Open letter to the PM

Sir, you did it! The same empty rhetoric! “We will not bow down to terror”! Fantastic respected Sir. But, may we know which country you are talking about? If it’s India, then you are afflicted with some deep hallucination. The terrorists haven’t bothered about whether you will bend or not. They have already bent you at the waist and having an orgy at your backside. Maybe you can charge them under Section 377 of IPC. If you are not aware what the section stands for ( as you are hallucinating anyway ), it is against sodomy. ( afterall you and your party want less stringent laws against terror )

You and cronies should be hanging yourselves by the neck if you have any shame at all. But then why would you have shame? You look like a puppet in the TV screen and on most times, I have to pinch myself to believe that you are a human ( not humane anyway, that we know, with the blood of so many Indian citizens in your hand ). For God sake, next time you appear on TV, do two things. One, move other parts of your body apart from the lips ( despite the fact you may be agonizing in pain at your posterior extreme ) and two, don’t use the teleprompter. Make some effort atleast to say it straight from the heart. Don’t read out reassuring messages to us. We are anyway much better equipped to handle grief and anger without your help.

Are you really serious about terrorism? If you have proof about foreign involvement, why are you not crying hoarse? Did someone promise you a ‘Best Diplomat’ award or what? If underworld is involved, why are you not making a demand on Pakistan to extradite Dawood? That’s the least you can do to add some bravery element to your stupid empty speech?! Why are you not unleashing fury at POK? Are you scared about the reaction of Pakistan and their nukes? Or is it that, you are suddenly concerned about our lives? If the second thought is true, Sir, please don’t worry about us. We are braver than you and we prefer getting nuked to getting shot by one bit, two bit terrorists.

Your inaction and weak knees have sacrificed many of our fellow citizens’ lives and some of the finest officers. If you need some inspiration to act firmly, shall I advise you to watch some TV? See what’s happening out there. The bravest of our men, getting airdropped and taking bullets for your cowardice!

Don’t you really think that you should have stayed with academics? Maybe write a paper on the Economic Impact of Terrorism than trying to deal with it? Why your cabinet committee meeting? Why not an all-party meeting? Why not ask Modi on how he managed to defuse bombs at Surat instead of giving speeches and announcing solatium?

The least you can do now, is to shut yourself at 7, Racecourse road. We don’t want the additional task of saving you and given our mood, we may forget that we have to.

Shame on us

Shame on us! A country of a billion people! Claiming to be a new power in the world! Boasting endlessly on what all we can achieve in the next 20 years! Maybe I should add ‘If we are alive’

How long this tragic situation will continue, we would never know. Maybe as long as we treat Indian lives as a cheap commodity. The US, UK and Australia governments have already issued bulletins advising against travel to India, their cricket tours cancelled, all for the few hundred of their citizens who may possibly be affected.

If you are in any of the Metro’s save Chennai, can you honestly say that you are not running the risk of getting killed any day? It just doesn’t sink on us. The famed Indian tolerance comes to our rescue here. So does our Karmic philosophy. If you gotta go, you gotta go! A dialogue that is drilled into our heads to accept any shit that is trashed upon us.

You could be in a train, in a cinema hall, dining with your family in a restaurant, stand in a chaat stall you could be anywhere! Sorry my friend, you aren’t safe! Because you are an Indian and you are dispensable. Mayawati has 350 policemen saving her and almost all our neta’s. You and I are second-class. The Home Minister will anyway condemn the attacks and we will go back our idli, dosa and vada paav’s. We will have some nice live TV action and debate and wait for another day to get killed if we already are not.

Maybe Chandrayaan will help us. Maybe we can find ourselves a safe haven in the Moon where we may hope to live longer. Maybe we can spend a few more billion dollars to amass weapons, which we will dust up on the Pooja days and lock them up.

How the f*** we are so shameless? How the f*** we celebrate Pirabakaran’s birthday in a high court complex bursting crackers? How the f*** we cry over the Tamil’s across the border and just don’t bother about cracking down on terrorists on our own soil?

If there was a plot to insult India’s sovereignty, this is it. Terrorists coming through boats from Karachi and strike at will at the very heart of the country. You think we will wake up now? Never!! One strike at them, a country got annihilated and for 6 years they are safe. For us, we cant survive if we don’t see blood in the newspapers as a daily diet. We will shake hands with the enemies across the border, play cricket matches and throw mud at Modi.

As long as Congress runs the country, your life isn’t yours. They are so weak and they make the country weak. We are having a cabinet committee meeting and the PM will address us at 7 pm, almost 24 hours after our country was invaded. I know what he will say. He will say that he condemns such attacks on innocent civilians, he will say that India won’t tolerate such things anymore and he will say we will crack down on terrorism and to added measure he will add it is cross-border. He will say that we have sufficient proof that it is a foreign conspiracy. And none of us will ask what the ‘F’ he is doing if he knows all of this.

And the people of Mumbai, will once again demonstrate their indomitable spirit and we will start trading first thing on Friday. Left to me, I will change the concept of that trade. I may sound jingoistic and I will have a hundred guys who preach on more tolerance. But I am not in a mood to listen, not when we spill blood on our streets.

Let us trade blood for once..

I am back

There is something about October. Could be a coincidence, but it is true. I just don’t write anything in October. Just went back and checked my postings. As soon as I had started two years back, just in the second month, I went into a shell and came back with a vengeance. Now after two full years, for the first time I haven’t posted anything at all. Not sure whether I feel vengeful now. But, thanks to Obama, one came out like flash in the pan and as if it is an addiction, next one is now being made.

Come to think of it, this is really an addiction. With no defined withdrawal symptoms or a detox program! Maybe you quit for sometime, but when you start, you start from where you leave. Just now, I saw one of very senior colleagues smoking. I knew he had quit long time back and suddenly he was back at again. And he said after 2 full years, he restarted when his dog died. Certain habits die hard. You don’t know when and how you start, but when you start it just doesn’t stop. Maybe writing is like that.

I was into too much reading and some of them real good ones. And maybe I wanted to drop the pretense of ‘I also write something’. And every time something strikes my fancy, I always felt that it has been written about in the previous blogs or just plain indifference took over.

Now I am back at it. Again, read it the Times on Sunday about writer’s block and on how the sheer thought of having to write something does not make one write. As it is claimed there was no pregnancy of words in me waiting to come out and if it was, guess it was akin to an elephant’s pregnancy. Just not wanting to see the outside world.

But when it starts, it gives a good feeling. Appears that I need to cram in stuff about all the things I saw and read in the last one month, be it an essay of Arthur Koestler or Dave Barry’s ‘Guide to Guys, or the fantastic movies like ‘A Wednesday’ and the US elections

Come to think of it , maybe there is a lot to write. I am back!! .

Hope

I have often wondered whether the Times of India takes journalism seriously and it is just about sensationalism!! The times guys don’t impress much, particularly if your diet for the last 25 years was ‘The Hindu’ and filter coffee in the morning. I often used to complain that, on all my tours the watery hotel instant coffee and some other newspaper is a sure formula to my constipation. And then Times invaded ‘Namma Chennai’ too. Don’t ask me why I subscribe! I generally don’t rationalize when it comes to English letters printed in paper. Anything goes with me. Constipation maybe, but indigestion never!

But Times actually arrived today. Not in full, but just by printing one small piece in its coverage of Obama’s ascent to the throne. It was a song from Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. Titled ‘Ebony & Ivory’, it goes like this.

“Living together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard, Oh Lord, why don’t we?”

Nothing can aptly sum up the mood of the world at this very precise moment. As if God has listened to such sort of a prayer! It is almost like a personal triumph for everyone in the world. A black man becoming the most powerful person in the earth! And a real life heroism story playing in front of your eyes! Hollywood coming alive in the biggest theatre that is world!

When the world is split in fragments racially, religiously, financially, a black man from a middle class family, with Indonesian step-siblings, with a Muslim middle name triggering celebration in a small Kenyan village is something like God’s prescription to the suffering sinners of the world. It is like giving a message to us, saying ‘Hey guys, I haven’t given up on you yet’.

This is not the time to ask questions like he was after all half-white, he is not a descendant of the real African-American slave, he didn’t have the courage to stand up and say that ‘so what if my name is Islamic’, he is going to be more of a protectionist of American interests than the world’s interests etc. He simply gives Hope. That’s enough.

Hope to millions of people who believe in democracy, the power of ballot, to his race, hard work and people who have nothing left for them but Hope.

His first name means ‘Blessed’ and may God bless him really, for on him rests a million hopes.

Amen. !