Honourable MPs with red cockscombs and wattles cackling endlessly about chicken recipes and heating up a huge 'Privilege' tandoor.
In the spare time he is penning 'Chicken Zen: A linguistic guide to naive and seasoned diplomats'. A whole chapter in the primer is dedicated to fowl metaphors.
Perhaps Sen should play it cool. He should be telling all those MP's baying for his blood that that being a headless chicken is not that bad after all. Especially, in India. Perhaps he should write a letter to the Ministry of Sports to help organise an annual 'headless chicken race' for politicians and journalists.
He could extensively quote from the inspiring story of Mike, a young Wyandotte rooster from Fruita, Colarado who escaped being the dinner of a farmer Lloyd Olsen in the year 1945.
For all those who haven't heard, the story: Olsen dreaming of a pot of chicken cooked by his wife Clara tried to chop of Mike's head using an axe, but missed it by more than a few proverbial whiskers. The only things intact in the head-part of Mike after the botched butchering job where a single ear and part of the brain stem.
The physically challenged fowl flapped around miraculously for another 18 months pecking for grains and worms and earning the poor farmer some $4500 every month.
It's inspiring to know there is hope, even if you have lost your mind.
But if somebody thought the business chicken had with things nuclear ended with a diplomat's linguistic misadventure they are thoroughly mistaken.
It was as if your world suddenly turned into a coop, teeming with millions of chicken. Some with their heads intact, others with their limbs missing.
As the N-deal between India and the US was being hammered out, a new species called homo-gallus was invading our broadcast and print space.
One theory that went around was that this Gallusean invasion because too much of chicken is being served in the parties hosted by diplomats and politicians, where pork and the beef are considered a taboo. Does eating too much headless chicken make you one? We are afterall what we eat.
Statements and counter statements started ruffling feathers. It suddenly became fashionable for page three queens and even the chics who walk the ramp to peck at the N-issue. Manmohan Singh too was feeling hen-pecked by Prakash Karat.
Columnists said the whole spat was over the style of prepearing chicken: ie Cantonese vs Kentucky Fried and nothing more. Nobody was reading the hapless chicken's horoscope.
The Left didn't quote Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, but said Manmohan Singh was submitting his scalp and the nation for a peck from a bird of higher rank. Karat was having dreams of painted chics being snatched by an imperialist eagle.
To top it all the UPA and the Left started playing the game of Chicken (Hawk-Dove) in Game Theory. A metaphor for a situation where two parties engage in a showdown, despite the fact that the outcome where neither person yields is the worst possible one for both players. Only their pride stops from backing down.
In the game playing Dove is equivalent to threat displays (Left's posture of withdrawng support to the government). According to the Game Theory if both the players choose the Hawk strategy, they have to fight until one of them wins. If both players adopt a Dove strategy, there is a tie. But the payoffs for the players are lower.
The tussle between the UPA and the Left over the N-deal issue acquired the character of 'War of attrition' model rather than a game of 'Chicken' at a later stage. Though both the games are models of escalation of conflict, they differ in the form in which the conflict gets escalated.
The outcome of a 'Chicken' game might not be agreeable for the contestants: it's either life or death.
The 'War of attrition' game models a situation in which the outcomes differ only in degrees. Think of contestants in a reality TV show having to decide whether the prize is worth the cost of risk they have to take.
With this realisation came the final 'chickening out' and the discovery that the N-deal is no Big deal. I don't mind catching Alektorphobia for a while. Do you?
