Fine print

Tenement landlords sue for back rents with voices like the fineprint of loan-contracts.

The Kauravas led by Duryodhana were the villains. His participation was, therefore, for the restoration of righteousness and the defeat of adharma. However, while in broad terms this description of his role is sustainable, the fineprint of his involvement militates against the assumption of any unquestioned ethical clarity.

We’re under no compulsion to say that it is postmodern to be invariably concerned with ‘betrayal’. But there are signs – in postmodernism’s vigilant and diligent regard for local contexts and the contingency of meanings, its eminent ‘lack of trust’ in language as a medium for the representation of truth, its unsleeping attention to the fineprint of what is said, its rigorous aim to search out inconstancy, inconsistency and contradiction, and its express intent on the dismemberment of foundational authority – that we may be on the right track in conceiving of a connection.

Mountbatten may not have influenced the fineprint of the award on any regular basis, but he undoubtedly did inspire some of its vital features.

‘The transactions of this institution are bound by a number of regulations, procedures and operational standards, generally known as the laws of the universe. Basic Newtonian principles, plus a few more recently discovered ones. It’s in the fineprint on the form.’