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These days my blogs are replete with images and quotes from religious texts. That is because I was rebuked by a Chief Engineer (Retd) that I was writing nonsense at my age instead of writing of God.
Noblesse Oblige ;)
Tasmaat tvam uttishatha yasho labhasva
Jitva shatroon bhunakshva raajyam samruddham
Mayai vaite nihata: poorvameva
Nimitta maatram bhava savyasaachin
Gita 11-33
Lord Krishna (Bless Him!) is telling the nervous and trembling Arjun, "All you have to do is to go through the motions of the battle. For, I have already killed all of your enemies there assembled on the battlefield. It is a fait accompli. You take the credit and enjoy the fruits of victory"
That is why Gandhari curses Krishna instead of Arjun for slaying all her sons and relatives. She also says that Krishna's Peace Mission to Hastinapur was fake because he had already promised war to Draupadi who was thirsting for a bloody revenge. Another fait accompli.
That there would be war and all Kauravas would be killed and Dharma reestablished by Krishna (dharmasansthaapanaardhaaya sambhavaami yugey yugey) is a foregone conclusion to any reader of Mahabharat, however great a moron he otherwise is. It would have been a miserable anticlimax to the epic if Duryodhan and his friends had agreed to the meek submission of Yudhistir to grant the five Pandavas just five villages to rule.
The endings of all epics are thus faits accompli. No surprises on the last page. It wouldn't do for Paris to meekly return Helen and seek forgiveness.
I haven't read many whodunits but the few I read had predictable endings. The exception was Sherlock Holmes's Speckled Band which I read when I was rather young. That the speckled band could be a venomous serpent was beyond my imagination.
During my father's time, the announcement of the sex of the newborn (It is a BOY!) by the midwife was a nail-biting finish to a long period of suspense. I am told it is not so nowadays (for a price) unless you want to go through the suspense of a lifetime just for the kick of it.
There have been quite a few surprises for me during my long life. That Indira Gandhi would call for election after a swell period of emergency only to lose it badly and end up in jail was the surprise of a lifetime.
Also that the valiant Khans who killed and raped and pillaged by the million would meekly surrender a fully-equipped army of 90000 troops after a show of battle for a mere 12 days was another surprise. Not only for me but also for the residents of our western borderland spoon-fed with tall tales of the invincibility of their mighty army. They have yet to recover from that shocking disgrace. Their nightmare is that India will dismember their nation once again....they don't need India to do it though.
For many of the physicists assembled at Alamogordo, the success of the test explosion must have been a fait accompli...the modeling must have been thorough. Maybe for many of them, its actual use in the battlefield (before it was too late) was also a fait accompli. And many must have recoiled at what they assisted in.
One experiment that was not a fait accompli in the history of physics was Ruhterford's bombardment of gold foil by alpha particles...some of them backfired instead of going through like bullets through butter.
I have been away from the recent excitement of the discovery of the God Particle, so I can't say if it was a fait accompli. I guess it must have been.
Talking of stories, the one by Thurber titled 'The Princess and the Tin Box' foxed me alright...I was not a child when I first read it.
There is this Princess who, from the time she was a year old, had been showered with presents. Her nursery looked like Cartier's window. Her toys were all made of gold or platinum or diamonds or emeralds. She was not permitted to have wooden blocks or china dolls or rubber dogs or linen books, because such materials were considered cheap for the daughter of a king.
When she came of age her father announced a swayamvar in which princes of neighboring kingdoms were asked to bring suitable presents for the princess and she would marry the one whose present she liked best.
Four princes brought (respectively) expensive gifts like gold apple, diamond nightingale, jewel box made of platinum and sapphires, and a gigantic heart made of rubies and pierced by an emerald arrow.
The princess evinced no interest in them.
The fifth prince was the last and the strongest and handsomest of all. But he was poor and so could only bring a small tin box filled with mica and feldspar and hornblende.
She examined this tin box with great interest and squealed with delight for all her life she had been glutted with precious stones and priceless metals, but she had never seen tin before or mica or feldspar or hornblende.
But, when the moment of truth came, she chose the gift of the third prince.
Thurber ends the story with this moral:
All those who thought that the princess would select the tin box filled with worthless stones instead of one of the other gifts will kindly stay after the class and write one hundred times on the blackboard 'I would rather have a hunk of aluminum silicate than a diamond necklace.'
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