I dream of a White Christmas

As the smoke smoulders over the Mumbai 26/11 attacks and the Indian media insisting on fanning the flames by reeling out images 24/7 and mindlessly interviewing every Tom, Dick and Harry who has an opinion about it, I believe its time people stopped the finger pointing and mourning and started thinking of affirmative action.

All the media can do is keep reminding us of how tragic the whole incident was and keep scratching the scab so that the wound never heals. It has only one purpose, like all cheap entertainment: to titillate; by either voyeurism, fear or sorrow. It seldom talks to the right persons who have concrete and useful solutions, because it truly seeks no answers and probably because the right people hopefully would be on top of the problem rather than speaking with a bunch of looney journalists who could kill each other for a sound byte from some 'important-sounding' person. Peace protests and boards filled with messages of solidarity only serve at best to unite people until the time they forget the tragedy and go back to their microcosms.

With every tragedy come the scapegoats and inevitably the first on the firing line are the politicians. The people are ostensibly tired of politicians and the media seems to fire it back to the people for not exercising their franchise: like it would make a difference! Its the same herd of jackasses up for elections each time and they just keep playing musical chairs: once in the opposition, the next time in the ruling. Our country is what it is, whether good, bad or ugly not because of our government but because of the people: right from the rickshaw driver to the corporate honcho. The politician serves only as comic relief.

The next heads to roll are obviously those of the Pakistani government and to date all the diplomatic and not so diplomatic ways of getting them to be declared a terrorist state have proven to be futile. Even if we have them declared a terrorist state, would that stop them from producing and harbouring jehadis? Would that give us a tangible excuse to go to war against Pakistan? War between two countries has never served any purpose more fruitful than a shouting match between two raucous juveniles: no matter who win., The former get battered economies and piling debt unpayable for any forseeable future and the latter get their larynxes battered and can't speak for a forseeable future. There are a lot of countries out there that could benefit from this war given the global economic situation, and one of them most certainly isn't India or Pakistan.

In this whole post-mortem of the terrorist attacks a few things were blurred out of the context. One cannot keep one's safe unlocked and expect no one to steal. The whole process of tackling the terrorists left a lot to be desired: for one we were caught napping, next our forces did not have the right ammunition, the commandos reach the hotel and then rummage for maps and layouts and further the terrorists used GPS when our average joe NSG commando would never have laid eyes on one! It beats me how a country with top IT giants can fail at the most rudimentary tranferrence of information.

Now that the war is no longer fought in battlefields of Panipat or for that matter Kargil, one would expect the security forces to be armed for such civilian warfare and on their Christmas wish-list would be getting the right arms and ammunitions and fast enough, getting briefed about the layout and locations well in advance and to top it all getting the media out of their hair when they are on an operation. With an apathetic government, a Prime Minister and a President who are a travesty to the posts they hold, one can only expect inaction from them on this wishlist. Its time corporate India which has so far been a silent spectator, largely viewed by the public as an emblem of capitalistic greed and an equally visible finger pointer in this whole circus begins to take affirmative action and becomes the 'secret Santa' of our security forces. Corporations like Tatas, Wipro and Infosys have been pioneering in trying to effect social and infrastructural changes in cities like Jamshedpur and Bangalore. I am sure the security forces would be happy to use CCTV cameras installed in public areas, lobbies and hallways of commercial buildings, databases containing layouts of buildings and for God's sake a good PR who would get those rapacious media hyenas out of the way and cordone off the area before they start a tea party amidst gunfire.

Ideas of having paid public toilets, of installing pollution meters, of manning traffic during rush hours, of building a city around steel plants took birth within corporations that looked beyond merely profit margins and annual turnovers. They sought to change the situation around them not just point fingers and blame lazy governments. Lazy governments came and went and yet the cities that survived were those with responsible corporates. It is time that those within corporate India cogitate and percolate such ideas with the powers that be to reclaim our belief that we the people truly run our country.