medicine has seen great strides being made towards the cure of several ailments and afflictions - can we for the sake of convenience consider the drive of an individual to commit a crime, as an affliction and see if the solution to having smaller prisons might come from of all the places, the field of medicine. Be it a serial killer, a rapist or a hard core terrorist, there has to be a common cause for their actions against the society. Interestingly the reason some people kill may be the same the reason some others save lives - because it makes them happy.

Every action of ours is driven by the same intent, the quest to find maximum happiness or least sadness. Like the laws of chemistry say that every system will try to attain the minimum energy, it is human tendency to perform actions that they feel will provide maximum happiness, therefore peace. This explanation however, may not apply for individuals with psychological or physiological abnormalities.

A psychological abnormality may be as simple as irrational thoughts - Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet are examples of people who's irrational thought have led to war crimes and genocides; leadership combined with irrational thoughts led to the sheer numbers of deaths these individuals are responsible for. And while these leaders may not have personally carried out murders, there are others with similar psychological conditions who kill on their own. The Boston strangler, Jack the ripper, Charles Sobhraj have all been personified in movies in their respective countries; this shows the extent of terror the citizens experienced while these serial killers were on the prowl. I am hoping that medical science unveils a solution for identifying and curing these abnormal psychological conditions in individuals, so that we see fewer megalomaniacs and serial killers and thus spend fewer tax payers' dollars in building high security prisons.

While a psychological abnormality is what drives people to plot mass murders, a physiological abnormality may be the reason people are driven to kill. Killing "In a fit of rage" is caused by elevated hormone levels and while some people are prone to occasional increase in the level of hormones, thus committing one-off offences, there are others who are prone to more frequent violent behavior due to a constantly high level of hormones. A common psychological vulnerability in individuals with physiological disorders can be successfully exploited to turn them into the perfect killing machines - that weakness is the susceptibility to being influenced. Like glass can be used to focus the rays of the sun to burn a hole in paper, effective influence can be used to turn aggressive individuals towards committing mass murders. A majority of individuals, involved in executing war crimes or militant activities would belong to this category, since display of aggression is controlled by physiological factors.

Every year millions of dollars are spend worldwide to hold persons with a history of violent behavior. The reason for holding them may be - to punish them for the crime and thus make them repent their actions, to give them time to rehabilitate, to prevent them from causing further harm to the society. However if medical science can convincingly prove that physiological disorders are akin to afflictions and can find a way to suppress the factors causing these disorders in individuals, will we see a day when hardcore criminals are merely treated for their crimes and given a chance to get back to society? In utopia, yes; in the real world, no; but looking at the pain these individuals have caused to their victims, it is unreasonable to expect that the popular sentiment in the society will be one of forgiveness. While Gitmo will slowly fade into history, we will see more walls, more bars, more shackles and more guards.