It's always sunny at the MAC

 India VS Pakistan series is it? If the late VK Ramasamy was here with us, he’d have said “naa apopave sonnen ippidiyellam nadakkumnu” roughly translated as, “I warned you about this earlier”. The media is debating about it, the actors are debating, the fans are debating, the franchises are debating and the cricketers, well they are just plain confused. Amid all this, the bookies continue betting. But, at its midst hangs an ethical question that is so big that it is not visible; like the dot inside a big circle, nobody notices the circle.

I’m just a lay man, I get to read the paper once in three days, I don’t find news channels entertaining and I find Akshay Kumar’s movies more interesting than Arnab Goswami. What do I see? Rather what do I glimpse? For a guy who flips through the daily news paper real quick, stopping now and then for headlines or waistlines that grab my eyes, I found that almost every week there are at least one to two incidents at the border. Incursions, breaches, attacks, bombings, kidnappings and what not. I’ve become so numb to that these articles look like old Gopal toothpowder ads on The Hindu; a headline with a fancy font with some girl smiling, only, this is more macabre.

Now coming to the point, what prompted me to write this?? Well I’ve seen govt/pvt. Offices up close in India and responsibility is something that one rarely assumes. Besides this, Most of our actions are reactive in nature. The general solutions to most of the tricky situations is to either wait for the problem to solve itself or wait for time to heal the hurt or the best option: blame it on someone else. Appallingly, most border issues seem to be treated with classic Indian courtesy.

While you travel through the slow evening traffic, You encounter all kinds of people, poor, rich, the aggressive, the timid, the interested, the disinterested, the irate, the cool etc. a veritable microcosm of our society. They play out the emotions of the society beautifully, the patient driver who grumbles as the aggressive cuts across. The ignorant, who is more, involved with his music than his surroundings, the grouch who does nothing but gripe about his plight, a "know it all" guy who opines on everything under the sun without being asked….. you get the picture now. Now, let’s say there is a bombing and say, this is analogous to a traffic jam. Everyone starts getting impatient, they start honking, abusing, questioning, shouting, suggesting diversions and some of the educated lot starts suggesting options to improve the road. You can imagine the whole rigmarole. Now the govt steps in, asks a few cars to stop, diverts some of the traffic to the other side, eases up the tension a little and the traffic gets back to its normal slow moving pace. People at the front are disgruntled, while the those at the back don’t even realize the event as the pace had always been slow and the jam was sorted out before it could water down to them. The cardinal rule to remember here is “Every jam can be solved”

The recent Anna Hazare jam had been a big one and the traffic had to be diverted through different channels to ease the tension, but in the end everybody knew “Every jam can be solved”. Every guy wants to reach home and as long as he’s out of the melee he’s happy. So it just sorts itself out in time and the next morning all is forgotten. The real issues that are to be resolved are never resolved. “Why sweat over it?” they ask. Future promises can be built on these present problems and if they do get out of hand, you can always blame the previous Govt for it. In extreme cases; the incumbent minister can be sacked and the blame can be localised from an organization to that entity.

In general, the magnitude of the attack defines the healing period. Some questions are asked initially, then some more questions are asked, this is followed by lot more questions (same questions in triplicate as with all govt. procedures).Dossiers are sent, received. People have a good time at the embassy testing the latest printers and their speeds. Then, when enough time has passed, important questions like whether the prevailing climate is conducive for playing cricket, running trains, etc. are discussed. Heck! It’s always sunny at the MAC stadium, come over, we’ll play T20.

Ps: fundamental research activities happening across the border can be viewed here