How Can They Miss?

Why I have no respect for shoe throwers

This is what I would like to do—organise a press conference in which the panelists would be Sunil Kumar, Jarnail Singh, Pawan Agarwal, Chandrashekar, Rajmal Saharan and ‘unidentified amateur’. They would be seated behind a desk without footwear and their hands in clear sight. Lording over behind them, in a giant cut-out, would be the snarling photo of Muntadhar al-Zaidi. Since I would be the organiser, I would ask for the first question to be taken and I would also ask the first question, which would be: How the fuck can each one of you miss? And then, I would let my shoe fly at them.

I do understand their limitations. All five are notorious show throwers. Jarnail Singh is the Christopher Columbus of the Indian shoe throwing world. It was to P Chidambaram’s right that his shoe went. Pawan Agarwal was equally impressive in his choice of target—LK Advani. Chandrashekar is suspected to be a drunk and newspaper reports called him a vagabond, but that still does not take away from the merit accruing from flinging one at Karnataka Chief Minister Yeddyurappa. Rajmal Saharan hurled it at Naveen Jindal and I have not even bothered to find out why. Unidentified amateur’s target was Manmohan Singh and he was not close by a mile. Sunil Kumar, the shoe thrower of the hour, is an unqualified disgrace. He was two feet from Janardhan Dwivedi. My neighbour’s three-year-old toddler couldn’t have missed from that distance. And yet, he stood there showing Dwidevi the size of his shoe but not letting go of it.

I can commiserate with al-Zaidi, the man who set the whole thing off by shoeing George Bush. That shoe was bang on target but George Bush was an animal in dodging it. But how is it possible that every Indian shoe thrower is wide of the mark. I think they do it only to get thrashed. I think they deserve to get thrashed. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime-thing. Both in terms of getting the idea, mustering the guts and actually doing it. How can anyone then miss? You are screwed anyway, right? Sunil Kumar is in judicial custody for two weeks and God knows what for. I can’t see him making witnesses hostile (what’s he going to threaten them with—his shoe). But he’s there. If the shoe had landed on Dwivedi’s face, this is exactly where he would be. He would have merited it. I think he should have thrown the shoe.

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