Postcard from Europe #5: Love blossoms in unlikely places

This is yet another post from the time when I was living in Germany and traveling around trying to visit every corner of Europe before my return back to US...

This post is not about me or my experiences.  Rather it is the story of the parents of a fellow traveler.  But I was so fascinated by it that it is etched deep in my memory and even today I continue to marvel at it.

I was returning back to Frankfurt on an overnight train from Italy.  A Norwegian girl on the train asked me if the train would stop in Darmstadt (a town south of Frankfurt).  "No", I said, "This is an express train.  But you should have no problem getting a train from Frankfurt.  Why do you want to go there?"  "My grandparents live there".

Now, I was really confused.  Why would a Norwegian girl have grandparents in Germany?  That too so far from Norway?  Something didn't quite add up.  I was definitely not going to dig up a sleeper cell but I didn't stifle my curiosity and asked.  And here is what she said:

My dad was drafted into the German army during World War II when he was a teenager and ended up fighting and getting captured in Norway.  He was in the POW camp when he fell really sick.  Horribly sick.  My mom was a volunteer nurse and it was her job to keep checking on my dad and giving him medicine.  When the war ended, my mom made sure he got sent with a big supply of medicine (he was still not well).  Later, she sent him a care package with more medicine and he wrote to her thanking her.  Later still, he wrote to her that he was now well and hoped to get admission in a university.  Her mom prevailed upon her own father (who happened to be a university professor in Norway) to give this boy admission...

To this day, I cannot explain any of it.  It is such a strange happening - two people on either side of an insanely murderous war find love with each other.  I have wondered what happened to her dad at the university in Norway.  Did he have to hide the fact that he was German?  Did the fellow Norwegian students shun him?  Did his love for this girl/woman keep him going when his spirits were down?  Or was he glad to escape from a ruined country that seemed to have no future?

Either which way, I salute the parents of this girl.  As for the girl, I left her at Frankfurt central train station after making sure she knew which train to take.  I had to get back to the office, it was already 8am!

Seeking Osama bin Laden

In just under 6 months, we are going to mark the 10-year anniversary of a pretty big terrorist attack on USA - known by its numeric moniker - 9/11. Because everyone would be writing about it, this post is trying to beat the crowds.

Back in 2001, most Americans got mad at the terrorists and their brethren. We demanded that their lair be attacked and the terrorists be annihilated. So, we launched a "War on Terror". Our first mission was to find Osama bin Laden, a one-time "friend" of America who had gone renegade and was the mastermind behind 9/11. Somehow this "War on Terror" morphed into "Seek WMD in Iraq" to "Topple Saddam Hussein because he cast an evil eye on W's dad" to "Bring democracy to Iraq by appointing a charlatan as PM" to "We cannot leave now - the helipad on the Embassy's roof is not yet finished".

Meanwhile Osama is busy hiding in some cave. Almost 10 years later we have no clue where he is. Not only he is not in the news, he has been forgotten in the land that he terrorized 10 years back. Today, we are terrorized by bankers and the whole credit crisis (was it brought on by the "Shop till you drop" method of providing support for our troops?).

So, dear readers, if you have a clue where we can find Osama, please send a letter to:

Manager, United States of America

1600 Pennsylvania Ave

Washington DC

Marijuana Control - Capitalism v. Communism

It is now official. Californians would have the opportunity to decriminalize marijuana this November by voting for Proposition 19. I am glad for the opportunity. Why? Well, let me count the ways...

We Americans have a prohibition against marijuana aka weed aka ganja. People believe that it is such a harmful substance that mere controls over it (such as minimum age for use) is not enough. It must be permanently banished from our society. Well, try as we might, it has not disappeared. Despite Billions spent on catching the buyers, sellers, smokers and growers and throwing them in jail, we have not made a dent in the popularity or use of weed. Us taxpayers pay for the jails as well.

In one of my entries, I talked about the underpinnings of capitalism - prices and how they act as signals in the overall system. Do you know why Columbus sailed to the New World? He was trying to get to India where the spices were insanely cheap compared to Europe (think 10,000 times cheaper). Now let us see how different societies handle a scarce resource. Of course, in a capitalist system, the price keeps going up till demand drops to the supply available. Under commandist systems, rationing is often used. If there are 1,000 people in a town and the town has only 1,000 gallons of gasoline, allow everyone to purchase only 1 gallon. Sounds fair but is it?

What would happen is that officially the price of gasoline would remain the same but, informally, the price would skyrocket. People who love to race their hotrods would secretively buy the gasoline from the homebodies. Meanwhile, because the price has not increased in the official market, there is no incentive for anyone to create an alternative to gasoline!

So, what is it we should be doing? Well, for one, we should be looking at our experiences with another prohibition - the one against alcohol - that we had between 1920 and 1933. Thanks to the illegalization, retail value of alcohol shot through the roof and a bunch of gangsters became filthy rich overnight. They not only smuggled whiskey from Canada, they also corrupted our society - paying off police, custom agents, tax officials, district attorneys, judges and any other official they came in contact with - and infected our institutions in ways that took years to recover from. How could they get away with bribing such people? Well, the cost of making alcohol and its retail value were so very disparate that the profits were through the roof. It was easy to bribe people with 100 or 1000 times their salary.

But did the alcohol consumption go down? Well, not really. The rich had their loopholes and sources. The poor had moonshine. The middle class bore the brunt of shootouts. Who won? The gangsters!

We have a similar situation with marijuana. There are drug cartels murdering each other and innocent bystanders and killing police officers just to make sure that they control the drug business. The biggest chink in their armor is legalization - exactly what Prop 19 is going to do.

So, PLEASE go and vote and vote for Prop 19. This is a rare opportunity to right a stupid mistake made more than 2 generations back that we all are paying for ever since.