Canonise this man now!

When news of Osama’s death broke, you could see TV stations and newspaper hounds swooping in, ready to put the Fourth Estate in hyperdrive.

News consumers knew that what they were witnessing was not current affairs. They were witnessing history.

It was one of those days that have 10-year anniversaries down the line, one of those “where-were-you-when-you-heard-the-news” type of days.

It has given the media the sort of back-to-back coverage it wanted, the headlines, pullouts, special reports, and analyses came thick and fast.

Osama started off as an heir to billions, became a soldier, a Western ally, a leader, a caliph, the most wanted man of the year — make that “century”, if you will.

He became shorthand for anti-Western evil, a bearded bandit and, finally, a martyr. The global bogeyman’s network of sleeper agents spanned the globe and was behind more insidious plots than the script writers of the Bold and the Beautiful.

His evil was compounded by the fact that no one really knew how to pronounce the name of his organisation.

True evil confounds the tongue, and every reporter struggled with the second part of the name Al Qaeda, Al Qaida or, perhaps, Al Qa’ida. The saddest part is that he never got to clarify which of these spellings was correct.

Television was meant to be a tool to spread facts and figures, but what it revels in is emotion. That is why they beamed the royal wedding live and went into overdrive after Osama’s death.

Television loves weddings and funerals, and it got one of each in quick succession. Reporters invited us to dance around the grave, telling us that justice had been done.

It was right that they killed a defenceless man in a foreign country because he deserved it. Never before, since Hitler’s suicide, has the shooting of a man in the head been met with such jubilation.

We all know the next blockbuster Hollywood will flog at us will be Operation Decapitate: The Hunt for Bin Laden, featuring Jack Bauer going in solo, armed with just a bent paperclip and a shoestring while draped in the American flag against the full force of the Pakistani military, a slew of suicide bombers, and Denzel Washington starring as Obama.

The movie, as all execrable Hollywood scripts, will be split into three parts to milk the most money out of punters. Osama was found in Pakistan. It had to be Pakistan. Pakistan is not a country, if we were to be completely honest.

It is India, with a crescent where the Wheel of Ashoka should be. Pakistan is a religious sentiment plotted on a map.

It was created under the delusion that Muslims and Hindus cannot co-exist, and its birth only exacerbated religious tensions in a volatile region.

(I wonder why India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan all played in the Cricket World Cup semis when they are essentially the same country).

Pakistan has split in two since its formation and has gone on to become the most Middle Eastern country on earth despite being in the Indian sub-continent.

It has all the problems of the average Middle Eastern country but none of the oil. It harboured the most atrocious mastermind of our age.

No one would touch Osama with a bargepole, even North Korea would think twice before inviting him over. It had to be the country that need not have existed in the first place and is riven with problems it can barely solve.

It had to be the country which receives billions in aid from America to combat him and his followers. Pakistan has lost one of its greatest foreign exchange earners.

As for Obama, a beatification, if he were to become a Catholic, is not out of the question. The hagiography is already being penned. Americans want a tough president with scalps on his mantelpiece and the heads of dictators over his fireplace, and Obama got the biggest prize.

Bush’s deputy tried to share in the glory by claiming the initial groundwork. It was a bit like members of the Moi administration taking credit for Kibaki’s turnaround of a flat-lining economy.