Moral Terrorist

The first thing I knew this morning was there was blood all around in Mumbai. Family, friends and their families were fine, but I feel miserable. A friend of mine said that I was traumatic – and she deserved thanks from me – my feeling was not anonymous any more. I felt slightly less miserable.
Every Indian I met this morning smiled at me, I smiled at them. Most of us didn’t say anything but somehow we all understood. It was written all over our faces. I haven’t heard a known casualty by now but this doesn’t help my misery. What makes it all more miserable is how I came to know about it. The stock markets page told me that the markets were closed due to terror attack in Mumbai. The link directed me to a web site which had loads of links in bold telling the story of dead blood and living tears. But guess what, the first link I clicked was the one with the news that England’s cricket tour of India has been cancelled. The first thought was a sad thought – No more matches. And then I read the news of the mayhem that left me in the grasp on an unknown misery – like claws of steel gripping my throat and choking my wind pipe as if that was what I deserved.
What have I become? What have we become? If I am the personification of a country then what has my country become? And if this is what my country has become then what right do we have to mourn over what another man does to my country and to my people? Demographically my country is 60% people under the age of 30. 60% of the whole population are in the age when there is nothing impossible for them – and what have we made use of it apart from worrying over stock markets, cricket, football and abolition of smoking in bars? We are a generation bred by greed, bred by ambition but devoid of responsibility. The people who kill, throw grenades, slit throats of journalists, rape women, slit their wombs and dance with the foetus on the tip of their blood thirsty swords, they are all like me, like the rest of my country – greedy, ambitious but without a trace of responsibility. It’s only ironic that their greed is opposite to us. The inevitable act of Nature – balance.
Somebody asked me that why this mayhem in my country and I said that I belong to a country of greedy foxes, coward chicken and sleeping lions. And I felt a little bit more relieved – may be because I had found someone to blame. But then I realised that I myself belong to one of the three groups. And then I found that belonged to the class of coward chickens – and because of that, I and everybody like me, the rest of the 60%, deserved to feel the pain of helplessness which only comes when somebody dies. Unfortunately, the pain of knowing that somebody is killing somebody for reasons not fit in the rules of mankind, the pain is the exactly the same. Helplessness – this is the choice we make when we decide to care more for our own cars than the old man walking by a cane by the road side and we decide to drive by. This is the what we deserve when we choose to throw the food in our plates while millions sleep hungry every night. This is the consequence when we decide to be just ‘I.’
I am a terrorist myself because deep at my core, I have the same motives and impetus as the man who would have laughed draconically while rotating a firing sten gun around people indiscriminately. My country, just like any other country has been shaped by wars – mean who decided that they held the fate of others in their own hands. Some were good, some were bad and we inherited all of it. And left it to rot with time while we lay merry in our cosy homes with costly whisky warming our throats. Are we the people for whose future, men and women died? Do we have the slightest right to live in the country of Nehru and Bose and Gandhi and every single man and woman who took the slightest of bruise on their innocent bodies for the sake of the freedom of our country? Are we in a free country? Do we call this country free where white-clad men and saffron-clad women trample the flag of my country every night and let democracy take the blame of their selfish motives? Did we inherit this country just to sleep and express sadness when innocents die and then just go back to work the next day as if nothing had happened? When will we realise that we need wait for pain to pinch us to realise that it hurts? How much do we wait to understand that we are the only ones responsible of that fact that others dare to think of standing on our motherland and killing our families? Why have we become so scattered by our selfish ambitions that we don’t realise that we are breaking up? How many lectures of Panchatantra we need to understand that if we don’t stand united, we will fall and a great nation will see its worst days?
The enemy is not at the gates, it’s within, and unless India becomes what it had transformed into on the day of 1857, we will not be able to stop them. We have no right to cry unless we ourselves stop being the Moral Terrorists that we have become. My country does not a uniformed army to protect; my country needs a common man with a slightest sense of responsibility and a little respect for the blood which has already been shed and millions of tears which will continue just because we were living with out eyes closed.
The sleeping lion has to awake and the coward chickens have to stand with them. We have to UNITE. Then we will regain our right to pain. And the right to peace.