Tamil Cooks

“You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information.” Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB officer who defected to the West in 1970 – speaking in an interview with Ed Griffin in 1983. He wasn't talking about Tamil cooks!

Yuri Bezmenov's main message was that much of US society had been psychologically subverted by systematic and deliberate propaganda techniques for over twenty years and was now virtually capable of only Pavlovian patterns of behaviour designed to produce the conditions from which it would easily be possible to critically destabilize the nation. He claimed half-baked, drug-affected, or cycnical and demoralized people with a type of 'programmed education' had risen to all the control structures and social and bureaucratic positions of power, and that there was no longer any means by which the country could any more access its own common sense or rational thought or logic or real human social awareness.

Some of Bezmenov's writing (and recorded public speaking) refers to the years he spent as a KGB agent interfering with the social, economic and political panorama of India. I personally think that a worldwide common impression now of 'Indian people' as avaricious, corruptible, treacherous, middle-class social and mercantile graspers - bespeaks for the utter, comprehensive, success of the KGB's plan for recruiting and grooming and financially-supporting anyone who showed those traits so that they would more let's say 'competitively' rise to positions of power in every walk of life in India.

Surely, Gandhi ought to have been what we most readily associate with the face of the ordinary Indian personality and character traits... Or at least, powerfully alongside any vision of the unworthy type of Indian individual?

Oh dear. I think Bezmenov could have been rather more correct than makes me feel comfortable.

Some of my family being high up in Shell Far East post-World War II, I spent some time growing up in places like Malaysia (or Malaya, in those days) and it was there around the age of ten that I met the gentleman in this picture. I recall he let me feel around on the area of his head (to prove it) where he had a metal plate – the result of battle injury –, demanding little so-and-so that I of course was! And for which generosity I let him call the orders out for when I had my small 'toy' cannon arrayed, and ready to fire. I recall he was quite thrilled that I had one tiny little piece that actually fired wadding out with the exploding of a small cordite charge. I remind you that by 'cannon' I do mean plural; that is, several cannon. This is the English language, you see. Odd thing, isn't it.

Lt. General Harbakhsh Singh (late). An amazing man.

When I am bored with the banality of modern life, I cook a curry. And I am very good at cooking curries as I grew up with Tamil house staff – who later, by the way, went on to Washington with the American Ambassador when my father and mother decided to retire to a quieter Australian life, away from the embassy party circuit and the twenty-one course Chinese dinners a million light years before the BRIC glamour... And now you know why I smile in my photographs; nothing ever changes. I've seen it all before and I know how it all ends. How it always ends.

Ten was a true vintage year for me – I met J.Paul Getty on the steps of Raffles Singapore that year too. You can't Obama or Bill Gates me none. They are nothing people in a nothing age compared to what has gone before. And they don't have Tamil cooks. A big point. Programmed Pavlovian Australians don't want Tamil boat people, apparently. Why, Malaysians don't even want Tamil cooks now! You have billions (or you owe billions) but you don't have a Tamil cook??! Ridiculous.

All the best,

OMSF.