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Wednesday, 5 June 2019

Satish Kumar Talking About Terrorists

Satish says he wishes George Bush or Tony Blair would go to the mountains of Afghanistan and meet Osama Bin Laden. I hope he knows by now that George Bush and Tony Blair are every bit as much a terrorist as Osama Bin Laden.

At 1 min 51 secs there is a burst of interference that sounds similar to the ones you often hear in the UK when there's a mobile phone nearby. It's said that this is something to do with the phone contacting the cellular base station periodically, but I very rarely hear that noise here in Bolivia, except once, in Banais Café in La Paz, and that's what prompted me to throw away my temporary British passport which I had no intention of using anyway.

This story of Satish's reminds of the trip I did canoeing the Cauvery River in India, in 2002, I think. We passed through the territory of the bandit Veerappan, and I was really looking forward to meeting him, and hopefully being kidnapped for a few months or years.


One issue of the UK Canoeist magazine carried a photograph of me on the front cover, with an old man sitting in the prow of the canoe. That photograph was taken when we camped near the village where Veerappan grew up [Correction. It was near Mettur, which is where his family moved to after things became too hot in Gopinatham, the place where he grew up! 😂]. The old man very probably knew Veerappan personally, if he wasn't directly related to him. Whilst searching for the photo, in vain, I discovered this story from May 2012 about two British men, called Ian and Michael, coincidentally, who died canoeing the Cauvery not too far from there. Veerappan was killed in 2004. This is how The Guardian reported it.
"The political connections have to be investigated," said Abdul Kareem, a retired police official from the southern city of Mysore whose son, a policeman, was killed by Veerappan's gang in a 1992 ambush. "If they had caught him alive, lots of secrets would have tumbled out."

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