The Hindu Business Line : Between two <I>purush-s </I>

IT often happens with hurried resignations and messy dismissals - that they simply don't work, as in the case of Khurana. Gore Vidal said that democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. And that, perhaps, applies to parties too where, after much hullabaloo, everything is back to square one.

H.L. Mencken is of the view that under democracy, "one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right." But the comedy that we regularly see closer home is about one party or the other that devotes energies to prove that it is simply unfit for any serious work. The tragedy, however, happens at the ballot box when the voting public fails to recall the several antics it had been entertained with.

"Ninety per cent of the politicians give the other 10 per cent a bad reputation," said Henry A. Kissinger, and I think he may be closer to the truth with a 99-1 split.

Though the target of recent drama has been `a loyal soldier' who had volunteered to be the pujari, in the context of the fight between two titans of purush material, there may be more than what meets the eye, on who gave bad reputation to who.

What's funny is that we keep hearing the word discipline bandied about quite freely. `Discipline is not a nasty word,' Pat Riley assures, but it seems the word is finding use in wide-of-the-mark places. Isn't it odd when you hear kettles calling pots black? "Call for our chiefest men of discipline, to cull the plots of best advantages," declares King Philip in the Bard's King John, but that's not directed at netas, who nevertheless can be depended upon for the best of plots. Yet, indiscipline too has its limit, they'd say. For, when K breached that, hardliners should have rebuked him, "Speaking too loud, or tainting his discipline," using Iago's line from Othello.

"Discipline come not near thee," they might have added, for effects' sake, as Thersites does in Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps, somebody from the Sangh would have goaded them with, "the military discipline; that is the point," picking up from King Henry V.

Or worse, supplied them with this snatch: "Put him to execution; for discipline ought to be used"!

That's when expulsion came. "With variable objects shall expel this something-settled matter," is a helpful line from Hamlet, though Burgundy would have protested, "Should not expel these inconveniences," as in King Henry V.

That was not all. "More hateful than the foul expulsion," as Cymbeline states, we had the anti-climax with the quick withdrawal of expulsion. "As rash in the repeal, as hasty to expel him thence," Aufidius explains aptly in Coriolanus.

But Prospero of The Tempest would join in the repair work, "Flesh and blood, you, brother mine, that entertain'd ambition, expell'd remorse and nature... whose inward pinches therefore are most strong... I do forgive thee, Unnatural though thou art." As for Khurana, the play is not over, so we can expect to see more action after the intermission.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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