Shane Mohammed, if it Walks Like a Duck …
…And if it Quacks like a Duck then it must be a duck says the folk wisdom; and then the proverb says the proof of the pudding is in the eating, which suggests that some things are self-evident. But then there is the contradictory proverb that warns that all that glitters is not gold; that there is costume jewelry that looks so like 24 carat gold that if one is fooled into buying such bogus items, one should not be shamed for even the banks are fooled when counterfeiters slip under their radar and get through into laundering their home-made bread.
The counterfeit industry is so omnipresent that even among persons imposters proliferate that Netflix has made a TV series called Imposter where a beautiful con artist gets involved with men and robs them blind. And via transgender resetting, many persons undergo sex change operations and what you see might not be what you think you see. Thus, the pretty girl you might want to take home to get mama’s permission to marry might in a previous incarnation been the son of another woman.
It is naïve to think that in the field of education where competition for success is so fierce that everybody walking around with a post-graduate degree in his briefcase is duly qualified as his certificate boasts. You remember the movie “Catch me if you can” based on the semi-autobiographical book of the same name by Frank Abagnale Jr., who claims that before his 19th birthday, he successfully performed cons worth millions of dollars by posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia doctor, and a Louisiana parish prosecutor. The movie version of his story might be over-dramatised with Leonardo DiCaprio portraying a con artiste who transitioned from one character to another as one changed clothes.
That white jacket/black jacket transitioning having been established, how does one catch up with such players as Frank Abagnale? The walk like a duck litmus test is the best method available. Does the person who claims to have a doctorate sounds as if he has one or does he make all kinds of pseudo-intellectual bluff in gibberish-speak, hoping that his interviewers are bowled over by his obscurantism? Over to you Shane Mohammed…
L. Siddhartha Orie