Word: devis
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There are a few exceptions. John McCain has a story. But even McCain's record of war and imprisonment pales beside the story of Phoolan Devi - India's Bandit Queen and Member of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh, assassinated the other day outside her home in New Delhi...
...Devi was born, once upon a time - that is, 38 years ago - of a low-caste family in Uttar Pradesh. Sold into marriage at age 11, she ran away from her brutal husband, and fell in love with a highway robber...
...story says that upper-caste men from Behmai killed her lover, and took Devi prisoner and raped her repeatedly....and that she escaped and formed her own gang, and, by and by, returned to the upper-caste village and took her revenge. It is said she presided over a massacre there of 22 men. They made a movie about her wild, romantic youth - Devi seen with rifle slung across her back, galloping hell for leather across the Gangetic plain...
...might be a little dangerous to suggest that every American politician should have a massacre in his or her background. The massacre in Phoolan Devi's past had the savor of rough justice in it - of victim's revenge. In the case of former Senator and former Navy Seal Bob Kerrey and that dark, problematic night in Viet Nam, we have seen that past massacre cannot play, politically or aesthetically, unless there is a perception of justice...
...George W. Bush's story is a dull one: Not much drama in a long-ago D.W.I., in political inheritance and abstinence from alcohol. In a sublimated and nonviolent way (unless you count the lamp), our nearest version to Phoolan Devi may be....Hillary Clinton. Her defining struggle was Bill Clinton (playing the roles of both her nasty husband and her robber-lover). Standing in (unsatisfactorily) for the robber gang, we have her moral smudges and various adventures ambiguously outside the law--billing records and all of that. But Hillary skipped the massacre, the rifle, the gallop across the plains...