Lull After the Storm

This sequence of events is all too familiar now for most of us. On the 26th of November, we were attacked, wounded and most importantly humiliated by the gang of no more than ten. We watched haplessly as the trauma and the grief ran into minutes, hours and days. We picked up every gory detail of the attacks, we lapped up all that the media fed us, we argued and argued more, we decided in our minds who the enemy was and decided what the best course of action, we looked up the Internet on varied topics from Taj, Oberoi, Mumbai, India's comparative military strength, the origin of our border dispute, the cost of waging a war, the demographic makeup of country, Article 370, Nehru, Gandhi... anything remotely connected to that fateful day. We watched as our political leaders failed us yet again. We called it India's 9/11 (this was a first for us) and thought we had the means and the will to retaliate the US did. We perversely rejoiced at the attention with we getting on the world stage, satisfied with the lip-service doled out to us by the powers that matter. We wrote on chat forums and on our blogs. (As I indeed write on mine now). We changed our orkut and facebook profiles, we joined umpteen number of online groups expressing our support in this time of need. We made personal vows to hurt the enemy in whatever ways we could. We paid our 2 minutes of respect silence and We decided we needed to change... everything. We decided we needed a fresh new start.

And then we moved on.. not instantly but gradually maybe but definitely. They said it was time to move on...i saw the first signs of it when I saw the headline "Mumbai limps back to normalcy"... no doubt the editor didn't lose anyone dear. We saw as the "news" lost its novelty. It was relegated to other more "important" and "news-worthy" incidents like the crash of the stock exchanges worldwide (something that happens with far too much regularity nowadays), the IT meltdown and how Infosys wont hire anymore, England's resumption of the cricket tour... heck even Maradona's coming to India suddenly seemed to be more important than the crisis of the hour. Should the fact that a woman from Haryana gave birth at 70 really be hogging the front page news? How many more 26/11's (another of media's wonderful creation-thank you for giving us memory aids for remembering the dates on which we lose fellow countrymen by hundreds for no fault of theirs. ) do we need before we realize that its not right to forget such incidents in matter of days. How many more lives do we need to lose before we stop treating this horrible breach of our trust as merely an inconvenience and a soap opera all bundled together by the media as a wholesome side-dish to our evening dinners? The enemy is closer than we think, its among us. Its inside each one of us... its called complacence. "Chalta hain" attitude definitely nahin chalta hain. We cant forget what is wrong! It would be doing ourselves and the generations to follow a great disservice.

I am reminded of a stanza from a hindi poem

Khoon jo ab na Khaula
Woh khoon nahi paani hai
Jo desh ke kaam na aaye
Bekar woh jawani hai.

And please don't change channels... Saas-bahu can wait.