A 3-Sided View of things

Keeping the anger alive

I liked Prasoon Joshi’s poem. ‘Is baar zakhmo ko nahi bharoonga…’ because we can’t afford to let ourselves heal. Because when we do, we forget all that we promise in our hour of grief. It’s happened so many times before – the Mumbai floods, the numerous other terrorist attacks that have happened on this city & even after all the failures in infrastructures that we endure. 

 

Right after each event we, especially the educated higher income elite of this city, vent our spleen about all that went wrong during the event – corrupt administrative systems, political feebleness, the chalta-hai attitude that prevails, the logic of political enfranchisement & vote banks that has left our city to be orphaned by its users. We are astute thinkers, emotionally exploring every aspect, passionately arguing about cause & effect, which is the reason why we are so well placed across global management cadres; but alas, we soon forget what we have analysed & concluded. 

 

Is it our culture of philosophical resignation to what-will-happen-will-happen that is to blame? Could be. Leaving it to fate & surrendering yourself to what will happen next is the popular way how many Indians deal with anger & strife. 

 

But this is a false view of how to deal with anger & the resultant stress. There are two ways to deal with anything that unsettles you & makes you angry; one is to steel yourself & be disciplined in handling the negative emotions that overcome you. This is undoubtedly a difficult path to take. Consider how calmly the NSG handled the situation, dealing with the situation at hand & no doubt blocking out everything else. This was certainly not any in-born talent but a result of years of disciplined training.  

 

The other way to deal with it is to surrender yourself to the emotions that engulf you. Mostly this is interpreted in a defeatist sort of way & a rationalization that this is a consequence of fate & destiny. However surrender means is that we should accept what has happened & prepare ourselves for the future so that a similar event does not repeat itself & we don’t go through the same cycle of anger & negativity. 

 

This is not what we do. To get rid of the negativity someone will declare that things must return to normal as soon as possible. Offices must open, stocks must be traded, cricket matches should be played, beer must be drunk. 

 

How insensitive have we become? 

 

Do we make time to reflect upon what has happened & to draw lessons from it? Don’t we need time to mourn this senseless tragedy, to introspect? 

 

Here are the list of things that I can predict will happen over the next few days:

 

1. The BCCI & Lalit Modi will announce the next cricket junket. All of us will concern ourselves with selection ‘blunders’, broadcast fees & rejoice over the majestic on-drive that Sachin hits. 
2. The stock markets will go up a hundred points & the Economic Times will have a smart aleck headline on it (sample their headline from Friday – ‘Quantum of Solace’). It will be hailed as a ‘testimony to the spirit of Mumbai’. 
3. The BJP & Shiv Sena will call for a bandh to protest against this attack. Narendra Modi & Bal Thackeray will make inflammatory speeches from Shivaji park. 
4. That upholder of maharashtrian masculinity, Raj Thackeray will launch another agitation against ‘outsiders’ who are actually responsible for everything under the sun. 
5. Our newspapers will continue to spew out inane supplements, giving air-time to assorted socialite floozies, glorified peacocks & the party circuit. 
6. The news channels will organise a round of live candle-light marches at each of the attack sites. The anchors will raise the temperature by inciting & invoking emotions of the audience, putting on air sound bytes of grieving kin, and worse, by ignorant but indignant south-bombay types who will offer simplistic & naïve solutions that are so impractical. 

 

Its time we put an end to this. We have to keep this feeling alive in our minds, fresh, so that we force those who are supposed to do something to prevent such things, actually do so. 

 

Its time to stop watching cricket, its time to switch off that news channel. Let the logic of TRP’s spell out how we feel. 

 

Its time to boycott the politicians who will call bandhs or try to distract us with their petty & trivial agendas. 

 

Its time to make sure that we do something this time. 

 

How? 

 

Ask the politician who will come asking for your votes inside a 100 days time what he/she has done to prevent this from happening again. I find it appalling that we don’t have a single leader among the political class, someone who will stand up & tell us that ‘yes, I will make sure that this does not happen again’. All we see are poker-faced men who mumble about passing the buck. If this was a company we would call it ‘externalising’ the problem & not taking ownership for your job & the person would be given the sack immediately. While this was not surprising to see from the old bandicoots who pretend to be political leaders, it was distressing to see the young blood too assume a similar posture (see Milind Deora mumble away on TV). Ironically the first real statement of apparent leadership came from the much maligned ‘foreign’ politician – Sonia Gandhi, who said that ‘we can no longer sit back and let these attacks overwhelm us’. Unusual you would think? Not really, we Indians love to argue & pontificate, but are not so hot on execution; its not surprising that she is only one who chose to say something like this while all the other desi bandicoots keep silent as they lie low in the safe knowledge that the public will move on to the next titillation. 

 

Can we spend just 5 minutes everyday for the next 100 days thinking about this tragedy? Refresh ourselves by looking at the photos & videos from the past few days? Think of the kin of those killed, maimed, seriously injured? We need to channelize our anger constructively so that we don’t have to go through this again & again & again.