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
