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Leech Walenchka......Poland’s hero

By Prakash Subbarao

I wrote this article, as you can see from the date below, on 21st March 2004. It was written for a friend of mine named Ana.

Ana is a Polish girl in her early twenties. She shares the love of Dubai with me. Though we have never met, we became good friends via the Internet.

Ana’s story is a sad one. She fell in love with an Arab over the Net and visited Dubai at his invitation. To cut a long story short, she realised that he was already married and felt badly cheated. She went back to Poland and used to cry every day at the bad luck that had befallen her.

We met when she became a member of “Dubai Discussions”, a Yahoo Group that I ran a few years ago. She posted her story on Dubai Discussions and amazingly there were several other women who had suffered similar fates in Dubai!

Ana was very depressed one day and to add insult to injury, she had suffered a fall and had a few cracked ribs. She was in bed and miserable and I wrote the below piece to cheer her up and make her laugh. The story is based on a fictional miner called “Walenchka” (not to be confused with Poland’s Nobel winning Walesa). The article spoofs him, though.

She told me that it helped her and whenever she felt low, she would read the article.

Happiness has now found Ana. She was a stewardess with Etihad but has resigned. She will be going to Toronto to study further.

Prakash

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Date: Sun Mar 21, 2004 10:53 pm

Subject: The Story of Leech Walenchka

Hi Ana!

Here is something to cheer you up!

Leech Walenchka burst into the world spotlight in 1980 during the infamous liquor strike in Gdansk, Poland. Workers, incensed by an increase in prices of beer, were demanding the right to set up their own stills and distilleries.

On Aug. 14, Leech Walenchka, a miner who had long been active in the underground labor movement, (meaning that most of the time he was under the ground and used to actively telephone his colleagues on the surface to let them know his views) arrived at the barricaded pub just as the dispirited workers (no pun intended) were on the verge of abandoning their illicit liquor stills. Scaling the pub walls, he delivered a stirring speech from atop a bar stool.

Revitalized by his drunken passion, the strike spread to liquor outlets across the nation. Christened "Beer or bust," the strike became a drunken revolution.

Walenchka entered into negotiations with the government, convincing it to grant legal recognition to drunkenness and the right to form unholy unions with the Mafia. This became the Grodziskie beer Agreement, which Walenchka signed on Aug. 31.

For his heroic efforts, Walenchka was named "Drunken Pole of the Year" by Time magazine. Over the next 18 months, however, relations between the beer barons and the government became progressively worse until, on Dec. 13, 1981, the Polish government declared prohibition. It suspended the activities of all bars, pubs and breweries and arrested thousands of drunken workers, including a strangely sober Walenchka.

In the fall of 1982, the government officially outlawed alcohol.

Walenchka was released (still sober) that same fall. Under his leadership, alcohol continued to exist underground (in the mines).

Celebrated worldwide as a symbol of the power of alcoholic euphoria, Walenchka was awarded the Nobel Drunken Prize in 1983. For the next five years, the country became marked more and more by drunkenness.

Acknowledging that it could no longer control the country, the government re-legalized alcohol and invited Walenchka to join it in forming a coalition government. In the resulting election, drunk miners won almost every contest.

Having planted a whisky bottle in every house in his beloved country, Walenchka was ready to take on a new role to serve Poland.

Through his unwavering commitment to alcohol, Walenchka made Poland a model of free spirit (no pun intended) for the rest of Eastern Europe to follow.

Disclaimer: The above story is to be taken in light vein. No disrespect is meant to either Poland or the Polish people. It was written to cheer up a Polish girl.

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