The Writer and his times.

One of the easiest things an otherwise mediocre writer can accomplish with aplomb is to comment on the times he finds himself a part of. And so, with no need to cast aside my mediocrity, indeed use it as a strength here, I begin my commentary on what happened last week.

If I mentioned that my interpersonal sexual activity curve suddenly plummeted to make love to the base-line before I talk about how Mumbai was attacked by a bunch of charged up tweenagers, I suppose I would being disrespectful, unpatriotic and perhaps be liable to be charged with light treason. So I won't.

How does one begin to overgeneralize the tendencies, aspirations and activities of a billion people that have managed to fill a subcontinent to the brim? By calling them fucktards with a set of intestines for brains and another brown eye where their mouth should be? Of course.

Consider for example what the casualties of last week's terror attack means. If there were 500 casualties in all, that would make a loss of 0.0000005 of India's total population. Doesn't look like a big loss. There are more than enough births everyday to compensate for that. Sure we seem to have lost a disproportionately large sum of money. Some say thousands of millions over three days. But time is money and so that can be expected. And yet, for some reason it hurts us so much more. How now?

Is it because it could very well have been us in those hotels? That train station? Perhaps.

Now what is Mumbai? A money well? A deep throated whore? An island full of the best bits of the Indian people? Maybe. Mumbai is the nerve center where all the other nerves want to be.

There are so many Indias and so many of them seem to be drawn in by the behemoth that is Mumbai.

We could call this a Navy and a Coast Gaurd and an Intelligence Bureau and a Research & Analysis Wing failure. The bureaucracy might have failed us. The present government maybe to blame for having loose fitting policies. Our neighboring countries might be blamed, and they are being made to bare their teeth too. So in the end, we are blaming a mechanism spanning thousands of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of employees for letting in a handful of young boys armed with a few hundred thousand dollars of equipment, and even letting them go about their business.

Consider what is happeneing in Tamil Nadu this very day. Similar casualties?Socioeconomically speaking perhaps it pales before our Mumbai business. Still I don't see 20 lakhs displaced from Mumbai. 

What could have fishermen and agriculturalists have done to incur such wrath? What could Mumbaikars have done to incur such wrath? Now even though you expect I am using this as rhetoric, and will villify Mumbai (and perhaps even those pre-modernist village-folk) in some ingenious fashion, why should I? You can guess what I have to say. We all know we have to say with "the voice of our ageless creed", shit just happens. Saying Mumbai wore her dress a little too short and so was just asking for the raping is being far more broad minded than our friendly neighbourhood representative fuck who is even now busy passing the buck.

Look at what the cyclone means. It is a force of nature. Vast, invincible, and unavoidable. We accept and even laud it for its nonpartisanship. It is not evil. In some easily explicable behaviour, the freshly updated toll was not even carried out in most papers. The same can be extended to other similar natural phenomena. Calling them disasters would be narcissistic. Floods were prayed for from the Nile. They were, to put it gently, used.

Need I say more?

Why shouldn't my sex life interest you just as much?