Thursday, July 13, 2006

Survival ... the Basic instinct

Being in the place I am, among all its constraints and restrictions, is my compulsion to watch CNN world endlessly.... there isn’t another English language channel around :( ,

Of what i had heard of CNN ... of its being a US propaganda mouthpiece is not far from wrong.. you find most of the reports bragging about what the US is doing ... on the War on terror in Iraq ....or how will the highly advanced missile defense system can track a north Korean missile launch, inform Bush about it within x secs , get a decision in y secs and shoot it down in z secs :) ... i cant comment on how biased the reporting actually is …. as there aint any way to verify out here ....but for sure CNN takes pride in being American and I see nothing wrong in that … now looking at the positives .... Which I have started doing more often than not since landing in this god forsaken place J ..... my knowledge on international affairs is better than it has ever been ...

It was one of those days .... back from another hectic day at office ... i reluctantly switched on the tv having nothing better to do .... And as usual it was preset at CNN.... but this certainly wasnt like any of those days.... the face that appeared was our very own Rajdeep Sardesai ... and the coverage wasn’t a normal CNN world coverage .... what i was seeing was a Breaking Story … a live coverage on the very familiar CNN-IBN ... the story of those 11 minutes that rocked Mumbai .... Leaving around 200 dead and more than 700 injured..... and more importantly once again reinforcing the uncertainty of life.

Death off course is inevitable, but survival is often considered as the basic instinct of any living species and when we talk about ourselves.... the Homo Sapiens.... its complete evolution to this day has been fiercely driven by this very instinct.... there has been a constant Endeavour in this direction .... through developing basic tools out of stone for self defence against wild animals to developing the best of medical procedures to fight death ...predictablity is the hall mark of any develpoed society .... be it about the weather forecast or your life !!

Darwin provided us with the mantra of survival ... survival of the fittest ... only those will survive who adatp and change according to your changing environments .... newton another great told us of inertia ... a body at rest tends to be at rest until an external force is applied .... for us I believe the external force has been applied a bit too often in recent years and its overdue to get out of Inertia .... and get fitter if we need to survive as a sovereign nation.... we no longer can afford to be a soft nation and a soft target for such acts of indiscriminate violence ....

This is not the first time such a dastardly act has been committed in Mumbai .... the culprits of the 1993 blasts still roam around freely .... organize weddings at the grandest of scales under full media coverage and we and our authorities are still trying to prove that that person exists .... we need to to do an Israel or a KGB or a CIA or even and ISI ..... track each one of those associated with such acts and if need be even get them assanitaed !! ... the point is that the message should be loud and clear that no one will be spared .... if the US can ravage an entire nation to search out one person .... or Israel can launch attacks to search out one of its soldiers ... why are we so soft ..... Why the only statement that our PM can make is 'stay calm' ....

There are schools of thought that talk about motives and rationale of such attacks ... but for me killing of innocents is the greatest act of terror that is possible and beyond any kind of mercy .. and as a friend of mine says "Till the time violent groups strike at such soft targets...till the time they keep on killing innocent civilians just because every act of terror gives them 10000 rupees, they will remain to be called Terrorists...the day they get their target right they will become freedom fighters and nationalists " … read more about these views at http://tedioustedium.blogspot.com/

People today are talking about the spirit of Mumbai and how two days later those very trains are packed again ... but does that mean we don’t care ??? does that mean that this will be one more incident that will keep moving down the pages of our papers and one day forgotten till another similar incident happens ??? if things stay the way they are this is what is exactly going to happen this time round too .... the inertia of our govt machinery that has set in is too high for such "SMALL" incidents to shake ....

Why are we as a nation like this, what makes us so soft .... what makes us to accept things as they are .... When will the time come when we will learn to protect our honour .... our lives and that tooo with authority ... when will the time come when we as a Nation will assert ourselves ??? when will we have our very own CNN !!! i guess no one has the answers now .... but surely the time will come when every indian will start asking these questions and then we will see a revolution !!!! .... just hope that I manage to SURVIVE till then .....to witness the new India ...