There can be very few places on Planet Earth, where you would find a Talib, and a very senior one at that, standing at the cubicle next you in a loo, while you are doing your thing. Kandahar comes to mind, so does Bagram, certainly Peshawar, perhaps Islamabad. The place that certainly does not come to mind is the loo in the lobby at Hotel Grand Hyatt at Bambolim, in Goa.
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef co-ounded the Taliban along with the more famous Mullah Mohammed Omar and two others, in Afghanistan many years back. He was part of the leadership which refused to handover Bin Laden, he took part in the war over Kandahar and Kabul. Perhaps he watched, unconcerned, as his fighters destroyed the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan. He retreated into the dark, narrow caves of Tora Bora as the B-52s overhead pulverised them with their 'bunker-busters'.
This day, however, he was standing next to me and pissing peacefully.
The fantastic event that he had come to attend was Think in Goa, where Tehelka annually collects a bunch of eclectic, extraordinary people from across the world and puts them in front of more than a thousand enthralled listeners. I went there last year and it blew my mind off, I went again this year and it blew away the rest of it.
I will write a series of blogs (hopefully) on this. Robert De Niro was there, so was Amitabh Bachhan and Gary Kasparov, Mary Kom and Priyanka Chopra walked in hand in hand, Medha Patkar and Chidambaram did not, Farhan Akhtar did a jig with Remo, esoteric professors came in to talk about esoteric stuff... But, to me, the signature event in this function was when the good Mullah sat down, hunchbacked and attentive, next to the ex-commander of the CIA for AfPak - Robert Grenier.
It was a fascinating discussion, ably moderated by the brilliant Shoma Chaudhary, and you can watch more of it at www.thinkworks.in. The Mullah impressed people at first, when the impression given was that the Taliban was moving away from its extreme fundamentalist stance, but subsequent conversations revealed him, and them, to be as cussed and uncompromising as they had always been. But he was articulate, forceful and did break a few shibboleths. He also, I noticed, washed his hands and used tissue paper.
Grenier, on the other hand, was bland, colourless, and spoke the party line. Skulking around the room were, I am sure, unobtrusive representatives of the CIA, ISI and the Mossad; and a highly obtrusive DG of the Indian Intelligence Bureau.
Believe me, I was glad they were all there: I am pretty sure that the other unobtrusive presence was a Predator Hawk drone several thousand feet above us, not hurtling its Hellfires down on the Taliban founder, because all these other guys were there...
