Of espionage, fags and blocks...

Managing a free market is expensive. Rewriting history?

Of espionage, fags and blocks...

Confessions. For years I have been going to his house functions only to listen to his stories. All the small talks with the other guests just bore so quickly; his presence was the motivating factor that draws me there. With his ever-smiling demure and his stories that transport me to a time when my country was a fledgeling confluence of people trying to stand together under the shade of a flag of a country named Malaya, Uncle Kesavan was the reason I was there.
Now aged 84 years old, he is still so passionate about his work that he will painstakingly tell every detail of the time when he was almost working like a secret agent, minus the licence to kill. His team, of the Malaysian Royal Police, was the pioneer in the heeding times of the communist insurgency. They were sent to the UK to learn the then-novel way to intercept communists' radio transmissions. From the stories, or rather life experiences, that he narrated, he must be easily thousands of unsung heroes in this country who are yet to be given due recognition.

He is a living example of how one can give up smoking just at the snuffing of a cigarette butt. It was a time when he was almost in his late 50s that he fulfilled his pilgrimage at a holy shrine in India. Due to pressures of his work and the company that he kept, he was already a chain-smoker, burning 60 sticks a day. Just after completing his religious obligations, after descending the hill that held the diety of his liking, he lit his first 'post-Enlightenment' fag. He felt an instant dislike to it. Thinking that the stick was a defective one and he lit another. And that was the last stick of cigarette that he ever held. He is living proof that willpower alone (maybe with a little divine intervention) can stop any addiction.

Then a few years later, after losing his dear beloved and fulfilling his fatherly duties, he was feeling a little queasy over his chest. To the utter disbelief of the attending medical practitioners, he was diagnosed to have four critical blockages in his coronary vessels. He was labelled by the cardiologists as a walking timebomb, that his situation was precarious and needed urgent intervention. Contrary to his physicians' advice, Uncle Kesavan, by then around 70, decided that his modality of treatment would be masterly inactivity. Despite his doctors' predictions of not lasting Long enough to celebrate the next new year, he defied medical wisdom and is living to tell his stories still, some fifteen years later; perhaps even outliving some of his learned caregivers. Now and then, we have outliers. He must be one. Now aged 84 years young, he is grinning from ear to ear at the launch of his story in a book written by his daughter.