Citizen K

I am citizen K; A proud citizen of India. I am proud of India only and only because I strongly believe that one’s Dharma and Motherland; in spite of all its shortcomings, is still better than someone else’s Dharma and Motherland.

The last some days have been interesting.  Interesting; because there is no other way to describe it. Do we as Indian become sarcastic or indifferent towards this? We can if we choose to, but it’ll hardly make much of a difference. We’d just be closing our eyes while standing in front of a charging bull. Do we show anger? We can but then what is it going to lead to? We can expect all men to show their anger at the right place, in the right manner and more importantly, towards the right person.  We have been reacting in similar terms through all the blasts, riots, kidnappings, inflations, pseudo-wars etc.

What happened in Mumbai is a mockery. Not just on Indians, the politicians, the intelligence,  the armed forces or the utopian concept of democracy. It is a mockery of everything and nothing at all.  Just now, the honourable Home Minister of India, Mr. Shivraj Patil has ‘taken a moral responsibility’ for the ‘tragic incident’ and has hence tendered his resignation.  The only responsibility that Mr. Patil has taken, is that he was incompetent to handle the position which was given to him. Where was his moral responsibility when blasts were happening all over India? How come his morality got a wake up call only and only when assembly elections are taking places in Delhi, MP and Rajasthan?  Had Mr. Patil’s moral conscience really woken up he would have vowed to catch all the people who were responsible for this, he would have made sure that Dawood got extradited or at least mysteriously ‘neutralized’ on Pakistani soil. And when everything would have been hunky dorey then perhaps he should have gone on national television and should have said “I did the duties which were entrusted upon me, but the finger pointing and mud slinging by the opposition, the media and even my own colleagues has hurt me a lot. Hence, I choose to step down in the high point of my career as Home Minister”. That would have been poetic.

Ladies and Gentlemen, least we forget; Mr. Patil is just a fall-guy. He is just a crash test dummy who needs to hit the wall at 200 km/hr so that the actual driver of the car remains safe. We are all collectively responsible for everything that happens. Why is it that when it comes to basking in the glory of winning a test match or 20-20, we become collectively, a happy set of Indians? But when it comes to taking responsibility for a screw-up, we start pointing fingers. All the politicians that we blame are eventually just illegitimate children of our own misdeeds.

Finally, a note on the media coverage. The Indian media has been the only entity in the past few days to have shown some consistency. The Indian media had made a name for itself being blood sucking hounds and parasites, for being opportunistic to the point of fornicating their own sisters in order to make a breaking news story on incest relationship, for being pimps in the hands of those with money, power and both. And they have lived up to that. In its own way, the Indian media is a beacon. It is beacon of motivation on what can be achieved by being consistent. Consistently good or consistently bad, is a different ballgame altogether.