Saturday, October 17, 2015

Pablo raised the bar

I sincerely hope everybody watches Narcos. For a really long time, i felt Breaking Bad was the finest thing that ever happened to fiction on television. Game of Thrones is epic, yes, but what Breaking Bad did is it brought us closer to reality. On the other hand, Narcos, being based on true events, is the closest you'll ever feel to a TV show. To top it all, the narrator (good guy) leads us through the legend of Pablo Escobar. Pablo, who? 
Well, he was the biggest drug mafia that ever was. At par with Al Capone, maybe. El Chapo might have escaped from prison and trolled Donald Trump on Twitter but he is nowhere close to what Pablo was. This Columbian rose from nowhere and ended up as supremo in the field of narcotics. I read about him long time back in an article in Asian Age but i saw more of him in the documentary The Two Escobars (2010). However, after watching Narcos' first season, i can admit that i can understand a bit of his greatness. You see, greatness has nothing to do with good or bad. It flows both ways. If Gandhi was great in his pacifistic ideals, then Hitler was great at his evil executions too. Pablo was great because he could dare to dream bigger than he was programmed to. He killed powerful politicians, blew an airplane, himself murdered hundreds of people purely out of paranoia. He didn't care for anything although it seemed like he cared for the poor. He built them hospitals and schools but at the same time, he was holding a nation at ransom. Which might make you wonder what exactly did he care for. 
Was it money? 
If yes, how much is enough? He was perhaps the richest guy on earth. After all, he was rolling out $60mn every single day! And if that's not convincing, he had more cash than General Motors did at one point of time. And we are talking about late 80s and early 90s here. He had no dearth of cartel enemies but his greatest threats came from the rats who chewed on his hidden moolah. No Swiss banks for him, sorry!
Was it his family? 
It looks like he really loved his wife but that didn't stop him from banging other women. A proper family guy! He loved his children like anything and the same is true for his mother. He indeed respected her. There's a scene in Narcos when he is quietly mourning his cousin's death on the terrace. He has a joint in his hand but as soon as he realizes that his mother is approaching from behind, he throws it away like an obedient son. It doesn't even matter whether that scene is a fiction because in its brief existence, it showed how even the baddestassofalltime turns into a pussy in front of his mother. 

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