To take the life of another

In India, there had been only three executions in 15 years, so I never gave capital punishment much thought. But after two high-profile hangings in the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking of little else. And I am not sure where I stand.

Sure, some crimes deserve the ultimate punishment. But when people protest on the streets, demanding a death sentence, you wonder if it is justice they seek, or vengeance?

Yes, fear of death might be a deterrent to crime, but is life sentence not as bad?

Does we have the moral right to take the life of another?
______
A Drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

What hope for a nation....

He was a convicted terrorist. He has been on Death Row for over a decade. If he was guilty as charged, the governing law required that he be hung. There was no reason to keep the hangman waiting.

And yet, when the end came, the government did not think it fit to inform his family. The execution was conducted secretly, almost surreptitiously. His family first heard about his hanging on television- the official intimation reached after his death. Is that how a democracy should function?

What hope for a nation that doesn’t allow a wife to say her final goodbye?

_____ 

A Drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

Will he ever get it?

“But he is a Muslim”, my son insisted. “He must be a terrorist.”

Where he gets these ideas from, I do not know, but now was not the time to probe.  “Muslims are not terrorists”, I told him firmly.

“But all terrorists are Muslims”, he insisted.

“That doesn’t mean that all Muslims are terrorists. Most Muslims are against terrorism.”

“Okay, all terrorists are Muslims”, he insisted. “Same thing.”

“No, not the same thing. In any case, terrorists do not have a religion; no religion asks you to kill. Terrorists worship only Terror.”

Will he ever get it? Will the world?

No words to describe it

Normally, I do not blog about current affairs, believing instead that what we need is long-term systemic change. But after telling my mother (and harshest/ best critic) that I would not blog about what's happening in my country today, I realized it is a part of the larger picture.

Conflict over land is the oldest reason for people to go to war. When the local tribal population in Assam targets illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, religion doesn’t enter the picture- they are merely protecting their land.

But since the tribals are Hindu and the immigrants Muslim, in the holy month of Ramzan, it can be projected as a religious war. People who cannot locate Assam on the map can be incited into joining the ‘jihad’. People originally from the region can be made to fear for their lives, and rush back home to safety.

Deplorable. Shameful. Words cannot describe it.
________

Disclaimer- The photograph is not meant to imply I blame these ladies in any way. I use the picture, because I know that in their emancipation lies a part of the solution

We cannot Forget

Two years back, the hubby came home from a tour. "A bomb went off near the airport", he said. "Let's turn on the TV and see what it was about."

We turned on the TV. There were images of terrorist attacks. But not where he thought it should have been. When hundreds are dead, nobody reports on a bomb that killed only two.

The Terror Attacks shook up the city, the nation. The news channels spoke of nothing else for days, then they stopped. Life soon went back to normal, it had to.

But, we still Remember. We cannot Forget.

A photograph taken three days later, which sums up
 the attacks- life as normal, but nothing can
ever be the same again

_____

A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

The post of the day after
Two days after
One year down
Remembering 26/11 on 9/11

Looking Out

[Yesterday was the International Day of Non-violence. 
To commemorate the day, here is a reminder that the only purpose violence serves is none at all.

This is a work of fiction.]

The Impetuousness of Youth. The Belief that Violence could Right a Wrong. I Picked up a Gun. Shot down Innocents in a Random Act of Violence. Witnesses Swore I was Elsewhere. The Law could pin Nothing on Me. I am Free. Free to Do Whatever I Choose.
She will Not Leave Me. Her Eyes Follow me Everywhere. Pleading with Me to Save her Child. Burning in Anger after I Gunned Him Down. From Her, there is No Escape.
She is my Jailer. I am Stuck in a Prison Cell of my own Making. Forever Looking Out. Forever Hoping for Redemption.

_____

A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

In October 2010, the Burrow is presenting a collection of drabbles inspired by the colours of the Spectrum. Read this Orange/ Red drabble and many, many more  exclusively at the Burrow.

Flickering Images

The most luxurious hotel in the city. The place where you took your girl if you really wanted to impress her- a coffee there would cost more than a dinner at a decent restaurant, but would be ten times as magical.

What were terrorists doing stomping along those elegant corridors? Did they even know that along with all the people they had cowering in the rooms, they were also holding our memories hostage? Is there no place where we can be safe?

I stood frozen in front of the flickering images on my TV. Terrorists had claimed my world. Again.

_____

A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

This is an entry for Jenny Marlock's Saturday Centus # 19. The post is in remembrance of 9/11, but I have chosen to write about an act of terrorism that took place in another city, several years after the attack on the World Trade Centre. Terrorism is the same everywhere- it leaves numbness in its wake.

The photograph shows the iconic Taj Mahal Hotel under attack. The photograph was NOT taken by me, though it was one of the flickering images I watched almost obsessively on my TV.

Five young people

Five young people at a fashionable restaurant with plans to bring in Valentine’s Day together! She was looking forward to her weekend with her boyfriend- would he propose on Valentine’s Day? He had just got a promotion at the bulge bracket investment bank where he was working. His sister was thrilled that her big brother had driven down to celebrate his promotion with her. Her friend returned early from her sister’s engagement so she could bring in Valentine’s Day with her friends.

Five young people. Well educated, smart, vivacious. Happy. Would they have laughed so hard if they knew there was a bomb ticking in a bag under their table?

"The blast at a packed restaurant in the western city of Pune left nine dead, including one foreigner", said a newspaper report. Can words ever communicate the real loss?

Five lives cut short in their prime. Four families that will never be able to come to terms with the tragedy. Another city that has lost its innocence.

Is the purpose of terrorism to kill, or to ensure that those who survive live in fear?

One year down

November 26, 2008. A dozen youth trained in Pakistan held the city hostage for what seemed like weeks. Bombay is no stranger to violence. I grew up reading about the anti-Muslim riots, and remember being shaken up for days after the synchronous bomb attacks that targeted many of the prominent landmarks of the city. After we moved to the city in the late 1990s, we’d lived through countless bomb blasts, many of which happened somewhere close to where me, my husband, or one of our friends, had been or was going to be.
But 26/11 was something quite different. Pavement dwellers were victims, as were business honchos and Page Three personalities. For three days, terrorists were holed up on two iconic 5-star hotels. It was only fast thinking on the part of bystanders that prevented the same fate befalling one of the busiest railway stations in the country.
The city came together in an outpouring of grief and solidarity. People took out candle light marches and demanded answers. The political head of the state was replaced, and token assurances made.
One year down, nothing has changed. The city still doesn’t have a rapid action force that can deal with similar calamities. The police force continues to wield outdated weapons and wear protection gear that offers limited protection. People are more vigilant than they were earlier, but there is only so much that individuals can do without political will.
Today, the City Remembers, the Nation Remembers. People have dressed in white in memory of the slain martyrs, and in black in protest against terror. A prominent wall in the city is going to be painted in white, black and red – the city standing up against terror.We remember today. Is that enough? Can it ever be?
This picture I took today on the way to work, sums it up- slogans on the walls, but life as usual.

Luck by Chance

That Wednesday.
I had shut down my laptop and was heading home when the boss caught me. “I need you to make a couple of changes in the presentation”, he said.
“Why don’t you mail it to me. I’ll come in early tomorrow morning and do it.”
“Tomorrow is too late. I need to send it off now.”
“But, my train, my gang...”
“Take the next one.”

I was still in office when I heard about the blasts. My friends were in the compartment where the bomb went off. I should have been there too. It was Luck by Chance.

A Wednesday - the movie

‘A Wednesday’ was a movie almost everyone I met and didn’t meet said was a Must See. Finally managed to see it over the weekend, and was not disappointed.

To someone who knew the ending was unexpected, the outcome was quite predictable. But the climax was not the climatic action scene, it was what could have been a boring monologue, or worse, a harangue, but which, post-November 26, was just grim reality beautifully articulated.

I’d recommend the movie to everyone, but going by my normal track record, I was perhaps the last person who hadn’t seen it before this weekend.

No Clenched Fist

The other day, I got a mailer from the organizers of the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon, which ended with -
‘No closed fists. No angry rage.
Just the open road and the will to finish.’
My sentiments exactly!
Others who presumably received the same mailer did not quite agree. More than one columnist has written about how Bombay should channel all its anger and negative energy into the Mumbai marathon. But to what purpose? Will the government become more proactive when it comes to tackling terror just because a couple of thousand people run a race that they signed up for months before the Terror Attacks?
One guest columnist has written about how in the aftermath of the Terror Attacks, he has been able to increase the distance he is able to cover from three kilometers to seven. He may attribute it to the anger he feels against the terrorists, but I know that without any such motivation, I was able to up my performance by roughly the same level last year.

The Mumbai Marathon is now an institution- an institution that celebrates the growing fitness culture among Bombayites, an institution that has got people who would otherwise never have run running. That many of the runners also care about the country they live in and would like to make a difference is incidental- the main reason why runners run is because they have discovered that they love running. And to try and put a political agenda to it merely cheapens the whole thing.

Just last week, we heard about how a swimming champion, Vinod Ghadge, got enmeshed in fishing nets and drowned in the open seas while paying homage to the victims of the Terror Attacks. A pointless death, in my opinion. The victims of the Terror Attacks know that the nation is with them. Would one man utterly unconnected with the Terror Attacks swimming from Raigarh to Bombay alleviate their pain in any way. If he was hoping to raise money from the swim and donate it to the victims, it may have been of some use, but that did not seem to have been his intention. Then why undertake the swim at all, unless he hopped onto the ‘homage bandwagon’ in order to get some additional publicity?

I am glad the Mumbai Marathon is rising above that. If things going as planned, it would be my privilege to join thousands of others on 18th January, as ‘Mumbai runs to secure its future.’

A game of chor-police

My two boys wanted to play chor-police with their friend. The friend had a gun, my two didn’t. They wanted him to share his gun– he had no such intentions. I could see stormy tantrums at best, a no-holds-barred fistfight at worst.
“Why don’t you play something else?”, I intervened.
“We want to play chor-police only!”
“Why don’t you play terrorist-police instead? Your friend can be the terrorist, you be the police.”
“But we still need guns.”
“Not if you are the Mumbai Police, you don’t. Mumbai Police takes on terrorists with lathis.”

Sometimes Truth does show you the way!

Drabble (n) - an extremely short work exactly one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.

One month and one day later

And I purposely did not blog about 26/11 yesterday, because I knew that to do so would have been a purely symbolic gesture, and we have had enough of symbolic gestures to last us more than a couple of months.
As expected, nothing has happened in the past one month. A few ministers have tended in their resignations and been replaced, some token sound bytes have been provided by assorted people who do not matter, various agencies are questioning the sole surviving terrorist and everyone is getting on with their lives.
Nobody is asking what steps the government is taking to ensure such incidents do not recur, and if they are, they are not being heard. Pakistani journalists have located the family of the terrorist and got them to admit that he is their son, but still the posturing on both sides of the border continues. Had we been serious about wiping out terror camps, we would have taken the Pakistani government into confidence and done what needed to be done jointly. True, the Pakistani government has not done much in the past to inspire confidence, but could we not have taken a chance on the new government – a government headed by a man who lost his own wife to terrorist attacks less than a year ago. Too much water has now flown down the bridge, too much time has elapsed since the Terror Attacks. There is no way we are now going to nail down the culprits.
Closer home, our borders have still not been secured. Our fishermen can act as our eyes and ears, and are willing to do so, but nobody chooses to listen to them. A fisherlady saw the terrorists arrive and even questioned them, but the police is yet to record her statement. The various police departments seem more interested in trying to take credit for injuring the sole surviving terrorist than with doing anything concrete. Does it really matter whether it was Savalkar, Kamte or Date that put a bullet into the terrorist? If the departments are really that segregated, why is nobody telling us why three such senior police officers, from three different departments, rode in the same vehicle to take on the terrorists? Did they think it was a lathi charge that they were supervising – did they not know that they could have been a lot more effective if they used three different vehicles and tried to surround the terrorists.
And what about us? Are we doing our bit towards ensuring that the probability of such incidents happening in future is averted. I think not – after a few days of having security being beefed up, even malls belonging to the Tata group have gone back to the old days of perfunctory checking of vehicles coming into their car parks. My handbag continues to be opened, but only the main compartment – I could smuggle anything in the side pockets and nobody would be the wiser.
Bombay, and India, is as vulnerable to Terror Attacks today as it was a month back. The only thing that seems to be proliferating is the number of Facebook groups that want to ‘do something concrete’. If only even one of them had a real plan, instead of empty phases that even I can dish out.
The time is ripe for a Leader. Will anyone (other than Rahul Gandhi) step forward, please?

A footnote of History

In a way, I witnessed the unfolding of a minor footnote of history on Sunday. Both the Taj and the Trident re-opened to public on the same day. And since we happened to be in town that day, we decided to drive by the Taj, and so heavy was the security around the hotel, we merely managed to get ourselves stuck in yet another traffic jam.
According to the newspapers, people thronged to both hotels on the first day itself – the restaurants had enough patrons to justify a discrete waiting list, room occupancy was about 60%, and many survivors made it a point to re-visit the place to try and put the past behind them.
To the world, Bombay has bounced back.
But I am not too sure about it.
To me, the more important landmark I drove past on Sunday was the erstwhile Victoria Terminus. Arguably the most majestic building in the city, she has evidently had a make over since I last saw her at night many years back. Bathed in the bright light cast by dozens of concealed lamps, she looked much more beautiful than I remembered her as being. Even on a Sunday evening, the station was as busy as ever, with passengers hurrying about oblivious equally to the grandeur around them, and to the fact that the station had been the scene of a gruesome carnage not four weeks back.
To me, the people at the station summed up the real resident of Bombay – the man who knows he can be killed any day, but who doesn’t dare think about it, because thinking about it doesn’t change anything, or the woman who knows nothing is certain except the fact that no matter what, she will have to continue waking up long before day-break and struggling to the day merely to survive.
The average resident of Bombay doesn’t overcome, transcend, or challenge fear - she merely co-exists with it, and ignores it the way she would the lady who’s smelly armpits are thrust beneath her nose all the way from Borivili to Churchgate. It is not resilience that makes the average resident of the city bounce back, it is the knowledge that there is no option but to carry on regardless.
It is the privileged minority that dared think they were immune to the attacks that ordinary mortals were exposed to. It is the people who travelled in chauffer driven BMWs and Mercs that believed that terrorists hit out only at the people who travelled by public transport. It is the people who frequented five-star hotels who thought that you could get blown up only while consuming a vada pav at the roadside thelagadi.
This time round, those people were also targetted, and because they have never known what it is to live with fear, they crumbled like the others could never afford to.
Which is why such a big deal is being made of the re-opening of the Taj and the Trident. But nobody even took note of the fact that there passengers were using Victoria Terminus even before the bloodstains were washed away from the floors.

Trauma counseling - part two

Ever since I mentioned on my Facebook profile that I need counseling to cope with the trauma inflicted on me by all the trauma counseling I am forced to inflict on my kids, I have been deluged by people who have been telling me they are just as tired with it all as I am.
In fact, I seem to have got off easily. All I had to do was to get my son to draw a picture- and activity he enjoys and looks forward to. Since his ‘fears’ are quite different from those of the other children, he would not be getting much counseling at school, and I am sure I can safely ignore the directive to provide him personalized counseling at home.
Older kids seem to be the worst sufferers- they are having to write essays on terrorism and how to deal with it, being made to enact role-plays of the 60 hours, forced to participate in candle-light marches, and to draw about the attacks to understand their latent fears. I see the consequences of all this being quite grim – kids who were relatively unaffected by the attacks will now realise that there is something that they have to fear, kids will start developing an unhealthy fascination for terrorism and counter-terrorism, and a few sensitive kids may even start feeling sympathetic towards the poor terrorist who has the entire system against him. Mothers are seeing all three things happening in their kids.
Why then, this need to focus so much on something that has happened in the past, and which is as relevant to the child as the cartoon episode that ended yesterday?
Are we projecting our fears and insecurities onto our kids? The last couple of months, we have learnt to live with fear – we knew a bomb could go off anytime, anywhere, but that could not really deter us from living our lives could it? This time it was much worse for two reasons – there is something impersonal about a bomb going off in a crowded marketplace, but not about young men taking aim and firing at individuals, and more importantly, perhaps, this time places we thought inviolable, places we aspired to reach, were targeted. That the siege went on for as long as it did, only made things worse for us. But, we too have put that behind us, and are getting on with our life – after all, where can we hide, even if we want to. But maybe some among ourselves need help in conquering their own demons, and they are the ones responsible for this overkill.
Whatever it is, I hope they end this façade soon – it has really gone on too long, and is not even snigger-worthy any more. The winter holidays start next week – I am sure the schools will find something new to do when they reopen. But how do we get through the next few days of trauma counseling?

Trauma counseling

Maybe I am a minority of one, but I am getting totally fed up of the so called ‘trauma counseling’ that is being forced on kids by well-meaning-but-totally-out-of-touch schools.
The first day he went to school after the November Terror Attacks, my older one came home with a long letter detailing exactly how we as parents can help our kids come to terms with the trauma of the attacks. Neither of my sons seemed particularly disturbed by what they witnessed on T.V. so I just balled the letter and chucked it into the dustbin.
I thought I had heard the last of it, but I was just being too optimistic. Last week, the school urged us to get the children to talk about their fears following the attack, and to try and put the fears in context so they would not be traumatized by it. To my kids, those three days had been a holiday– no school, no office, no Mamma yelling at them not to do things – the only trauma associated with those days would have been the fact that the adults just did not let them watch as much T.V. as they would have liked to.
I did the best thing possible and just ignored the second directive too. But apparently, the school is not willing to let things be – they are trying to get the children to draw about those days, so they can pinpoint the exact fears and address them. While some kids co-operated and drew buildings on fire and commandos or terrorists with guns, my son apparently drew a couple of superheros. What could the child be thinking of, the school asked me.
“Maybe he is trying to say that only Superheros can save the city?”, I volunteered tentatively. I intended to be sarcastic, but they took me seriously. I am now supposed to spend at least an hour everyday reassuring my son that the police would take care of him, and there will be no repeat of the attacks.
I have assured the school that I will definitely do so, but I know fully well I will not. For one, I do not believe in lying to my kids, and since I am not at all convinced that the police or the intelligence or the army or the paramilitary forces would be able to protect the city in case of a second attack, I am not going to tell my kids that.
But more to the point, we live in a society where anything can happen anytime. You can hide from the fear, or you can deny it to yourself, or you can accept that the reason for the fear exists and put it behind you as you get on with your life. I choose to do the third, as do most people I know – why should I want my kids to be any different?
And yes, I do need trauma counseling, but the trauma I need counseling from is the trauma inflicted by this so called trauma counseling.

Who is the real enemy?

A couple of days back, a glamorous actress of yesteryears proclaimed on national TV that she’s seen Pakistani flags fluttering with impunity in Mumbai and nobody seems to want to do anything about it. What she had really seen were the flags of the Muslim League, an Indian political party much older than Pakistan itself.
She can be excused – even a gnat would be insulted if her IQ is compared to his – but what was appalling was that she was allowed to make a statement like that on prime time, and the TV channel did not deem it fit to either correct her, or tender an apology immediately.
But then, for most of us, Pakistan is the enemy. And all Muslims are Pakistani sympathizers, so regardless of whether the colour of their passport is blue or green, they are the enemy.

Indian Muslims are Indians first, Muslims later. Over the last few years, they have gone out of their way to prove it – being the first to burst crackers when India defeats Pakistan in a cricket match, toning down Eid festivities after the recent bomb blasts, raising the tricolour whenever they can – but that somehow still doesn’t seem enough.
People still seem to equate Indian Muslims with the enemy, and others who know better do not see it fit to correct them.

And yet, the proportion of Muslim casualties in the recent terror attacks in Bombay was far greater than their proportion in the total population.
Muslim clerics have refused to allow the bodies of the slain terrorists from being buried in our cemeteries.
Today, Indian Muslims are celebrating Bakri-id today not with biryani, but with black arm bands.
Muslims in India and elsewhere have taken out candle-light processions to protest against the terror attacks.

It is high time we stopped asking Muslims to prove their patriotism again and again. It is time Indians realized that the real enemy is not the Muslim, or even a Pakistani.

The real enemy is the terrorist, and it is against terrorists that the war has to be waged. And that war can only be won if we stand united and fight united.

Each doing our bit...

Somehow, this sudden outpouring of solidarity and protest we have been witnessing over the last few days scares me- wear white on Monday, light a candle at 7:30 pm, assemble at the Gateway on December 3rd, change your facebook profile to an Indian flag on December 10th, sign an online petition, wear a black armband, display the word E.N.O.U.G.H. on your person for an entire day, forward SMSes lampooning politicians in general or one particular politician in particular- the list is seemingly endless . .
.

On Saturday, I was so angry at myself for allowing politicians to take me for granted, that I would have cheerfully done all of them, but on saner reflection, I realise none of it is going to make any difference at all. Today people are angry, they are scared, they are disgusted, and they are asking questions. The questions they ask are all sensible ones. The partial solutions they are coming up with are good ones that can be acted upon.

But nobody seems to be taking them seriously, nobody seems to be taking us seriously. Nobody feels obliged to provide answers, or even to aplogise for mistakes made in the past. Why?

Because the people in power know how short public memory really is. Today, the images of the fires in the heritage wing of the Taj Mahal Hotel are fresh in our eyes, we can almost hear gunshots when we shut our ears to extraneous noise, we can smell the fear we felt for those 60 hours. We do not want to relive an experience similar to that ever again, and we are willing to take time off to express our fears and our hopes.

But how long will we continue to feel that way? How long before real life catches up with us, and we find these memories being pushed to the back of our mind?

Two weeks down the line, would we continue to ask questions? One month down the line, would we demand to know what has been done in the previous weeks? Three months down the line, would we want to see concrete steps put in place to ensure that such attacks do not repeat themselves? Six months down the line, would we expect to see gradual changes in the way the political system functions? On the first anniversary of the attack, would we expect to see greater transparency and accountability?

Most unlikely!!!

We would like to deny it. We would like to believe that this time, the anger is for real. We would like to think of this as a watershed event in our nation’s collective fight against terror. But, our elected leaders know that national security is unlikely to remain one of our prime concerns for more than a couple of weeks. They know that by Republic Day, we would return to being the apathetic citizens we have been for the past six decades. And since they know it, the politicians do not see any point in taking us seriously.

Which is why I would rather all these symbolic protests be deferred by a few weeks. If two weeks later, we wear black armbands in protest, the impact would be much greater than if we do so today. If, one month after the blast, we take out a candle-light procession and hand over a list of questions to the Prime Minister, he would be forced to read them. If on the eve of Republic Day, we demand that the President dedicate her entire Address to the Nation to telling us the plan that is being implemented to ensure such incidents do not recur, she may devote a couple of minutes to the issue.

We do have the power to catalyse change, but we need to convince the people who would actually be implementing the change that we really mean business.

And till then, we can each register to vote in the constituencies we are actually residing in, we can join the civil defense army if we are able to commit that kind of time, and most important, we can try teaching our kids that just because we do not agree with a person that person doesn’t become an enemy.

That is quite a bit in itself!!!!

Bombay is my home

Bombay was the city I knew from summer holidays spent at my grandparents’ house, but it was to Mumbai that I came as a newly-married executive to set up home.

Mumbaikar or Bombayite- it didn’t matter what you called me. After all, the reason I fell in love with the city was because it did not have time to waste on inessentials. If politicians thought they could change history by changing signboards, so be it.

But no more.

I pay their salary. They are answerable to me. Politicians cannot take advantage of my apathy any more.

Bombay is my home.

Drabble (n) - an extremely short work exactly one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.