For some reason or the other, disasters happen. What is quite pathetic is articles such as these which contain the basic premise of ‘Is it safe to fly in India?’ Given that this event is tragic, hundreds of flights fly in and out of India every day. Nobody remembers when the last air disaster happened in India. Assuming we have flown for 50 years without any disaster, the all-knowing and omniscient media publish an article which probably will get marketed all over the western world who are just looking for such information.

 And then, you have politicians who announce relief money for the deceased sooner than I can say ‘Hello!’. What’s with the relief money almost everytime anyway? As if that is going to mollify and soothe the kith and kin. At the very least, the middlemen pocket most of this money (probably a percentage goes back to these politicians?).

 Sensationalism knows no boundaries. But in such tragic cases, please – shut the eff up.

 2) Fatwa-galore -   The other end of immense wisdom are these fatwa declarations by these god-knows-who-mullahs. First, there was this fatwa against working muslim women. When serious objections began to take shape, it seemed that the fatwa was misquoted. Don’t get me wrong here. Fatwas are usually written statements and not some random guy shouting on the street that there is a fatwa against so and so. Therefore, misquoting a written statement (the fatwa) cannot just happen. As if that wasn’t enough, some other fatwa was issued against insurance. Please people. There is an economic law called Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. A fatwa is supposed to be a very serious exercise (anyone remember Salma Rushdie?). A fatwa here, there and everywhere will seriously reduce your mileage of issuing a serious one.

Again, religion is sacred. But in such blatantly silly cases, please – shut the eff up.

3)  Ban-Ban-Ban – The most hilarious news over the past week was Pakistan banning Facebook. And then Youtube. And then Twitter. Last known, they banned atleast 50 sites. Let’s just go ahead and ban the Internet, shall we? I mean, Internet is evil. Social networking reduces productivity. We might as well spend that time polluting young people minds and turn them into jihad. Imagine if these young people get addicted to Farmville. And tweet about their level in Farmville. And upload a video on youtube of beating everyone at Farmville. The horror! That just cannot be done. Let’s ban the whole shit down and sit in darkness, shall we.

 Again, majority of the Pakistani people don’t need this crap. So, politicians, please – shut the eff up.

1) The much awaited and eagerly hyped marriage has indeed come to an end. No, I am not talking of the Indo-China bhai-bhai pact or the India-Pak Aman ki Asha initiative coming to fruition. The talk of the town has indeed been the Shoaib Malik-Sania Mirza nikah. The media as usual went ga-ga over a nikah which had controversy written all over it with glee. Some commentators, of course, astutely questioned whether Sania Mirza should play for India or Pakistan? (considering the way she’s playing currently, do you really care?). And then came the news of Ayesha Siddiqui and the Pati, Patni aur Woh angle which made Ekta Kapoor’s mega-serials look childish. The media lapped it up with relish and played it more times than the Mahabharat repeat on Doordarshan. Subsequently, news emerged that Shoaib-Sania marriage ‘may be’ postponed. By now, everyone and their great grandfather had stopped caring about an event that hardly concerned them. Everything was going fine and no one was really bothered until the keeper of our national conscience, Arnab Goswami and Times Now, told us to GET ANGRY at the baseless allegations of Ayesha Siddiqui and rumors of the nikah being postponed. Various anchors at CNN-IBN were so damn loud that one could hear them even after muting the volume. The Mirzas and the Maliks could take it no more and pre-poned their nikah with Shoaib divorcing Ayesha Siddiqui first and marrying Sania almost immediately (In one of those moments off work when I was thinking about Shoaib, Sania, Ayesha and their future, I was struck with an epiphany. Shoaib divorced Ayesha, whom he denied marrying earlier. Then he marries Sania. That dude is brilliant!  His net marriage count is still zero. And according to Quran, he can technically marry 4 more!). Of course, you would not believe that there is a recession going on in the world today, if you looked at the food menu and the Mehr amount involved in their marriage. Anyhoo, let’s get to the Lahore part of the wedding quickly, shall we? Last but not the least, Times of India, in its infinite wisdom gave a peek into their elegant, yet insightful news ticker -  ‘Aman ki asha: Are Indo-Pak marriages the first step?’ Why didn’t we ever think of this before? (V had warned me against squeezing this topic further because of my extensive comments on it on Facebook. I think it was more like STFU. So yeah, this rant will be the end of this topic unless of course something incredible comes up in Lahore).

2) The other big news of the week was CRPF jawans getting slaughtered in a Maoist attack. Of course, keeping in line with existing media standards, I will not, WILL NOT devote much space and analysis on some event like this compared to the exiquisite and eye-ball grabbing news of Shoaib-Sania. However, being a responsible blogger, I have to reluctantly point you to some news which will obviously lead to incredible happiness among us, the taxpayer junta in India.

Sample this very well written report for instance.

In summary, once the remaining few jawans who were alive at the scene were rushed to the hospital,

“No chief minister, no state home minister, no other minister, no member of Parliament, no MLA, no director-general of police (Vishwa Ranjan, a man popular with journalists in all seasons), no chief secretary, no home secretary, no inspector-general (TJ Longkumer, who Chidambaram later told journalists had planned the dead men’s fatal foray into the forests), no district magistrate (frenzied a few hours later as reporters surged at Chidambaram’s press conference because he didn’t want anyone to throw a shoe at the Union home minister), no superintendent of police, not one high-ranking officer of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), to which 75 of the dead belonged, were here; just the very angry CRPF sub-inspector.”

“Typically, the survivors mattered less than the dead. Head Constable Raj Bahadur and Constables Pramod Kumar Singh and Baljeet Singh are lucky to survive the carnage, having taken bullets everywhere but in the guts. A hundred paces from the mortuary, they lie writhing in pain on dirty hospital linen stained from previous occupants’ dried blood. Only one has a mosquito net. There are no doctors or nurses. Two constables who’ve come on their own watch over their wounded mates. The ward is a hovel; the toilet is a stinking blocked drain.”

There is much more. The article is a must-read for such issues which cause immense delight and mirth.

So, in summary,

We had a surprise attack by Maoists.

The Policemen didn’t have proper equipment to fight them.

The Policemen didn’t have proper training to fight them.

The Policemen who fought valiantly and got injured were neither treated nor cared for.

Now, why have I heard this before? Anyone remembers 26/11? (and in this case, no prominent guy arrived at the scene till much later!)

Of course. We are Indians. We don’t learn from our mistakes. We are like that only.

Surprisingly, no relief packages have yet been announced. It’s a real shame that some politicians can’t get richer with this relief money. What has our country come to? Time for another useless bill? Certainly.

3) Not that this news is worth linking to, but then again again, how else do we document and understand our Indian PM’s calmness and calculated moves to assert global and moral superiority in the world?

First, our Un-Man-mohan Singh requests (and maybe grovel) Obama to put pressure on Pak.

In line with keeping relations harmonious, President Obama urges Pakistan to bring the 26/11 perpetrators to justice. (Of course, you might ask, what exactly does ‘bringing to justice’ mean? Silly you. Justice means different things to different people. For you and me, justice is behind bars and rigorous punishment. For people like Hafeez Sayed, it is a palace-lifestyle with Muttom biryani everyday!)

If that is not embarrassing, news is leaked that Obama pressed Pak on terror at India’s insistence. What I do not understand is why should someone leak this? Even Arjun Rampal would have seen through it like a transparent polythene paper.

And the brilliant Gilani wants more evidence against Lashkar. I have no comment. Just Respect.

I am just seething with happiness at us being called a global economic superpower, but with softer principles, nay, Gandhian principles. I think the time has come for us to slap on our own cheek and apologize to the perpetrator. The circle would be complete. As Miley Cyrus told me one day during our yoga class with Deepak Chopra, Karma it seems, is a bitch.

1) It is strange that each one of us would be willing to be involved in some form of cathartic activity to demonstrate our opposition to terrorism. We suddenly had a spurt in the number of ‘I hate terrorism’ communities/groups on different social networks like Orkut and Facebook. It was as if we suddenly woke up to the fact that terrorists were scheming right across the border only from yesterday. Another form of highly visible but least efficient way of opposing terrorism is to hold candle rallies and signature campaigns. As far as I can remember, none of the above activities proved to be even as effective as a squirrel’s ass to prevent terrorism or for our politicians to make ‘Anti-terrorism’ a part of their party agenda.

2) Another extreme form of cathartic activity seems to be heavily arguing for bombing the hell out of Pakistan – smug with the feeling of ‘we are bigger and stronger than them and hence we’ll win’. There is no doubt that we would win but at what cost. The US might be willing to attack and bomb countries which are thousands of miles away from its soil. There is little cost in terms of human lives/development except for outrageous outflow of money. Would the US attack with same fervor, say Russia which is across the Alaskan border? Forget the fervor, would it even attempt to attack at all, say even with snow dinghies? Talking about winning is one thing, getting atleast 3 or 4 of our major cities bombed is another. The cost of human lives and to the corresponding development would be enormous.

3) My friend asked me a question the other day ‘Has India as a whole gone so aloof – why did some states let Congress win inspite of their non-performance and incompetence to tackle terrorism?’. Performance has never been a hallmark of any political party since our Independence. In fact, I would go so far to say that we have had this tremendous economic development, not because of the government but inspite of it. Secondly, looking back at history, India has always been a conglomeration of princely states. We never were one single country except under the aegis of Asoka and Akbar. Expecting the rest of India to be tuned and sensitive to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai is a far call. The rest of India might in turn ask difficult questions like ‘What are you doing about the Naxalite movement in Chattisgarh?’, ‘What are you doing about the ULFA in Assam and NE states?’, ‘What are you doing about the Gujarat riots?’. There is no one right answer to any of these questions. Finally, politics in India is and probably never will be based on one single issue (or any issue for that matter). Identity politics is rampant – and I particularly don’t see any immediate solution to move away from votes based on caste, creed and religion. Congress has won/BJP has won in those states purely based on anti-incumbency and not on any particular issue.

4) So, what can we do to prevent terrorism? Again, there is no one answer – rather the approach should be multi-pronged. The biggest and the greatest weapon we have is our education and favorable demographics – in other words, our economy. We need to get stronger and stronger in our economy, through entrepreneurship, investments and growth in general. It is an open secret that politics in the global world is nothing but managing the imbalances in economies. Given that state, we need to improve our economy multi-fold. Another approach would be to cripple Pakistan’s economy through tough economic measures (cutting off trade, holding off on bilateral talks etc) and probably getting it declared as a terrorist state. The present government is taking the right steps in that direction. This approach however, is fraught with risks as a unstable Pakistan with a crippling economy is a disaster to India (excessive immigration, legal or otherwise, more people resorting to terrorism due to hunger etc.) It is indeed a fine line between the two approaches – the question really is, do we have the leaders to lead us through the fine line? Honestly, I don’t know the answer.

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