FIFTY SHADES OF ELECTORAL BONDS

I thought was done with jokes linking electoral bonds with James Bond.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

But there are other bonds that bind us, too. With so much controversial talk swirling around the secrecy of the bonds that landed many entities in a soup, there is a natural reminder of Britain's most famous fictional secret agent. The alphanumeric number vested with each bond kind of reminds you of 007.

I see more British links to the issue than the dashing spy, apart from the fundamental truth that the bonds are a bumbling outcome of mixing a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary with our own desi culture of lenadena, in which dhandha (business) gets mixed up with chanda (donations).

I have another English inspiration to understand the confounding bonds-from Winston Churchill's famous radio speech in 1939, when he described Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma".

I am tempted to discuss the electoral bonds with the nuances of the English language, which has three different words to describe a situation that may be intertwined: confidentiality, secrecy and anonymity. Confidentiality, the Cambridge. Dictionary informs, is 'private information being kept secret'. Secrecy, on the other hand, is where 'a piece of information is only known by one person or a few people and should not be told to others'. Anonymity refers to a situation 'in which someone's name is not given or known'.