Shame

Extraordinary circumstances evoke extreme reactions and therefore need to be handled with extreme caution. The Mumbai terror strike brought death, devastation and shame. The vultures who wrote the script had planned it like this. What more could they have expected. They got round the clock television coverage as they held a nation of a billion plus population to ransom. And even though everything went according to their script what they failed to calculate was the enormous, once in a life time, kind of opportunity that they presented to the mighty Indian nation.
History is replete with examples. Opportunity travels alongside death and devastation. Japan was able to grab it because the death and devastation caused by the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrapped in shame. America’s 9/11 also had shame written all over. And now if those who planned the terror strikes in India are not taken care of once and for all the opportunity that has come alongside the Mumbai shame would also be lost for good.
Of what good is the nuclear deterrent if we can be bled like this. The lives of those who are still lucky to be alive are in no way more important than those who have laid down their lives. Let not a single drop of Indian blood go waste. Those who are coming out on to the streets be ware, it is no candle light party out there. Everything comes for a cost and the cost has to be borne by everyone.
Let’s not look up for any kind of action to the Singh who became king by buying votes in parliament. Nor from the BJP that abused the ATS chief a day before his death and later turned up at his residence to offer a compensation of Rs one crore to his family. Nor the communists for whom shame is a decent word. Only a rabid dog could have said this: not a dog would have visited the Unnikrsihnan house had it not been the major’s house. Where and when in history has a martyr’s father been treated like this? What could be more shameful than this?
The solution is lurking somewhere around in the dark. If India is crying for leadership, this crisis has the potential to throw up one. Candle light vigils will just add C02 to the already polluted environment. To quote my editor in Chief Mr Rajdeep Sardesai, “Let the Gateway of India be the Gateway of action” and let there be no peace till the perpetrators of the Mumbai Mayhem are smoked out of their safe holes.