As I type this post out, there are solidarity marches being held in major Indian cities including my very own, with people gathering in huge crowds to march from point A to point B, holding candles in their hands, hopefully with some tissue paper or cloth around it so that the wax does not drip directly on their fingers and then shout slogans and get emotionally charged up for the duration of the rally and then disperse and go back home to paying bills, watching TV and working away.

I’m all for marches and rallies. I’ve been to a gay pride parade in Oslo (accidentally, while walking around touring the city), as the sole representative there of all the straight people on the planet, been involved in a Free-Tibet march in Mysore and attended a protest march to protest against the 85% attendance rule for our juniors under the VTU regime. I did not give a shit about the last ’cause’, but it was either that or sleeping in class.

However, despite being pro-rallies, I fail to see the point of this solidarity march. Not just this march, but all other peaceful protests, and opinions and polls and SMSes that people send to stupid news channels. Heck, I’m even against pseudo-intellectual discources on personal websites regarding this, because I feel it is futile, and provides no value-add save for a marginal amount of catharsis.

As Aadisht summed up in an email discussing the solidarity march, “I think it’s middle class activism masturbation, stroking your ego to feel good about doing something, anything.”

I do not question the noble intent behind which most of my country’s citizens are trying to mark their anger and pain towards the recent events that have unfolded in Bombay, but I don’t see anything beneficial coming out of it.

However, I think we’ve all ended up being much more cynical about the whole issue, and this might be good for us in the long run, because we can focus and concentrate our collective energies more effectively on finding a solution to the best possible extent that we can, rather than being spectators / participants that aren’t accounted for.

Here’s also hoping that our government, that has been so callously sitting on its fat arse, does something to help stop such attacks in the future.

Signing off, on an altogether different note, do check out George Freidman’s piece on the strategic motivations behind the Mumbai attacks. Makes for super reading.

A weird sense of paranoia had set in, and that walk I took seemed to be among the longest I’d taken. I am sure that a few others walking there that day might’ve shared that same feeling that I felt, and I can only guess. However, I have travelled by BMTC buses on umpteen occasions thereafter and the thoughts of the serial blasts had been relegated to the back of my mind.

It was only the first time that a certain sense of tension was present.

Now, I’m headed to Majestic tomorrow to board a train that heads to Mangalore for a cousin’s wedding. I am waitlisted for both the onward and return journey, and I will receive confirmation about my travel shortly.

After what happened in Mumbai’s CST, I must admit that I am feeling a bit jittery about going there, and that I would be prone to being extremely paranoid and on my guard. I have a strong feeling that nothing will happen, but that strong feeling of being unaffected by events seems to have gone for a toss after what our country has gone through over the past year in particular.

“When all other means have failed and it is necessary to protect one’s borders, wives, children and culture, war can become Dharma.” 

However, once the reality has set in, and we’ve become aware of the gravity of the situation, the customary distance we’d tend to keep from things happening in different parts of the country has not made itself evident this time around.

The terrorist attacks in Kashmir have not made our blood boil so much, or made so many of us spew vitriol in the way these Mumbai attacks have. The various attacks in our country have shaken us up, including the ones that took place in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, in our very own Bangalore as well as in Assam.

What happened in Bangalore was probably the scariest of them all personally, at least when the first reports of the explosions were reported. However, these fears were significantly assuaged when we were made aware of those blasts being low-intensity, and that a few bombs had been defused and significant damage to life and property had been averted.

However, none of these attacks has made us angrier as a collective people, than what is going on in Mumbai currently. No longer is the average Indian, let alone the average Mumbaikar speaking about the resilience of the city, and its ability to weather any storm and the innate nature of its people to be able to pull themselves together in the face of any adversity.

No longer is anyone speaking about how life will go on once these terrorists are flushed out from the Taj, the Trident and Nariman House.

One is under the distinctive impression that the Bombay that withstood the communal riots, the bomb blasts of 1993, the local train explosions of 2006 and the various other sporadic incidents of terrorism and violence has now finally reached the end of its tether. As a city, it is too great to be equated to a camel, and hence I’d like to refrain from using the last straw metaphor. (As a pertinent aside, I was born there in 1983)

What every Mumbaikar, nay Indian is demanding at this point in time is justice. We’re tired of being labelled a soft state, that will withstand the blows that these terrorists keep raining on us. We’re tired of being in a situation where we have to be on our guard at all times, being in fear of our lives at all times.

True, we’ve acquired some sense of bravado within us that keeps propelling us towards doing what we have to, as we go about saying to ourselves that what happens will happen, and we will face it when it does.

However, turning the other cheek just doesn’t seem to cut it. With all due respect to the Mahatma, I don’t think his ideals and principles were developed around trying to provide solutions against radical hardcore religious fanatics who seem to have adopted the motto of ‘kill and get killed’. Ostensibly, Gandhigiri will just not get us anywhere.

This sense of anguish and despair was epitomized by Shobhaa De’s scathing commentary against politicians and her anger at how security is diverted towards their protection while the common people are subject to open gunfire in the streets when they go about their daily activities. Her angry responses towards Barkha Dutt’s quesitoning on NDTV earned her a lot of respect last evening, and in a way, was representative of the feelings of most people in general.

We, as a people need to wake up and get better acquainted with collateral damage. It is not enough to engage in armchair philosophy, while we let someone else take the bullets to ensure that our need to get jungle-style justice is addressed.

When we engage in retaliation against the source of these terror attacks, and I sincerely hope to God that we do, we can expect them to hit back hard at us. Lives will be lost, businesses will suffer, and our general quality of life might take a beating for the worse. People we know, maybe even you and I, might be ridden with bullets or have our limbs torn apart due to explosives.

What we need to understand, and more importantly hope and pray, is that the possible short-term troubles we face due to any steps undertaken in response to the attacks on Mumbai in particular, and the terror strikes on our country in general might translate into the long-term good of all of us Indians as a people.

Right now, one can only wish for the ordeal in Mumbai to end, for the decisive next set of steps to be taken. Respect to those personnel who laid their lives down in the line of duty.

However, what KP said once fine evening when I had met up with him still resonates in my head – ‘when you don’t do it for the money, you tend to do your best job’, and this is probably why I consider this site as my labour of love.

Churumuri article on the excessive media hype surrounding the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Churumuri article on how India should follow Israel’s footsteps in its steps to counter terrorism.

Churumuri article on the 2006 FIFA world cup, when I was north of where all the action took place circa July 2006.

(As a disclaimer, the post titles are given by KP, while I supplied the content which he has, in some cases edited to make it better.)

This is happening as I type. Our workplace, which is a set of cubicles on our floor with each cubicle having a telephone extension, is under seige. Literally!

Each and every telephone in my vicinity has started ringing in synchronicity at the same time, since most of them have consecutive numbers, and this time, it is not the usual suspects in the form of credit card / personal loan salespersons who are causing megadeath (sic) level pains.

Everytime one chooses to pick up a phone, an automated message is being played with some subscription offer for something that I haven’t had the patience to listen to. What I can say with absolute certainty is that this telephone ringing menace is getting on my nerves much more than I thought it would.

If I find out who was responsible for having come up with the first automatic telephone call and consequently appearing automatic telephone message, I would, if said person is not already dead, wring his neck with my bare hands and make him pay for all my phone bills until such time that I croak.

As I have been typing this post, all the phones seem to have fallen silent. However, it is not without a sense of foreboding that I am awaiting the next wave of the attack of the killer telephones.

I wish the phones, if rung simultaneously, could simulate different sounds of music so that it would atleast seem like some instruments were being played. Of course, to keep everyone at the office happy, it would have to be muzak, the likes of which even the most rabid music hater would be able to withstand.

Once again, death to those telephone terrorists.

Our office has reported that employees need to stay put in order not to get caught in the panic that is slowly but surely spreading across the city, and I personally feel that it is a wise thing to do – wait and watch in the relative comfort of one’s office environs as the events of the day unfold.

However, the explosions, regardless of the intensity are the handiwork of people that want to alter our way of life fundamentally and to induce a sense of fear within people that will make them think twice before they venture out of their homes to do anything that they wish to do, thereby robbing them of their freedom to do what they wish to.

Bangalore has been luckier than most other Indian cities with regard to the impact that serial blast induced terror has had on it, which is why there is a sense of panic that one wouldn’t see in cities like Mumbai which has, due to its status in the country been privy to incidents far worse than Bangalore has ever witnessed.

What would be lousy would be if people were to alter their way of life fundamentally in the face of these incidents, thereby ensuring that those who caused the blasts achieved their objectives. I hope that people would say ‘screw those bomb planters, let’s get on with things’ and let things take their own course, while exercising a little caution in any case.

From what has been stated across multiple websites and TV channels, the blasts were low in intensity and the number of casualties haven’t yet been completely established.

The blasts have taken place in multiple locations across the city, and regardless of the intensity, it has caused some amount of panic.

At the office, while some people remain chilled out and are taking it easy, there have been some others who have been hyperventilating as if they were present within a mile radius of the twin towers in lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001.

Rumours are flying aplenty, with channels reporting 5, 6 and 8 blasts across different parts of town, some of them at the city center while some others on arterial roads leading towards major IT hubs.

Nayandahalli, which is quite close to my office has also been the location of one of the explosions, and the proximity f this explosion to my office has had people here up in a tizzy. There is a palpable tension in the atmosphere with cell phones ringing or people making calls to their near and dear ones hoping that they stay put in a place that is safe or stay at home out of harm’s way.

While news channels (Times Now) was stating that the target was primarily the IT sector, with blasts on Hosur Road, Koramangala and such, it is quite unfounded to make such an assumption since the IT industry people would be the ones that would be among the most ensconed and protected among all others, given the levels of security within and outside their premises.

However, business men, college students and people using the locations of the blast as transit points would be the ones most affected by it.

I hope everyone I know is ok, and I hope everyone you know is alright too.God bless.