I’m taking you on a roller coaster ride from Abbottabad through GHQ crossing over to Pentagon on to the White House via Hollywood! It’s a dizzying journey of thousands of miles laced with intelligence leaks, international espionage and silver screen celebrities all bunched into one. The crème de la crème of the marathon is the madness of the world’s rulers. The spotlight is on presidents, past and present, known to be certified maniacs. Our destinies are in their hands, but worry not, we, the world citizens are safe, so we’re being told Some may think the following account is science fiction. No, it isn’t. Its pure logic; no more, no less.

Prologue: With the benefit of foresight, euphemistically called horse sense, the brain cells at times get overly jangly when connecting the dots. Put simply, all I’m trying to say is that in this very space some weeks back, I suggested Hollywood make a movie on Osama with Abbottabad as its location. Second, I conjectured that the tail of the US helicopter could set the creative juices of our military intelligence going. Well, as it turns out, the two comments made part seriously, part innocuously, have now developed legs to stand on. The White House has supposedly leaked sensitive intelligence details of the assault to a Hollywood producer. My writing about it weeks long before this story hit the American newsstands is really not a work of a rocket scientist. It’s a mix of common sense and logic kneaded into virtual reality. Any Hollywood buff could have predicted what I wrote: The movie on Bin Laden will rock the world when it comes out… So, here’s my Einstein-ish idea for our equally Einstein-brained leadership to make quick bucks – hold an open auction to give away the rights to the highest bidder for making a movie on the secret life of Bin Laden. His Abbottabad ‘villa’, along with its bloody refurbishments is ours to keep.

Guard it with your life before Pentagon sends in another Team Six of the Navy SEALS and carts away the house or sends drones to raze it flat to the ground. Time is money, so let’s declare the ‘villa’ out of bounds (especially for the snoopy foreign media). Hang on to the ugly house haunted with Bin Laden’s ghost, until we’ve done the story to death and in the process earned billions of dollars. Pakistan government will have sole propriety rights over the auction… The best place to hold the auction? The chandeliered halls of the Presidency. The ideal auctioneer? Our honourable interior minister. His impressive resume boasts of persuasive skills when selling an idea. He will bag the best deal that Pakistan can hope for.

Sadly Zardari government didn’t take the above advice offered gratis. Guess what? President Obama in the meanwhile seized the opportunity to cash in on the windfall. The movie rights have been auctioned to Sony (alas, where art thou Auctioneer Rehman Malik?) and the White House vaults holding classified information on the Abbottabad assault have been thrown open up to Oscar winning producer Kathryn Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal, both 2009 Academy Award winners for The Hurt Locker. OBL’s movie is said to be released next year coinciding with President Obama’s re-election.

But Obama’s opponents in the Congress are threatening to hold an inquiry in the leak of classified intelligence to Hollywood.Pentagon, CIA and the Defence Department will investigate how Hollywood gained access to covert military operators and clandestine CIA officers. Obama is being accused of promoting “a cinematographic view of history.”

Imagine instead of Obama, it could have been Zardari along with Rehman Malik to bag the unique award for “a cinematographic view of history” during next year’s election campaign that would have swept PPP to victory. Generals Kayani and Pasha too would have regained their lost moment in the sun.

The second brouhaha between Washington and Islamabad is the tail of the fallen helicopter in Bin Laden’s compound. The Americans have finally woken up to the possibility that Pakistan may well have held an exclusive show-and-tell exhibit for its Chinese friends. Such a conclusion is no brain surgery! Even a kid playing with Lego would tear down a toy helicopter out of curiosity and then assemble it back; it’s therefore ridiculous to think that our wonks in the ISI would not do the same. Such was my take many columns ago: Okay if the Americans have stolen the cell phone, what’s the big deal? We have the tail of the Black Hawk downed. While it has been returned to its rightful owner, the Pentagon, we must have Xeroxed the secret data before handing the tail back? I am sure our GHQ whiz kids are as smart as the Pentagon dudes. Is it not time then for the ISPR to leak out the juicy details of the tail and pass them on to a script writer?

And finally to the crème de la crème that I promised my readers. Suspend your disbelief and hear this (crazy) theory of leaders with bipolar and maniac depression being able to handle crisis better than normal leaders: Insanity is the solution; and sanity is the problem in special circumstances. “In times of crisis, we are better off being led by mentally ill leaders than by mentally normal ones… Depression makes leaders more realistic and empathic, and mania makes them more creative and resilient.”

Nassir Ghaemi, author of A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness gives convincing examples of mentally unbalanced people suffering from hyperthymia—a condition of perpetual faint mania, according to the author. Those identified as suffering from it are Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J.F. Kennedy to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, CNN founder Ted Turner, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. All these men have one thing in common: sex. They “slept around” writes Ghaemi.

Writing about Hitler’s constant anxiety and mood episodes, Ghaemi says: “On one occasion, in December 1942, (Hitler) shouted nonstop for three hours” stampeding all the while. The man who murdered six million Jews suffered from “a mood of high-strung vagueness.” In his final two years Hitler was unable to concentrate, he was indecisive, and absent-minded “He probably never experienced a day of normal mood.”

President Abraham Lincoln suffered from depression which “enhanced his political realism,” writes Ghaemi. According to him Lincoln displayed: resilience, creativity, realism and empathy, while a mentally normal person (Obama) tends to be overconfident, uninspired, thin-skinned and soundproofed from the suffering of others.

If Ghaemi, currently the director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts University, is to be believed then Pakistanis have reason to rejoice. Our politicians — federal and provisional ministers — have been known to display bipolar symptoms. The helmsman of the Pakistan ship was diagnosed three years ago by his New York team of psychiatrists as suffering from mental illnesses. The London-based Financial Times broke the story which was immediately picked up by other leading newspapers as well. So we are in good hands.

anjumniaz@rocketmail.com