Published: Apr 12, 2011, 10:58 AM (IST)
Edited: Sep 10, 2014, 07:17 PM (IST)
By Rajesh Ramaswamy
Please note this is a humour article — work of pure fiction
The Bangladesh government informed the US of this dramatic discovery through a CIA covert operative who was officially a ‘cook’ in the consulate, but who everybody knew was a spook, because he forgot regularly to add eggs in his omelettes at diplomatic parties.
In his official despatch to Langley, the CIA spook mentioned , “My source, who is a highly-placed official in the President’s Office, who may or may not be the President, was very rattled and kept mumbling about discovering a WMD in Mirpur. From what I could make of it, the discovery was accidental, or rather occidental, and its provenance was traced to Australia.
According to another high-ranking official who was the president of a body called the BCB, this weapon exploded rather dramatically and destroyed a team of Bangladesh’s best. Best at ‘what’, was not clear, except that they had bowlers – whatever that may be – and that this Australian weapon was a ‘batman’ that had hit their balls into orbit.
When I asked them for a description and how they knew it was Aussie, they said it was large and blonde and smelt of stale beer, and kept muttering ‘Fetch it, mate’ after launching the Bangla missiles into outer space. They kept referring to it as a ‘Watson’, and when I quipped, ‘…as in, Elementary, my dear Watson?” they said it was not elementary, but an elemental force.
Guess they haven’t been brought up on a diet of old Sherlock like we have. Anyway, they have put up their hands and asked for it to be neutralized, or at the very least to use our good offices with the Australian Government (by the way, I know the Asst. Vice-Cook in their embassy pretty well, so I can put in a word) to have the weapon withdrawn, or replaced by a Jason Krejza (probably an inferior grade of plutonium) or else they’d stop exporting Hilsa to them.
They also told us that they’ve solved the question of where the WMDs were hidden and that the US should be thankful. They also suggested that we could show our gratitude by sending our national cricket team to play them in a 24 match ODI series, so their team can regain morale and get confidence back, though I did see the BCB official looking worried and muttering darkly about how this current team might even struggle against us. As a junior case officer, I can only recommend that the Foreign Office look into this and talk to the Aussie minister once he’s sober.
I understand this rare occurrence may take a couple of weeks, so in the meantime I shall keep abreast of the situation and prepare for all contingencies, by practising how to dismantle another Weapon of Mass Distraction, an Indian bomb called ‘Poonam Pandey‘!”
(Rajesh is a former fast bowler who believes he could have been the answer to India’s long prayer for an ‘express’ paceman. He regularly clocked speeds hovering in the late 80’s and occasionally let fly deliveries that touched the 90’s. Unfortunately for him, the selectors were talking ‘mph’, while he was operating in the metric lane with ‘kmph’. But he moved on from that massive disappointment which resulted from what he termed a ‘miscommunication’, and became a communications professional. After a long innings in advertising as a Creative Director, he co-founded a brand consulting firm called Contrabrand. He lives in Chennai and drives down to work in Bangalore…an arrangement that he finds less time consuming and stressful than getting from one end of Bangalore to the other)
