THE GREAT ESCAPE

THE GREAT ESCAPE

The Trojan War is back in news, the movie Odyssey probably inspired the POTUS to do a Houdini in Turkey recently where he had gone for the NATO summit. Most of us are aware of the Trojan horse trick in the Greek mythological epic Odyssey, where the Greek soldiers hid in the wooden horse and ambushed the Trojans by subterfuge. Trojan these days is associated with computer malware, which too is supposed to lie hidden in the hard disk of the computer, passing vital information to the person who deployed it in the first place. Here too, like the Trojans, we invite it by installing unknown apps lured by some freebie or more often than not porn.

Trump not to be left behind, decided to do his own version of Trojan by switching to the Catering container from his Air Force One, the aim being the same, to con the adversary. In this case the Iranians, who are supposed to be baying for his blood. While Trojan Horse was an offensive act, Trump’s Container was a purely defensive one. One could of course call it chickening out, true to his TACO image. After all where was the bravado in being on the crosshairs of the Iranians, who are thirsty for revenge, after the assassination of their Ayatollah.

Using a decoy is as old as history of humankind and of warfare itself. The demon Marich disguised himself as a golden deer to entice Sita ji, and Ravan  adorned the robes of a Sadhu to abduct her. Shivaji too managed to fool Aurangzeb’s guards by getting into one of the baskets of sweets, which was supposed to be distributed in the temples and to the fakirs and fleeing from the prison in Agra.  ‘Deception’ is not just a tactics employed by the militaries, it is in fact a principle of war. Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese philosopher goes  on to claim that “All warfare is based on deception”. Strategic deception plays a crucial role in warfare.

Dictators are known to use their ‘body double’ as decoy to keep the enemy guessing. In the not so distant past Saddam Hussein was known for training many such proxies for him to confuse the Americans.  Escapes from prisons make for interesting stories. Escape of Netaji Bose from house arrest in Kolkata was another daring feat where the British were caught napping.

 I am sure most of the Gen X would recall the movie “Great Escape”, starring Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and Richard Attenborough amongst several others, a cult classic. Another movie which I recall was “Escape to Victory” starring Pele, Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine and many others, in a fictional story of a daring escape from a Football field during a match between the Allied Prisoners of War and the Nazi Occupying Army.

We were fortunate to have been trainee cadets under  one such legend, Group Captain (then Wing Commander) Dilip  Parulkar,VM,  who masterminded a daring tunnel escape from Rawalpindi Prisoner of War Camp after the 1971 Indo-Pak war. In Mahabharat, the Pandav too escaped from the Lakshagrih (Lac Palace) after being warned by Vidur. Shri Krishn himself is called ‘Ranchhod’, ,meaning someone who scooted from the battlefield, a master of realpolitik, instead of getting into a duel, decided to run away and lure the demon  Kalayavan into a cave, where he was reduced to ashes by King Muchkund’s glaring blaze at having disturbed him in his stupor. “Wisdom is better part of  valour” is often invoked in support of such acts of deceit and deception. Trump now qualifies to be called Rancho, recall Amir Khan’s character, whose name was supposed to be Ranchhod Das Chanched in that Imperial College of Engineering.