On Booing, Shooing and ‘Shoeing’…

We are from the land of ‘non cooperation’ where, we believed that active non-participation can move mountains or at least the British. What we learned from the efficacy of these tools is also the power of such protest and a non-violent way of showing dissent. Well, some of these methods may find takers when the opposition is full of civilized minds but may fall by the wayside when the opposition is paan chewing, red spitting, back and front scratching politician. But methods of protest have always seen the creativity of times!

Bush survived two strong well directed volleys by an Iraqi journalist – much credit to his fitness and reflexes. When you have eight years experience of ‘ducking’ issues, one gets a little talented at this kind of stuff. But I secretly admired Bush’s reflexes when the Iraqi statesman standing next to him did not even blink while Bush was all in parry posture.The sales of the particular shoe model increased thirty fold in the next three months ( are you hearing this Gucci, Jimmy Choo ?).

A blog entry on the Wall street Journal writes “ shortly after the incident, online shoe throwing games were the rage. At http://www.sockandawe.com/ 91,498,174 have already hit Bush in the face and the website is even offering a $1,000 prize for the person who hits the 100,000,000th shoe. The tech freaks at DVICE even did a Top 10 listing of Internet shoe games.” In February earlier in the year, another shoe was hurled at the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the Cambridge University did not find its target. This time the Chinese media panned the coverage and virtually censored the news and the video recording. But the effect remained and the inspiration to all those potential ‘shoe warriors’.

Now our own ‘desi’ shoe throwing incident! I would not call it 'throwing' as our man Jarnail Singh gently tossed it at Mr. Chidambaram who did nothing to duck or evade but still maintained his calm and shot out his innocent smile and asked the security to treat the journalist gently. Well, my lament is that the journo targeted the shoe at Chidambaram who is definitely one of the better political faces we have ,and definitely did not deserve such a demeanor. On the same breath, I also wish some one had shown the shoe at some of the other ‘worthy’ politicians.

While the security let off Jarnail Singh and no official police case was registered ( the Iraqi journo is on a three year jail sentence ) the media and the Sikh groups made a hero out of him. Also interesting was the monetary rewards, job offers and even a Lok Sabha ticket that were offered to him. With such incentives, shoe throwing is here to say. For the concerned security men, this is a new challenge – how does no prevent people from wearing shoes to conferences. Well, they may take a page out of ancient Indian ethos were shoes were always left outside houses and places of worship and encourage conference and meeting invitees to remove their shoes at the entrance of the building. But I pray this will not usher the era of a new protest weapon – smelly socks!