the irony of it all!

Beethoven started losing his hearing when he was in his 20s. He composed his masterpieces later when he was as deaf as a lamppost. This is called irony of fate. I especially like it. Or like when there was a sharp escalation in violence in the Gaza strip almost immediately after Yitzhak Rabin, the then Israeli PM and Yaseer Arafat, the Palestine supremo, were awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1994.

Indira Gandhi, after Operation Bluestar, heightened her 'Z' category security only to be shot dead by her own bodyguards. Instances of irony are everywhere and are captivating, if not compelling. Not all irony is so grim though. Sometimes there is an unmistakable hookup between irony and humour.

Like in June last year, the State of Virginia Employment Agency, which handles unemployment compensation, announced that they would lay off 400 of their employees for lack of work because there werent enough unemployed people to take care of. How I wish something of this sort happens in my country!!

What happens here is equally enchanting though. A friend, pursuing her bachelors, told me teachers in her class ask students to 'tone down' their english because Bangalore University evaluators may not understand their papers well enough to award them decent marks. Laugh out loud! During engineering a friend of mine - a genuinely inquisitive mind - got barred from attending classes because he asked too many questions! No wonder back-benchers flourish in our colleges!

I guess there is no moral of the story. Irony has to be taken with a pinch of salt or, if the situation is tragic, a clench of the teeth. As Andy Dufresne, in 'Shawshank Redemption', would've vouched for when he said, "The funny thing is - on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook."

P.S: Shawshank Redemption is one the best movies if you want to turn philosophical about how ironical life can be!