Though the remarks by the Maldives deputy minister ridiculing our PM as a 'clown' and a 'puppet' are immature and uncalled for, I do believe the bigger thing to have been done in this situation was for the PM to have laughed it off, instead of making it a focus of so much discussion and activity. Suddenly, a huge amount of money is being poured into Lakshadweep in retaliation, but are there better causes for those same funds than that of building an alternative to the Maldives tourism just to retaliate? Can the Lakshadweep infrastructure take huge numbers of tourists without its ecological system being damaged?

Allowing others to poke fun at us without getting insulted removes a weapon from an adversary's hand. And unless one learns to allow a laugh about oneself and to also laugh at oneself, life becomes a series of hate episodes!

Then there's this touching incident around Katie. Katie was a teenager dying of leukaemia. Katie's mother once said how her daughter approached her disease. She talked about a time, shortly after a bone marrow transplant, when Katie's head was slickly bald, as she put it. One day, Katie heard the doctor coming on rounds and ducked into the bathroom. Her mother heard her giggling and asked, "Katie, what is so funny?" She put her finger to her lips, pulled a Nike ski cap onto her head and crawled into bed. When the doctor came in, she said, "Well, Miss Katie! How are you feeling today?" Katie frowned and said, "I am OK, I guess... but I just have this splitting headache." She pulled off her ski cap, and there on her bald head was a huge red crack, which she had drawn with a marker. As the doctor recovered from her initial shock, the room exploded in laughter. Katie did not survive the cancer, but she conquered depression and despair and found an authentic way to live as fully as possible by laughing at herself.

There are many ways to respond when situations take a serious turn; one of the best is to find some humour. It does help, and you come out of the situation with the world cheering for you!

Mark Twain says that the human race has unquestionably one really effective weapon: laughter. Laughing at the twists and turns of life may not be your first response, but it can be one of the best!

Yes, indeed, it's time we as a nation stopped getting provoked by all and sundry and took that weapon away from the hands of our adversaries...!