![My Story: A Lesson from Yasser Arafat](res/uploads/stories/15b5982fe11fb9_peoknihlmjgfq_818.jpeg)
Those were the days when there were only a few avenues for our amusement. Reader’s Digest, the USSR and few Kannada (widely spoken south Indian language) periodicals were our only windows to the outer world. Of course Doordarshan played a major role as it was the sole channel on Indian television.
Whenever I try to recollect those DD (Doordarshan) programmes, a few programmes pop up in my mind even this day. News for deaf and dumb, award winning films on Sunday afternoons, Chitramanjari and of course a news show called The World This Week. The last one has never gone out of my mind.
There is a reason for it as it is entwined with one of my childhood’s mischievous acts. It all began with a news series aired about Palestinian unrest and war against Israel led by Yasser Arafat. What caught my imagination was the use of petrol bombs (PB) by Palestinian youth. Those images of petrol bomb being hurled refused to vanish from my mind.
I honestly fell in love with PBs. My crush for it led me to make one. To my luck I had a neighbor who was more mischievous than I and very cruel in every sense. I passed my idea to him and he instantly agreed to make a PB and experiment with it.
A PB was a simple thing to make. It required very few raw materials. A bottle with a cotton wick, petrol and match box was enough. All these were materials of daily use. Our ground work started with stealing petrol from a parked Luna in a nearby lane.
We picked a bottle from the backyard of my friend’s house. It was a small liquor bottle emptied by his father. It was our Pokhran. We pretended to be great revolutionaries. It was a secret operation.
Our new weapon was ready in hand. We lit the wick and just threw the bottle to theother side of the terrace. Yes, it made a great sound, exploded with great dignity, theyellow mixed with red fire flaring up. It was a good picture of art...a piece of modern art indeed.
Unfortunately, the bottle fell and exploded near the chimney vent. This we realized after my mother ran out of the house screaming in horror. When she was about to light thefire to the gas stove after opening the cylinder valve, our test result came out with a bang.
She thought that the gas cylinder had caught fire. Within no seconds all some neighbors came out for help. But no one realized what exactly had happened.
We hurriedly climbed down from the terrace using the guava tree next to the wall and ran. Although we were happy about successfully test firing the petrol bomb, we had no courage to go back home. Finally, we got back home and there is no need to explain what followed next.
Even after receiving hell at home about our new interest, we maintained the same enthusiasm for another couple of days. We decided to use the weapon somewhere else. Weapons are useless if you don’t have enemies.
We started searching for some enemy to experiment it on. All our enemies were too small for our new discovery. Our desperate search for enemies ended after three daysas we finally found our target. A girl. She was college student and pretty good looking.
The prey was my friend’s choice. She was his classmate in school and had moved to higher classes before getting into college. My friend had been struggling to pass his school exams for two years. Added to that, his bike wheeling and other stunts failed to impress her and she was seeing someone else. It is this matter that made him select that girl as our target. Our intention was not to throw a petrol bomb on her and kill her. We wanted to throw it quite far but visible to her, so that we can show our guts and impress her.
This was the result of mild punishment given to us in our family.
Her college was located in a very calm place. All girl students used to get off at thenearby city bus stop by 9 in the morning. By that time, the whole road used to dance with bright faces of beautiful young girls.
This time we went with a bigger bottle. We waited for the bus to approach the stop. As decided earlier, he smashed the petrol bottle on the road side as the girls stepped down from the bus. The shocked girls scooted away chaotically. We too followed suit.
But this time, the effect was more horrifying than before. The bottle smashed near theelectric transformer which caught fire and was gutted. Adding to our agony, two professors witnessed our act and they were good friends of our family, since it was a university staff quarters.