There is no shortage of water in Haiti. Yet, everywhere on the island, Haitians travel for miles to get water, pay dearly for it if they can find it, and sometimes die on their journey to collect it, like so many antelopes snatched by predators on their way to drink. How does a thing like that happen in a country that gets reliably drenched with more than 50 inches (130 cm) of naturally distilled rainwater per year?
It is sad that a nation defined by a great revolution has come to this: the docile copycat of a pseudo-ideological struggle at play elsewhere between globalism and nationalism. It is sad that in the country of Danton, Mirabeau, Montesquieu and de Gaulle millions have become resigned to their fate and submissive like farm animals.
In groups of people there are always bullies who feel entitled, for no particular reason, to want more than the rest and to dominate the others in complete disregard of the common good. Fortunately for convivial people, bullies tend to have the psychological subtlety of dominant male gorillas who beat loudly on their chests and fight over food and females. Therefore bullies often annihilate each other. The more serious social problems occur when they collaborate to gang up on others.
For news of the world, peel away from those who follow the daily offerings of bombings and supposed terror attacks, as bulls in the ring chase a red cape to their ritualistic slaughter. Look instead in places like Haiti, where it is easy to discern the lies from the truth. In such places, where no one appears to be watching, the sanctimonious missionaries do not hide their faces as they morph into kidnappers and pedophiles. The bribes are publicly offered and accepted.
Haiti’s incarceration rate of roughly 100 prisoners per 100,000 citizens in 2016 was the lowest in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, there is a systematic campaign underway for more prisons. Canada and Norway have each given one prison to Haiti. Thanks to prison aid from the United States, three additional prisons have been inaugurated since 2016, and another is under construction.
Death might be the ultimate equalizer, but in the case of David Rockefeller, considerable wealth brought unacceptable privilege and made survival to illness obscene by any moral or even medical ethics standards. On August 24, 2016, David Rockefeller received his 7th heart transplant which made him, besides being the grandson of the United States’ richest man and first billionaire, the worldwide record holder for number of heart transplants. Coincidentally, musician Chuck Berry passed away a couple of days before David Rockefeller.
I finished writing a collection of short-stories, which has appeared as Kafka Sutra, almost after a year of turmoil and obsessive work, in February 2016. Three or four days after I secretly mailed the manuscript to my editors, I still remember how the news left me aghast when I sat down to eat my dinner with the idiot box before my eyes. Some Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students had chanted slogans inside the campus, which they had swiftly denied.
With this collection of short stories, Imtiaz Akhtar makes his bold debut. Kafka Sutra is the sort of book that as a teenager, I would have loved to sneak from my mother’s shelf, and that as a mother, I would secretly enjoy letting my daughter or son whisk away.
“Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.” George Orwell in “Notes on Nationalism” (1945)
