Osama and Enid Blyton

Everywhere we turn, there is Osama bin Laden, continuing to hit the headlines and blazing out of TV screens. The terrorist and his death is likely to be debated loud and long in the days to come.u00a0

The most interesting aspect of the raid, however, continues to be how Osama lived near the Pakistan military, right under the nose of the people who said they were hunting for him for years, instead of living in the mountains and caves in the wild and lawless regions between Pakistan and Waziristan. Maybe, Osama and his loyalists had stumbled on a fundamental truth, that sometimes the best hiding place is the most obvious one, right in front of your enemy.

It is logic that took me back to a book by children's writer Enid Blyton. Blyton had a book in her series called Five Find Outers and Dog. Five Find Outers was a series that featured five children ufffd Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets along with a dog called Buster was hugely popular in the pre-Harry Potter days.u00a0

A book in the Five Find Outers series called The Mystery of the Missing Necklace sends these amateur sleuths scouting around for a gang of jewel thieves. Burglaries are rampant outside the village of Peterswood and Fatty and his four friends are eager to crack the case. After a number of trails that run cold, Fatty being locked in a cupboard by the gangsters (wish real life could be that harmless!) and fake disguises, the action moves to a wax work museum. The Find Outers are looking for a pearl necklace, which has been stolen. Bets, the youngest of the Find Outers guesses where the necklace would be, saying that if she were the thief, she would hide it in the most obvious of places "a place so in your face that people would not dream of looking there" right around the neck of the statue itself. The Find Outers find out that is just where it was and that is how the mystery was solved, when the Five realised that what they were hunting for, was in front of their eyes itself.

The hunt for Osama was considerably more dangerous and complicated than that of course, but, once again he was hiding rather audaciously, near the Pak military which claimed it was looking for him all these years. On a lighter note, maybe the US troops should have read Enid Blyton. On a more profound note, it makes me think that writers like Enid Blyton are immortal because they understood the human mind so well. The bloody world of Osama and fiction world of Enid Blyton which lit up the lives of so many kids is a strange parallel but sometimes, the twain do meet.