36 hrs and the drama is not ending. A bunch of young guys holding this entire nation for no ransom. There is a hostage situation but no negotiations. Even in war, there is some demand, some people want to capture a piece of land, fighting for their rights. Here there is nothing plane simple destruction. What a waste of life I say. If this is the purpose for which these gunmen are dying, then what are they dying for?
I used to laugh at all the action movies of the Deols and Devgans of bollywood. It is simply not possible to load a person with so much of ammunition I would think. I do not feel so now. To fight a battle so long, these terrorist have so much of ammunition with them. Where do they get it from? Who is paying for it? Why are they paying for it?
I wrote sometime back that terrorism is simply ineffective in India. I still stand by my views. Although the number of injured is quite high in this shootout, these guys have still not been able to cross the number of deaths in the stampedes we had. And these terrorist are surely going to die. But the nation is in real shock because it has taken lesser number of men to kill so many of them. I have been fortunate (or unfortunate) to see the live coverage of this incidence almost since the beginning. I was late from office and waiting to see the 11:00 PM show of Asambhav on Zee Marathi. My wife was channel surfing and she watched this news. She almost instantaneously shouted. Most of my in-laws are in Mumbai and she always gets upset with such news for obvious reasons. I could not stop watching the news and finally succumbed to sleep only at 4:00 AM as news came pouring in every few minutes.
For long time I was wondering when will I see Ratan Tata’s comments on this. Being part of the Tata group, I have tremendous respect for his (I would have had it even otherwise, but it feels like we are part of a family). What touched me most is that he asked all agencies not to forget this incidence. We as a nation have really left our bloody past behind. Had we remembered that, we would have taken all necessary steps to stop this from happening. If you look at the number of attacks on our nation and compare with US and UK, it would be easily understood that we have not learnt from the past. We take pride in saying how the life has come to normal in a day or two. But then did we really prevent the future instances of the terror attacks? Non-violence is an ornament of the mighty. We just have resilience to stand up when someone slaps us. That is not good enough. We should be strong enough to make that someone think 10,000 times before they take a look at us.
I was also wondering how much more coverage we are seeing for this event than the similar situations in Kashmir or other parts of the country. Deservedly VP Singh did not get much attention of the media due to this. But was this because it was in Mumbai and convenient for all channels to cover it? Media’s role in this case will always be questioned. All across the world, this has become a nuisance. I personally could not detach myself from the live coverage and I could not sleep well. But then live coverage is not complete without news paper report. You still need words to create a greater impact. I had to read the next day news paper.
I am sure that in some part of the world, these guys are going to be heroes. This means that we are likely to have similar attacks in future. How are we prepared for this? There is a contrasting environment in today’s urban and rural areas. For the smaller cities of India, this difference is not that wide. But compare Mumbai with some small village in Maharashtra, specially in backward areas and we will notice that the requirements of the police force are quite different in these places. Same is the case with general discipline. So when the person from rural area comes to Mumbai, he first has to learn the discipline of the city. Mumbaikars have learned it hard way and every now and then when someone creates a chaos, their lives, daily calculations of means of living go for a toss. Everything in Mumbai is so calculated today. We can make it more easier to live in Mumbai only if we teach this discipline to all our rural citizens. But that is not on our agenda. In fact the Mumbai way of life can make life much easier in villages as well. What is will also do is to bring effectiveness in our ways to handle such crisis situations. One of the biggest task for the rescue teams and police is to cut their way through hoard of onlookers. They have no business in such situations but then they are there. In my opinion, this social discipline is the only one lesson we need to learn as a nation to go to the top. Be it in the commerce or be it in fighting the terrorism. Discipline reduces waste and brings efficiencies. It is as simple as that.