A Commentary On "The Debate"

This is a recent commentary and edition on The Debate. 

I look back on all of this as a really humorous experience.  For me it was the Cosmic Theater Of The Absurd.  It was if the master crafter of all souls fused together Samuel Beckett and Peter Sellers to create The Arms Drop.  One night, just after being released from a dirty Indian prison and being placed under house arrest at the A.M. compound, there were rumors that the drums we were hearing were war drums.  There were similar drums many years before when the Bengali Communist government gave the locals alcohol, money and weapons to attack the Ananda Marga monks.  They killed six of them one day and had killed another 100 over the next two decades, according to the A.M. monks.  So there really was reason to be alarmed.  The monks were running for the trains to leave but we were under house arrest and could not leave.  Some monks told us just to make a run to the Nepal border any way we could.  I said we would be state fugitives.  The monk said that at least we would be alive and have a chance.

We still did not know that Ananda Marga was really behind the arms drop.  That came later.  I was being used as a poster boy of innocence and the leaders of AM put me in front of the press to tell my story.  It worked well and we became like local celebrities as people recognized us in public and wanted to meet us because we were "famous."  I think that many really had hoped we were really insurrectionists.   Later, the world discovers the truth after some true culprits were arrested.  It turns out that some A.M. monks bought some weapons in Bulgaria and tried to bring them into India.  The plan was discovered by Interpol and the British MI5 and the whole plot was foiled.  Ananda Marga was seen as a terrorist organization.  So there was all the more need to make some positive propaganda to make AM more favorable in the public eye to prevent an attack from the Bengali communists.  Little did I know I was being used as a pawn in an  insurrection against the Bengali communist regime.  

Even though we had been through so much stress by being so affected by some international coup against the Bengali Communists and under threat of an attack with spears, bows and arrows by some tribal people, our spirits were very high. We had nothing else to do under house arrest but meditate a lot and we were all really very high.  My friends and I made jokes most of that night about how we were going to survive the night.  They said the Texan (myself)should turn our hostel into the Alamo and make one last brave stand like Davy Crocket and the boys, using the guns we were accused of smuggling into the country.  I said that because we were already accused of being terrorists then we should just put panty hose over our heads and just be so freaky that the locals would be scarred of us and run away thinking we were demons.  We knew nothing would happen to us and nothing did.  

Actually, there was a documentary about those events but I could never see it on servers in the U.S. or even in Mexico.  This was just a few years ago, 25 years after The Arms Drop occurred.  One had to use a VPN to see the free documentary online.  Like me, the documentary questioned why the US government was so interested in that affair.  At the same time some Indian journalists, authors, and film-makers interviewed me because they had read The Debate.  I was hoping that their work would not be overly serious nor factual and intellectual, that the movie would have at least some dancing at the end.  All of the main characters in many Indian movies, friend and foe, dance together at the end.  Just imagine those orange-clad clowns dancing with AK47´s while the CIA and MI5 agents boogie alongside them!  I would be brake-dancing.