I've gone deaf

The blog sphere is flooded with sagacious advice, radical calls for action, screeching accusations of incompetence, Government officials to be sacked, people confessing this is the last straw and that India is a lost cause and overall, a mood of great depression, doom and intense brooding.

I am quite fed up with all this. No one is for a moment denying your right to mourn and remember those who died and those who laid their lives down. By all means, decry fascism and radicalism in all its forms. But please stop, in your oh-so-articulate ways trying to give incisive explanations and insights into what is wrong with the systems, how our politicians are the cause of all this, how our bureaucrats are another cause, how this and that and this again is done wrong in our country and the list goes on.

Of course everyone knows what the problems are. Of course we all accept our apparatus whether political or security related is pathetic. I won't go into the details of all that is wrong because so many thousands of you out there have already screamed it from the top of your roofs and made me deaf in the process. When I watched the attacks and the diabolical aftermath I was left numb. However I am now angry. Not at those 10 or 20 idiots who came here and randomly left death behind nor at the larger machinery responsible for these ideas. I am angry at the outbursts that I have seen, heard and read. All of civil society, all the articulate folks out there are on TV shows, in newspaper columns, on blogs all berating institutions of India. And now I don't want to hear any more of your theorizing and your suggestions. Stop it already.

All you folks out there who think you have a solution, why don't you have the intestinal fortitude to convert some of your zealotry into action? We all know what the problems are so instead of further underscoring what we already know, how about being part of a possible solution?

You think our politicians are inept and you are more capable?
You think our education system breeds mediocrity?
You think our hiring policies discriminate?
You think Muslims are disenfranchised and suppressed?

All of this is true. So how about you be part of a solution? Contribute your time, your money, your knowledge to root out these problems instead of turning all serious and pious , gloomy and worst of all intellectual when such events happen. It takes but a day's searching to know how you can work with educators, with NGOs reforming Muslim education, to work with unemployed youth support groups to increase employability. It takes but a day with Google and your mobile phone. That's it. No one's asking you to don combat gear and take a chopper ride to Baluchistan. You can contribute here. And the need is more urgent than ever. I have only listed a few and very random list of things that you could do to help. I honestly am not optimistic about it really happening you know because, this is our way the Indian way. We know best how to theorize. We know best how to device the most perfect solutions in our well-groomed, grammatically correct English. It seems actually, that we seem to know it all! Kudos to all you smart folks out there. I am sure many of you are going to take part in walks, protests, white shirt days, black band days et al. While I admire your awareness and sense of sharing your thoughts in this peaceful manner, do also remember that as important as symbolism is, by going for a protest and back to work the next week you are no better or no worse than the very politicians you derided so heavily for flying into Bombay to visit the sick and dying when the attacks were still on.

I know so many of you out there all of whom seem to have solutions for everything that's wrong with civil society. Now more so than ever, all of us has an opinion, something we want to change. Yet how many of us will act? I shall leave that to you to ponder upon.

But please, for now enough of your screaming. Enough of your shouting yourselves hoarse. Either act or go back to your cocoons, knowing now of course that no one really can cocoon themselves anymore.

Stop trying

Its Day 3 of the terror attack on Bombay and once the dust settles, as it inevitably must I will focus on composing some of the many thoughts flitting across my mind. For now, only one thing is clear in all this: they will never learn. Let me explain. Time and again Bombay has been battered, attacked and targeted. This current ongoing attack has definitely changed the game. Terror experts globally now will be scratching their chins and learning the rules of the new game. What is clear is this time, Blackberry phones were used and tremendous planning went into visiting death on Bombay.

Which brings me to the point I want to make. It isn't new or enlightening though: this is Bombay.

No matter the amount of planning and master plotting these misguided souls keep doing to visit death on people in this city, they still aren't intelligent enough to understand this simple reality: this is Bombay.

I learned this in the 1 year I lived there. But I grasped this fact a few days into first visiting this city as a kid: something is different here folks. Floods, rain, riots, bombs and now people going about with automatic weapons on streets: local trains run on time. People go to work. People continue to do what they do best in this city: try to make a better life for themselves. Because after all is said and done, isn't that the basic tenet of our existence?

And Bombay does it better than anyone else. Yes this time the blow is severe and Bombay has been left gasping, but make no mistake, soon trains will be packed again, South Bombay buzzing, the Zodiac Grill full, Bollywood releasing a slew of movies and I'll again be enjoying the sunset over Marine Drive from the lobby of the Oberoi: this is Bombay.

Liberty for all?

As the game changing terror attacks are ongoing in Bombay, Vijay sent me an excerpt, ironically enough from George W Bush's acceptance speech before his 2nd term. Now if only America truly walked the talk and the World community followed and if pigs could fly... but here it is:

We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

come on over

Despite growing evidence of Pakistani support for the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration has so far rejected pleas from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan for a showdown with Islamabad's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf....

Disturbing on many levels. The article goes on to explain the enormous subsidies totalling billions of dollars that Pakistan receives in military aid and debt relief in return for cooperation in the fight against terror. This really is an impossible situation because to begin with General Musharaff is, at the end of the day a dictator and not an elected representative, hence making it extremely difficult for him to build any form of consensus around sensitive issues.

Secondly, in spite of genuinely good intentions, his hands are tied: to satisfy the radical Islamic elements in his own country (to whom he has to pay allegiance because without their support he would not remain in power too long or he would be assassinated), he has to look the other way when the Taliban hop across the border into Pakistan to seek refuge while planning another insurgency. The first step would be to root out radical elements in Pakistan...but how to begin when the radical elements are intwined so with the ruler, that too of a nuclear armed state?