Ripples on the brain

I read quite a few blogs of journalists or free lancers who claim to be in the vicinity of the Mumbai blasts. They claim that either they or their fellow journalists put professional duty over personal safety by insisting on proceeding to or being in one of the areas of Mumbai blasts and reporting from there.

I must say like many others I’m not impressed. To me, there are only two important activities that can happen around the area of the blasts. Either you have gun in your hand and fight the terrorists or you help out the injured or those holed out in some way. Reporting minute by minute incidents to a person like me sitting thousands of miles apart is not helping anyone on the ground there. Having a camera or a mic and running around only obstructs everyone else going about doing their duty. Seeing Barkha Dutt roaming around the place and talking with the authority that she’s used to makes any common sensical viewer puke. It was atrocious to see these people almost insert the mics into the mouths of people who had survived the ordeal and were coming out of one of the hotels. If I were one of them, I would have slapped Barkha as I came out.

Pray some one tell me what service these reporters are doing in these times. How are they any better than the curious bystanders trying to watch the “fun”? In fact these guys are worse - they obstruct other people from discharging their duties and try to make money out of others’ miseries. I sometimes feel there should be some restrictions on journalistic freedom in our country, especially during such disasters.

And while we are in this matter, none of the 24 hour English news channels reported the Chennai flooding in any way. I saw a headline in NDTV just before the Mumbai incident happened and after that there was nothing. It makes me wonder if there’s any use for a South Indian in watching these news channels.

Just 3 days after Manmohan announced the 100-day plan to tackle terrorism, the terrorists have spit and shat on his face and in an act of blatant mockery of the state and its security machinery, even managed to kill the Anti Terrorism Squad chief.

I’m only reminded of the sequence in Vijayakanth-starrer Ramana, where as a team of policemen use public address system to assure the public that they will be protected against kidnapping, they get an intimation that one of their own men has been kidnapped. The public then ridicule the police team by offering to escort the police team to their station.

I can understand when M.K.Narayan says that intelligence is an extremely difficult task, but what I fail to comprehend how a same place (and that too a premier city of the country) can be attacked over and over again. If the present government even had an iota of the combination of vekkam, maanam, soodu and soranai, it would admit its failure of even protect the basic right of its people - the right to live and resign. But, I guess that is not going to change anything on the ground as there is practically no better alternative.

With terrorists almost holding the entire country to ransom through the scary regularity of their bombings, one really wonders what these decision-makers are thinking. My feeling is intelligence and enquiry and all should come later. Some drastic measures have to be taken.

When I was in New York city sometime late 2002, the city still presented a war-like situation to its visitors. One could continuously hear the drone of helicopters flying around all the time, there were so many cops roaming around the city randomly, entry was restricted in so many areas and so on. Why can’t we do something more severe - ensure zero (or near zero) infiltration from Pakistan and Bangladesh (take all our troops there), restrict entry points to the major cities and enhance surveillance of all kinds of transportation entering the city, restrict entry of visitors into airports, railway station and all other public places and keep up this whole emergency kind of situation for a year.

I know there are logistic issues here - how many cities do you protect this way and so on and so forth. But shouldn’t something of this scale be carried out? When intelligence doesn’t click, use brute force. I’m just pained by the complete lack of action. The Home Minister appears like a dumb asshole everytime a bombing happens and we can ignore him if his personal failure doesn’t have such an impact. He’s there only because he can lick the asses of his bosses, who themselves cannot boast of anything better.

I just hope things don’t get back to normal and something systemic change happens within the next few days. But I know I’m hoping against hope.