President of the United Wastes

By Bala Subramanian

This is your unique handbook to become a/the President, and stay, never leave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456626631

Book preview

Why should you read this book ?

Although this book has no precedent, it can show you not only how to become a president, even how to create a new country to preside over if you do not have one if necessary and above all, how never to become an ex-(president).

Vade mecum to the presidency

Have you not dreamt of being a President someday, be it of an association, a club or even the country itself? And have you also not wondered how the incumbent, who is neither your nor anybody else’s ideal president, was able to reach the highest office and continue to hover somewhere up there in the stratosphere?

For a pedestrian commoner, answers to introspective or fatalistic questions like why not me or how about me should normally be available from generic titles like " A complete idiot’s guide to…… or  This and that …for dummies". However a person of your stature, unhesitatingly aiming at nothing less than the lofty presidency, does not belong to this proletarian category because the objective is not the acquisition of passable familiarity with an obscurantist subject from such cheap shortcuts, but the mastery of an unfailing and tested method to achieve absolute executive power, global prominence and dominance. As everyone knows, the opportunity to become a president does not come more than once in a lifetime, if at all, reincarnations excluded. There is no such thing as better luck next time, only total failure followed  by utter oblivion.

The most reliable and eligible author to write a handbook on how to become a president would have to be none other than a president himself of herself, based on personal knowledge and experience of running for and winning the presidency. Not surprisingly, no such book exists for a number of abstruse reasons. Why on earth would any president be willing to divulge and hand over such a topmost state secret, especially if there were re-elections and the risk of such information falling in the hands of a potential rival? Whatever the motivation, a president would never start a book by addressing the citizens who elected her/him as dummies and compete idiots. Books written by and for presidents have tended to be voluminous, autobiographical and expensive but have never devoted even a single page on how to avoid landmines, booby-traps and poisoned chalices or the arts of grapevine and stonewalling.

This book aims to obviate the absence of an authentic presidential version by drawing from the examples of elections and personalities and providing you with an easy to use survival kit. It could be viewed as a receptacle containing all the numbers of a super jackpot. All that the winner would have to do is to select the recipes and proceed to copy, cut and waste.

Happy birthday to you, Mr(s) President!

Fast FW

It is challenge for many authors to write a synopsis of their book in a few salient words and yet to excite, but not give in to the curiosity of the reader as to its theme and how it might end. This book, in conformity to its eponymous title, and contrary to conventional wisdom, deals with the unorthodox and awkward facets of wastes. As such, its writer could be described as a man of litters engrossed in the habit of spilling words deliberately and recalcitrantly and presenting facts as though they had been fabricated and vice versa, or recto verso, if you prefer.

This work is inspired by two oddities: firstly the extraordinary capability of the human being to produce lot more than required of anything, and junk the excesses and garbages out of sight and out of mind; and secondly an enduring electoral system of handing over our freedom to a handful of people called presidents, heads of states or prime ministers and leaving it to them to decide how we should be more obediently more productive. There is little doubt that the time has come for our presidents to preside over our united wastes, instead haranguing about abstract wastes like money or time or energy.

All the places and people in this book could have been authentic but with a view to humanizing them and (en) lightening them, the author has attempted to make them as imaginary and inexistent as possible. Any resemblance therefore, to those you may know or may have known might be because they could have been, or regrettably still are, quite real. This book might even help you to deal with some such people with mostly nothing to do but accustomed to doing it at your place. It is not about love thy neighbor or thy country. It is about waste refusal.

The Black Gazelle

She was a dilapidated bulk carrier making one of her last voyages en route to the final port perhaps in Bangladesh to be ripped apart by bare hands of children of school-going age and converted into scrap iron for foundries. She would have been disqualified as unseaworthy if ever inspected and sink without ceremonial adieu in a matter of minutes, but she had more sentimental value than the cargo in the bellies and the accounting book of her owners. This 30K ton seagoing barge was a pre-war dame with an impressive number of passports and past owners, even from landlocked countries. For this excursion, she was flying the flag of Pangea Plastica, which, if one searched in the list of countries with an ISO number of the United Nations, would turn out to be a missing entity. It could be easily deduced therefore that the current journey was clandestine and that if discovered, she could be impounded forthwith. But the owners were no novices and knew that in the ocean, which was a big place, the best place to hide was on the surface, albeit discretely.  Such outings were inherently risky and therefore always profitable, whether the mission was accomplished or aborted. Perhaps to prove the point, there was only one lifeboat on board, for it was only in ancient mariner’s fables that the captain drowned with the ship.

Coincidentally, the skipper hailed from ancient seafaring nation whose mythological heroes had fought valiant and occasionally vainglorious battles with the evil forces of the ocean. In the patronymic tradition, he was born Dimitriou, as the son, grand-great grandson of sailors with similar sounding names, although, because people did not have much time to pronounce the entire appellation, he had been abbreviated to Captain Dimi with his first name having fallen away somewhere in the water or from memories. One could not call up his name on the Internet because as a loner spending most of the time offshore, he had no affiliation with any social media or even a bank account.  Capt.Dimi was one of the few obscure professional seamen, specializing in secret missions on tramps and vagabond vessels, ferrying undeclared cargo without a manifesto. The ship owners took care of him and the boat he was assigned to and were even proprietors of ship chandlery and repair docks. The crew was never the same but predictably from some far away country whose language Capt. Dimi would not have been even able to use for short greetings or lengthy commands.

The crew for this voyage was mainly Vietnamese. They had started as dockworkers to load 50 kg jute bags of parboiled broken rice by marching on the improvised jetty because the crane had broken down and had stayed on the boat. It was part of a UN tender to supply staple food to an oil-producing African country as humanitarian aid. The boat’s capacity had to be filled within five days, the wages were miserable but there was no dearth of laborers in Ho Chi Minh. They had each a sailor’s passport and were pre-destined to set foot on ground only to climb quickly back into another ship.

This was going to be their night to demonstrate how quickly they could handle the goods lying in the hulks and the innards of this old lady. The fragrances of fresh ginger, tamarind, garlic, spring onion, red chilies and shrimp paste mingled with the smoke of fake Marlboros had started reaching Capt. Dimi’s cabin. But he had a guest on board, incognito, as was the custom.

The night of big breakfasts

For the entire population in this area, it was going to be the start of an eventful night ensued by days of feasting, reunions with family and friends and gift-giving. The summer had been excruciatingly hot, long and dry and had been testing the tenacity of hunger-stricken people to endure hours of fasting and literal starvation. Tonight, all the travails of the past month would be forgotten after the last prayers and a transient joy would permeate before yielding place to the terrible poverty in which all but a few were born.

This part of Africa got swallowed by darkness every day after sunset and apart from a few distant lamps on government buildings somewhere, the occasional headlights of four-wheel drives, and mostly the stars above on a clear evening, getting lost in the desert-invaded hamlets without streets but sandy lanes would not be described as a routine even by the disingenuous locals. This night would be an exception because the moon was sure to be sighted and the big breakfast of Eid-al-Fitr to start by just about the end of the day. Though it was a wasteland of paupers, this was a once a year celebration and opportunity to text the best wishes from their latest model smartphones.

At 15:00 hours, Capt.Dimi ordered the final readiness drill. Although the Black Gazelle had a couple of cranes and a conveyor belt, the type of cargo was unconventional and had to be hand-handled and brought up to the deck in batches. Except in the hull area, because there would be no lighting on the upper surface, the movement had to be carefully rehearsed. According to his calculations, the entire operation would be completed in seven hours time after which the boat would leave before sunrise. The precise time for the unloading to begin would be announced a little after 19:05 hours when the sun would have completely set, to enable the crew to finish dinner and get on with this job without interruptions or breaks.

The Zodiac was in mint condition. It was no speed monster but had a 20 horsepower Ewinrude/Johnson engine and had been designed to withstand turbulent waves and stormy weather. On this day, its destination was just six or seven miles away and on these calm waters and windless afternoon, the trajectory was not more than an hour away. Like the mother ship, this super-dinghy was all black, without a name or any identification. Even its engine serial number had been etched out by laser. It could easily carry four passengers comfortably but its role was to be a lifeboat and today a delivery vehicle for the mysterious passenger aboard. Capt.Dimi instructed it to be rechecked for its onboard instruments, stop switch, oars, and alarm system, lowered down to the water, attached but ready to slide away at the touch of the ignition. The pilot should leave precisely at 16:30 to give himself adequate time to park and secure the boat in the jetty reserved for water-skiers and skate-boarders.

The crew had no clue as to who this stranger was, in what language he and the captain were speaking, why he had to disembark and when he would return. He was wearing greenish Nike sneakers, an Adidas tea-shirt on top which a fluorescent life jacket, mercury-coated Ray-ban sunglasses and carrying a waterproof gym bag when he entered his boat which looked more like a dinghy or canoe. Suddenly, he had disappeared on the starboard side.

The sun’s bathtubs

Capt.Dimi was accustomed to ruminating about a thousand things that were fluttering through his mind with no one to share such thoughts. He had witnessed a thousand sunsets but every one of them had always had a mesmeric effect with his eyes riveted on the slowly disappearing act. This day was particularly astonishing because the sun seemed to have gotten fatter and rounder like a big ball of cheddar that was being taken out of a big bowl of red wine. Like involuntarily peering at a woman’s breast, the sun was right in his field of vision, a fixation of sorts over which he had no control. It was useless to time a sunset with a stopwatch because there were too many fuzzy parameters. It was even more futile to calculate how long it would take to get dark after sunset. The meetings of the sky and the sea, the horizons, twilights, clouds, hazes, rain and innumerable other phenomena were the free episodes reserved to sailors on their lonely sojourns on water.

He knew that when this orangey spherical shape eclipsed into the big bath, the local time would be 19:04 hrs. All he had to do then was to wait for a go-ahead signal from the guy who had just left on the lifeboat. The agreed code was Eid Al Mubarak to notify that all was clear and that the celebration could begin. A second corroborative message would have to be received with the same text on the satellite phone before 21:00 hrs for the operation to commence. There would be no other communication thereafter and if the messages were retraced, they would be too innocuous and uninteresting to incite any further interest.

These precautions were essential in his profession, which in the last few years, consisted of transporting, very often one way, goods of doubtful origin and even less doubtful usage. His people were specialists in disposing of unwanted things, which as in this case included the carrying vessel. While mercantile vessels were plying products from one country to another for resale, redistribution or manufacture, his trade dealt with getting rid of goods that had become obsolete, hazardous, superfluous or simply an embarrassment. Depending on how one interpreted legality, nothing he was involved in was illegitimate, illicit or contraband. Which side is the right or wrong side to drive on a road in France and Great Britain respectively? His carriage never involved human trafficking, arms and ammunition or drugs. He did not want to get up shot to death with a bullet in his head. But he did not also abide by loose and nebulous laws on ethics, conservation of the earth, climate change, responsible cultivation and distribution, social contributions, pensions, compulsory schooling and the like. All he wanted to do was to carry the goods assigned to him from one place to another, aware of what was at stake but without being overly inquisitive. He hated getting into trouble, getting locked up in an aboriginal jail and contriving to escape by pretending to be suffering from a vociferously contagious illness he had inadvertently caught just a few days earlier. However, if the need arose, he was capable of fighting his way through the labyrinths of order and disorder and greasy palms.

The sun was already burning the wafers of the water and was just about to elope when the phone shivered. He did not pick it up because he was not expecting a call but just the coded message. The messenger had arrived and reached ashore. Twilight was letting darkness in.

Baobab Dorf and Resort

In the little known German colonial days, many places in Africa were strictly Deutsch-speaking. Even though reunified Germans used to flock posh holiday sites like the Club Med, there was a lingering nostalgia for places like Swakopmund in Nambia, the then Togoland or Wituland, which unfortunately were lost with the war. The Baobab Dorf, with a capital D, was like a brand new stretched Mercedes in Havana, out of place and incongruous but a real splendor in the squalor just outside. Even a Federal President had once visited this exclusive village and started his speech with what he thought was the very endearing Dear Negroes. This was the place where Germans could feel at home, where the beer would flow and the wurst would roast and nights would grow louder and noisier and strange bed-fellows and girls would move in and out like silhouettes, in goose-step orgies in the background of Bundesliga replayed matches. No one here bothered about waistlines or wasted food or whether the handsomely tall attendants attired in livery really came walking from huts and shantytowns miles away to work. All one had to do after breakfast, lunch or afternoon snack was to splash a bit in one of the seven swimming pools, get sunburnt in the easy chairs and enter into intermittent siestas, with popular newspapers of two-days earlier fluttering in the sand. There was a marina area for water sports but notwithstanding the valiant beach-cleaners, there was no escaping the rubbish and plastic in the sea. There was even an 18-hole golf course but in the absence of water, the desert had built natural bunkers and sand hills and made a mockery of green pastures. Planeloads of vacationers arrived every Saturday from Düsseldorf, Munich and Frankfurt, got into the air-conditioned buses with darkened windows, got down to unpack and left departed after a week or two without even venturing into the local fish market, undoubtedly one of the world’s poorest, where even rotten tomatoes and used shoes and clothing could be seen exhibited on the muddy ground. It was absolute paradise inside the German Dorf and real hell just outside in the African village that must have wished it were colonized.

On one New Year’s eve, just after midnight, two jeep-full of camouflaged jihadists descended at the service gates, walked calmly to the dancing pit and the surrounding bars and open air dining area and opened fire with their Browning machine guns. Bodies were falling, shrieks and howling were getting silenced. It was a bloody mess. The executioners then went on a rampage to hunt and kill everyone in the bungalows. There were no survivors. Nobody had seen anything. The resort’s reservation books, computers, hard disks and backup systems were carefully disconnected and loaded in metal trunks. The final security was to collect the cellphones and empty them of their sim cards and remove their batteries if possible. After the devastation, the firing squad got back into their 4x4 vehicles and left. It took more than three days before anyone noticed the massacre.

It was here that the lifeboat arrived to be tethered to the rusty bridge. The pilot got out, sent the second text message that he had reached the destination, climbed up the steps with his bag and lifted his sunglasses. He knew that this village had been abandoned and closed but was not surprised to be accosted by two gun-wielding, tall men, wearing black masks on what he presumed were black faces, body checked and beckoned to follow them.

Territorial rites and wrongs

To shipowners, oceanographers and governments, international waters are twelve nautical miles from the baseline, beyond the reach of national laws. By convention, there are maritime laws that are murkier than their land-based counterparts to guide and govern the behavior on this vast expanse, although by conventional wisdom most mariners, even if they are not pirates by trade, would know that they should be interpreted loosely and yield place to down-to-earth common sense. The Black Gazelle,was well inside the territorial waters because that was where the action was going to take place. But she was just minutes away from going away from this controllable spectrum. Till the discharge was completed, she had to make some small circles, at slow speed, not straying far away from the depth of 200 meters, where the cargo could be carefully deposited.

Capt.Dimi’s satellite phone shivered and vibrated a second time, with the identical message. There would be no more contact or communication. He erased the last two messages that were identical but could be tagged and traced back if ever something went wrong. There was no movement of any ships, small or big, reported in the vicinity. The coast guard was off duty, but even on working days, their equipment and staff was hardly sufficient to interpolate maritime traffic close to the shore but too far away to do so with any efficiency. This evening, everyone in this part of the world was closeted inside to enjoy the following four days of feasting after a lunar month of fasting.

This boat had been specially but simply equipped.  All the cargo was pre-packed in plastic bags of 50 kgs with 20 inside a loop-type closed jumbo bag. The hatches were foldable and served as platforms on which to deposit the jumbo bags raised by six electrical derricks and hoists. All the three sides, except the stern, were fitted with hinges on the rails on which zinc chutes would be attached at unloading time. The maneuver involved lowering the jumbo bags down the chute, releasing them in the water. During the drills and rehearsals, the rate of discharge had been measured and computed in stevedored man-hours. Unless nothing unforeseen happened, the Black Gazelle could empty herself completely between eight and ten hours and move on as if she had never been there.

It was just an hour past sunset, an ideal time to commence the disemboweling. The remote-controlled hoist did not seem to have a problem to baptize the first bag that disappeared without even a blip. All the side cranes had already been set in motion to keep the ship from tilting. At 05:30, there was nothing left in the Black Gazelle’s belly. There were still some minutes to go before sunrise but it was already time to sail away. Capt.Dimi was very satisfied because the jumbo bags had resisted the impact with water and had not opened up or split up. There