Stiff-upper-lip police authorities world over surely take a jaundiced view of the kind of narratives dished out by P. G. Wodehouse, holding these to be posing a grave danger to the law and order situation in their respective areas of contol. After all, these espouse the merits of pinching not only policemen’s helmets but also umbrellas, silver cow creamers and such other objects which are dear to their owners. Suave gentlemen, in a hurry to impress a young lass waiting for the rain to stop, think nothing of stealing someone’s umbrella and offering it to the party of the other part. Woolly-headed Lords do not shy away from pocketing a scarab from the collection of American millionaires. Aunts who are not gentlemen keep enticing their nephews to steal cats so as to win an upcoming race. Even members of the porcine species get kidnapped. Cooks get charmed into moving to greener pastures so the lining of the stomach of their prospective employers may continue to be in the pink of health. Gutsy young ladies who are bent upon making insurance companies more spiritual by the latter having to cough up large amounts of claims resort to persuading profesional thieves to steal vintage stamp collections owned by their heart throbs.
Given this singular absence of morals and ethics amongst the characters etched out by Plum, it should come as no surprise that his books are not permitted to be stocked in the libraries of our prisons. This is the only way the prisoners can be reformed and the foundations of our civilization can be stopped from quivering uncontrollably.
Here is a rib-tickling post covering an incident which occurred in one of the jails of India earlier this year, wherein a hapless prisoner was summarily denied a book by the Master.
Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage / Minds innocent and quiet take / That for an hermitage. 17th-century English poet Richard Lovelace from his poem To Althea, from Prison.
My heart goes out to the well-known human rights activist, Gautam Navlakha. I shan’t go into the whys and wherefores or the rights and wrongs pertaining to the justification or otherwise of his confinement in a prison in Mumbai, where he is holed up in a high security cell. Let the lawyers and the judges break their heads over matters that go over my head. That is not part of the mandate I have set for myself in setting out to pen this piece. Reports tell us that he is allowed a 30-minute constitutional ‘in the open space’ and must clean his own cell. So far so bad, but it gets worse and this…
ashokbhatia 
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