Friday, July 24, 2009

Security at the airport and VIP status

The news ruckus about the incident where APJ Kalam was frisked in the New Delhi airport has raised several questions about how/why a VIP was being humiliated by being searched by security personnel. While most people expect that if VIP's were to use facilities shared by regular people they would behave so, there are some who think that VIP's are beyond the law. A simple example is the Tirumala temple, every time some VIP comes for darshan be it the President or CM or some mega star, the inner sanctum is closed down faster than you can say Govinda. And people wait in those cages for hours till said VIP makes his/her exit.

Now K.T. Thomas (a former Judge of the Supreme Court of India) comes up with a really witty and thought provoking article in the Chindu about this dichotomy in handling VIP's. I really liked this interesting anecdote or rather conspiracy theory
When Zia-ul Haq was President of Pakistan, he and his baggage were exempted from security-checks. His weakness for ripe mangoes was well-known. It has been reliably theorised that his adversaries managed to have a small packet of mangoes to be included in his cabin baggage, that one of the “mangoes” was in fact a small bomb and that it exploded when the aircraft was air-borne. All the crew-members and passengers in the flight, including the General, were killed in a trice.

Hope we see more of K.T.Thomas in the Chindu in the near future.

2 comments:

web development said...

very important status!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sudhir said...

My sincere apologies if this post looks a brazen attempt to promote my blog, but my intention here is to make sure that interested people need to know the depths to which Sagarika Ghose can stoop with her reasoning ( not that most of us don't know about it :D, she just keeps giving us more opportunities! ).

She conducted a chat on the frisking topic, and when one poor gentleman asked her, "... but don't you think some national figure should be spared from frisking". Madame Sagarika goes bonkers here, and shrieks at the top of her voice "There IS NOTHING WRONG OR HUMULIATING about frisking. NOTHING. ZERO. NO.NOTHING. "

Fine. So I have this question for you Sagarika. Who made this an issue? Who ran headlines saying, "Kalam Frisked", " Kalam Humiliated" ? Who ran this whole news for two full days as if this is a national security concern? The media right? CNN-IBN also right? Why did you hype it up to this extent, and then ask why we are taking this so seriously?!

I have given more examples on her intellectual stupidity with respect to this chat on my blog piece here:

http://serious--fun.blogspot.com/2009/07/sagarika-ghose-never-ceases-to-surprise.html

- Sudhir