Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Mera Bharat Mahan!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I am holidaying here at home and that’s the reason why I am away from blogosphere. It’s a week since those darned exams got over and I had an uneventful journey back while Mumbai has had an eventful week, which by the way it could have done without.
I was watching this crazy series on HBO titled “Mumbai Calling”. It ranted for an hour about domineering Indian parents and I found it tough hiding a smile whilst all this mummy-papa bashing was going on. Funny the series should worth mention here except that my parents have been fussing over me all this time and I am literally hiding from them, to pen down my thoughts. And yes, I just finished an iconic battle with a couple of cockroaches for territorial supremacy in my room. Full of bloodshed, like a Bruce Willis movie, so lets skip the gory details.
My thoughts are extremely scrambled right now. Unsurprising, you would say but it’s probably got to do with the huge backlog of events or the enormity of the events that actually happened. I have been in Mumbai for 4 months only, having come to love the city for whatever little I have seen of it and this attack (or the set of attacks) left me shocked, searching for contacts frenetically and trying to find out the ground situation. I wish to express my heartfelt condolences towards the deceased and salute the spirit and courage of our security forces, whose efforts thwarted the terrorists from carrying out any more heinous acts.
While I am trying to read a book side-by-side, the events that took place today still jangle my mind. Oh the shenanigans of Indian politics and democracy!!! A major security lapse has been represented as a government failure, used by dysfunctional spokespersons as tool to grab airtime and converted into a mega serial of the “saas-bahu” genre by our venerable news networks. I am left wondering if the Indian people have actually become so gullible that feeding them so much of noise in the form of news will make them forget the actual issue at hand. If so, then God tussi great ho.
While nationalistic jingoism was at its peak when the commandos killed the terrorists and emerged victorious from the “battlefields” and the past few days of frustration against the political classes, I am pretty sure that all this will die down in a couple of weeks. Blasphemous eh?? Well it’s just a question of time before the necessities of life and the challenges of succeeding in a billion-strong populace take hold of us and back we go on our daily pursuits of roti, kapda aur makaan. That this compulsion will be repackaged as the Mumbai or Jaipur “spirit” or the “resilience” of Ahmedabad, telecast back to us and will make us feel proud, has no consequence for us.
We have become institutionalized, and that is the root cause of our bull headed behavior. We are expected to live from one terrorist attack to another. Each time we hope that we are not at the wrong place at the wrong time. Feel bad and forget it, it’s a mantra we have practiced with perfection. But what happens when the luck runs out? Simple. Someone else takes our place, expresses sympathies and goes back to their 24x7 struggle for survival.
Till this attitude remains I have only one thing to say. Mera Bharat Mahan!!!
Now let me get back to my book, need to finish it before the terrorists find me.