K Raveendran
In the lush greenery of Kerala, where the backwaters meet the sky, there’s a whisper among the coconut palms. It’s about the tagline “God’s Own Country,” a clever bit of branding done by an ad agency for Kerala Tourism that has stuck so well, even the heavens above have given it a celestial nod of approval.
Imagine the scene: celestial beings gathered around a cosmic conference table, nodding sagely as they stamp the divine seal on Kerala’s tourism brochure. “Yes, yes, this will do,” they murmur, as they pass around tender coconut water, the official drink of divine endorsement meetings.
On the ground, however, there is a terrestrial twist. Kerala’s subjects, heavily loaded with their super ego and sense of pride, go about their lives, buoyed by the idea that they’re living in a land so favoured by the gods. They navigate the potholed roads with the patience of saints, telling themselves that perhaps this is just a divine test of the suspension systems of their vehicles. They face the monsoons with the resilience of mythic heroes and embark on daring rescue missions that are even beyond the dreams of their counterparts in other states.
They face power cuts in the sweltering heat but take in their stride as divine punishment for electing a government for a second time despite a hundred reasons for not doing so and breaking a time-tested pattern of alternating governments.
But even while punishing the people for their unpardonable sin, God has been defending His own government. Just like governor Arif Mohammed Khan has no hesitation to call the Pinarayi Vijayan government as his own while delivering the address to the assembly ahead of the budget session despite his constant fight with the Pinarayi establishment on the campus and SFI activists off it. God has been a stickler when it comes to the constitutional implications of his benediction.
Whenever, His government faced trouble on account of its own omissions and commissions, God intervened to protect it by sending out the elements. For instance, when Swapna Suresh, a woman with a name destined for intrigue and ambition, dared the government to release CCTV footage from the Cluff House, the CM residence whose name sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for a clandestine meeting spot. Her audacity? To prove she had been dropping by the Chief Minister’s residence to brainstorm ingenious ways to promote his daughter’s business empire.
Naturally, the brazen challenge couldn’t go unanswered. And that came in the form of divine intervention. A well-placed lightning bolt zapped the recorder, conveniently blanking all its contents. A subtle message to this as well as all future Swapna Surseshs.
It was ditto at the state secretariat when incriminating documents were facing the risk of exposure. A fire ravaged the records room. God has his own ways of doing things! (Who else meticulously arranges the fall of every sparrow?) To avoid any suggestion of celestial trail, a charred liquor bottle was made to appear on the scene. Pyrotechnics is a favourite pastime up there.
God’s hands, though invisible, were again there when a non-age mayor and her MLA husband created a scene on pubic road, waylaying a KSRTC bus and its driver along with a dozen passengers. Now, the details of their nocturnal escapade will ever remain shrouded in divine amnesia as He performed a vanishing trick, causing the memory card of the cameras on the bus to disappear. Magician P C Sorkar is said to have made a train disappear, but there is no previous record of anyone performing the vanishing trick with a memory card.
