A visceral mistake - The downfall of the LTTE

How on earth did this happen to such a ruthless fighting force, led by a master-strategist like Velupillai Prabhakaran? Surely it can’t be anything the Sri Lankans have done

No, the blame for the LTTE’s great debacle lies squarely on the well-padded shoulders of Prabhakaran himself. The simple but awful truth is that he has committed the most heinous sin a guerrilla can ever commit — he has become fat.

Since anybody who made personal remarks about Prabhakaran was summarily executed, nobody advised him to cut out the calories, or to jog.

This isn’t the first time, though, that a revolution has failed because its leader became too fat. The Shining Path band of Maoist guerrillas used to terrorise Peru in the nineties, before their leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured.  Imagine the surprise of the Peruvian army when they saw that the terrorist they had nabbed was not a lean, mean killing machine, but instead a baby-faced, pudgy professor. Those stuffed tortillas topped with cream had taken their toll. They promptly dressed him in clothes with horizontal stripes, so that he would look even wider than he was, and paraded him on TV. That soon killed the movement, because nobody, not even a Peruvian peasant, would want to fight for such a ridiculously fat man.

That goes for all revolutionaries. Would Che Guevara have become such a romantic rebel if he had chubby cheeks and a double chin?

Studies by researchers at Rush University Medical Centre have shown that the accumulation of visceral fat, the kind of fat packed between internal organs at the waistline, is often linked with depression. Could it be that Prabhakaran had become so fat that he became depressed, which, in turn, led to his defeat?

The problem, though, is that she is even fatter than Prabhakaran.