Unknown Flying Leaders (UFLs)

The Unknown Flying Objects (UFOs) are well-known. But unknown flying leaders are common in the Indian politics.

The Times of India writes (22 August 2009)

Scientists have discovered a critical component of all living things, the amino acid glycine, hiding in comet fragments from far, far away.

NASA says that this discovery aids the hypothesis that some of the ingredients necessary for life originated not right here on Earth, but in distant galaxies, and took the meteorite route to this planet. If this means we're all aliens, that sure explains a lot of things which would otherwise have remained shrouded in mystery.

It's not just a question of the mysterious and therefore inexplicable allure of the Teletubbies, or why we flock to see Steven Spielberg or Rakesh Roshan films to do with visitors from outer space. In October last year a question of great national import was posed and answered in the Rajya Sabha.

Did the Indian government have any information about a UFO strike on a Romanian jet plane? And how was it going to contain this grave existential threat? Minister of state in the PMO at that time, Prithviraj Chavan, decried any knowledge of the existence of UFOs. But the truth, as we all know, is out there.

If further proof were to be found that indeed ETs 'r' us, there could be imponderable consequences on Indian politics. Raj Thackeray, for example, may find it difficult to reconcile his belief in the supremacy of Marathi manoos with the knowledge that they hail from a planet some light years out of Mumbai.

The thousands of UFOs 'spotted' by believers in any given year many claim even to get abducted by them ^ would not seem so strange when one considers our species' intergalactic origins. What we think of as 'abductions' could just be reunions with long-lost extraterrestrial brethren.

The new perspective provided by the discovery that life may have originated elsewhere makes sense of a lot of our literature and films as well. We may need to revisit Men In Black as a prophetic tale about the future.

Then there's the literature which says that the gods of ancient and modern religion were super-advanced aliens who came to Earth and built giant pyramids, scratched incomprehensible symbols in South American fields and made huge sculptures on out-of-the-way islands.

And because such activities mean nothing without an audience to confound, one of their side projects may have involved mucking about with simian DNA to create, well, us.

Not least of all, never let it be said that Indian politicians aren't truly avant-garde or that they do not plan for the future. As the question-and-answer session involving Chavan shows, their concern for the public surpasses the earthly and material.