New year makes me realize dat am such a lazy bag!

Why on earth am I so lazy..
none of my writings see the light of the day..;X
nor this blog..nor that one..NONE..
WHAAAAAAAAAAN!
wish i cud b btr tis NEW YEAR 2010. ^-^
wish i cud throw out my laziness n rite jus as i talk..;X
mommmaaaaaaaaaa!!!
okay delhi am cming back..now be good..n let my uniqueness be unique..^-^
mwaaaaaaaaaaah..ye ye yeeeeee

‘Aam Aadmi’ – No spotlights, no camera but oodles of ACTION!

(image courtesy: 'aam aadmi' by R.K.Laxman)
I had decided to post a blog on ‘education and terror’ today but analyzing the reactions to my earlier post; I decided that I may as well channelize my thoughts.

I had comments from various channels and that made me sit back and ‘think’. If we talk about ‘terrorism’ it talks about a certain termite which is licking away the global development in its own ways.

But...

Unfortunately it doesn’t STOP there. There are so many other factors rampant around us that I couldn’t count them on my fingers. Yet, as pointed out by some of my friends, a major one of them is ‘CORRUPTION’. If there were NO LOOPHOLEs; there would be no crack in the wall through which miscreants would enter our state and sabotage it.

I have always heard this quote , “ It is always a rotten apple that spoils a basket of absolutely excellent apples”. True..

“Wednesday’ was an absolutely fantastic flick. It was an ode to the ‘aam aadmi’.
It has been ages since the common man has been exploited, given thousand forgotten promises, kicked around like he was ‘nobody’! He has not been taken SERIOUSLY for a while! In this movie the end proclaims the common man ‘ the best’ in the end.

But it is horrible to even assume that common man has to actually do all that to make himself heard!! He seems to scream at the top of his voice today that ‘enough is enough’.

I want to be secure in my home not scared that the guy who knocks at my door late at night may slit my neck; nor do I want to have a chill run down my spine when I see an abandoned bag in the bus stop. In the movie the common man was recognized and given absolute importance but not as a ‘common man’ rather as a ‘terrorist’.

I do not have solutions nor can I give any, I am a simple human like anybody else and I believe firmly that my solution for a day to day problem may not be the same as anyone else’s. Then again when it comes to the system as a whole I guess I can chip in like anyone else because I am accountable to the system and vice versa as much as Mr.Manmohan Singh.

Corruption is the single reason that the common man rarely gets what he deserves. I have heard the Government announcing a number of plans for the betterment of the people but how many of them actually reach the people? The money gets lost on the way in the hands of million people who aren’t just government servants but also private organizations.

All said and done; Is common man the friend of the other comman man???

I wonder and at times I doubt it.

How many times have people stood and stared at somebody being hit and run by a vehicle and rushed away just because they were getting late for some selfish reason?

How many government servants take bribes just because they aren’t paid well??

How many people do not help others at the time of need just because there was a time when they needed help and they weren’t helped?? Tit for tat..

How many of the people out there who earn five-six digit salaries actually pay taxes??

Sans rare few; I have heard almost everyone around me sculpting ways to EVADE TAX even if their salary is huge or just touching the tax limits.
These are the very people who blame the government, the intelligence bureau and the army.
I guess we believe in ‘the blame game’ a LOT.

I am in no way advocating the cons of the system but wouldn’t it be more responsible if we would be more HONEST??

We dream of a spick span and clean path but we decide to spit there assuming that one spit won’t show on the road. But we forget that we think so alike and when thousand spit; it is a DISASTER.

I won’t use a cliched line like ; ‘we common people can do small things like bla n bla’.

Whatever we do is in no way ‘small’. When attacks happen I have seen people forgetting everything and running around to help others. It feels me with pride at my fellow human.

But on a normal day when something happens why is there such a big misconception that some NGO or the cops alone will save the other man? Why not us?

How many humans have been killed, raped and kidnapped infront of the eyes of many others of the same species??

There seems to be only one question all around us NOW..

What can we do??

Let’s start with the BIG issue. We need a change of system; don’t we?

So let’s all vote! ( I guess by now 49-O issue is resolved). Let us vote for the better man with a better history not on the basis of relegion, caste or bla.. C’mon we were born as such and such because our mom and dad were such and such..We did not even choose our relegion so let’s kick out communalism. We can demand that every part releases the list of minister who will be appointed if the coalition/party emerges victorious. This would help us to evade people like ex-home minister Mr.Patil as we would already know as to who the ministers will be even before we vote.
DONE!

What should one do to stop corruption at the grassroot level?

Be ready for a painfully long ordeal if you have decided to be HONEST but I tell you after you are done, you will be proud.
Do not bribe anyone. When you are asked to pay a fine, PAY IT and DO NOT FORGET to get the receipt. I know the fine is a bigger sum than the bribe but then you are atleast assured that your money ain’t wasted ( ofcourse even taxes aren’t used well but they do have chances to being used rather than a bribe which will go into somone’s personal account)

I read a story on net a while back; a man was suspended from his office for taking bribes and he was thrown out of the city. He settled down on a port on outskirts of the city and started meddling with the ships anchoring there and his bribe season started again.

In the movie ‘Traffic Signal’ I remember the scene where the politician gives off a 500 rupee note to a beggar and laughs quoting that anyway the money will come back to him.

It is a vicious circle. So it is important that one takes care not to TAKE as well as not to GIVE bribes.

Next, remember when a man does his work he is SUPPOSED to do so and is APPOINTED to do it so if he asks a bribe, be ready to COMPLAIN.
Never hand out extra money to any official who is working for something. for e.g – if a passport verification official comes to do his work. DO NOT PAY HIM so that your work gets done FAST.. These are seeds which reap into cacti.

Whenever you are tormented by a product or service, do not hesitate and buckle up and file a case in CONSUMER COURT. And I shall tell you, these courts work pretty fast nowadays.


Whenever you realise than an issue is bothering the public and you will that your hands are tied; do not feel down.
You must have heard about PILS ( public interest litigations). They give every common man a right to file a plea in the superior courts by themselves. Baba Amte and lawyer-environmentalist M.C. Mehta were iconic when it came to such PILs, they have got landmark developmental decisions with the help of PILs.


Whenever you want to know something about any government body which is public; go on and use your ‘Right to information’.

These are certain simple , very simple steps that one could take if needed for everyday corruption.

There are many organizations which help combating corruption. Thanks to the Internet, many are available online.
I have read about a certain online effort called ‘Bhrasht’.
It is a forum where you can report corruption cases, read articles on the topic and discuss related issues. There's also a 'Rogues Gallery' that lists officials from different services including the IAS, IFS, IPS and other public sector enterprises, who are under enquiry of the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC).
There is another site Corruption eradication, Indiatogether.com and Parivartan.org which works on the same lines.
International efforts include Global Corruption Report, Daily Corruption News, Internet Centre for Corruption Research and transparency.org ( I got all this info from Rediff- courtesy-rediff.com)


Apart from all this we could do things like taking out time to do things like TOI’s initiave ; “Teach for India”. If not that, there are arrangements in India by which straight after completing graduation one can work for two years at the grassroot level’; voluntarily and with just a stipend and later go back to the corporate world. ( I do not know how many people do that)

I remember in 2006 some guys came together with some ideas to curb corruption and they did not know what to do, they wanted to start a media channel but they knew it was costly and needed experience. I guess they went on by shelving that and printing pamphlets and getting it stamped by one person from various communities and then sending them to every household through the newspaper guy. It was a pamphlet which changed Ajmal Amir Kasav’s life. So when it can have such a horrendous effect it could very well help us positively too. I do not know as to how far it went- the mission.

But I personally thing that the pamphlet in newspaper idea rocks.

This is to simply say that we all can start things, it just needs honesty and never say die spirit.I have woken all my life watching R.Laxman’s common man in The Times of India standing silently watching everything around him. But I guess it is time to show that he is silent not because he is dumb but because he is ‘wise’.

I know it is tough but then we always knew that. Didn’t we?

Where does the roots of 'terrorism' lie?????

It was too…I don’t know how to phrase the word after ‘too’, it was sort of gnawing at my heart; the whole issue and the whole idea of me researching on ‘the cause of TERRORISM’. I just took a pen an my diary and decided to sit down somewhere were none could even see me writing instead of tabbing on the keys on my laptop..

I have no idea as to why I wanted to be alone but then not every query of my mind is answered by my heart.

I have never read any post supporting terrorism in my entire life and so the only window I had to peep into a so called ‘terrorist’s life was by listening to their interviews or read voraciously on articles written on terrorists who broke down during the interrogation and spilled up some beans.

I was confused, I saw some and I read some and yet none of them where of the same person, they were of a variety of people who may have had different mindset and different situations which drew them to join the terror brigade. But when I zeroed them all under the single category of humans, it became terribly easy for me to understand certain points.

I decided to take up a case for my ‘Analytic Journey’. I took up the name ‘Ajmal Amir Kasav’. I had the name and I had the crime; now I had to find the ‘identity’ .

I have been intrigued by this man right from the day I saw him being flashed on almost every television channel that I could see in my TV. He and one of his friends was captured by the camera when they were leaving CST or Chattrapathi Shivaji Terminus after initiating the terror spree that they had started out for.

I kept wondering whenever I saw his image on TV or newspaper as to how familiar he looks. I had this notion that I actually had seen him.

No, I had not.

But all of us , we youngsters could see him as familiar. He was or let’s saw he is just like any of us; a normal day guy,young, determined and human. I may have to take the ‘HUMAN’ part back because no HUMAN can kill his fellow men so brutally as that man and his gang did.

But….

I had made up my mind to follow every talk of his that is revealed to the public after interrogation, mainly because I wanted to hear him say as to ‘WHY’ he had taken up this course of life!!!

I read, I followed..

They say that to uproot an evil you need to know where its roots lie!!!

Terrorism has its roots in every other evil of society.

Poverty!
Communalism!
Hatred!

This is the profile of a TERRORIST that I could make up from all this.


He is twenty one, some say he is nineteen. He is the most hated man in India as of now( politicians follow closely in the list). He was born in a small village in Pakistan. He had a large family. He had four siblings and a mother and father to complete his family picture. He has an elder brother who is illiterate and works as a laborer, he has a married elder sister and two younger brother and sister( 11-12 years old). His father owns a small chat wala thela and his mother takes care of their home which is already into ruins.

They are no well off enough to make him study for a graduate degree and so what do they do? They let him study till 4th grade and then take him out of school and decide that there are enough feeding mouths in the family and hence he is sent to live with his brother. He keeps moving places and is fed up by the time he is seventeen and decides to leave home and go on and make his home money.

He abandons his family, joins a religious leader and starts working as a laborer. He ain’t satisfied. He wants something which he never had enough of in his childhood- the green bills; MONEY.

He decides to indulge in small time robberies and thefts. One day he goes to get new arms for his robberies along with his friend, they meet people handing out pamphlets form the political wing of a terrorist outfit. They decide to sign up.

If you think they are heart and soul into the whole agenda of the outfit, you are extremely wrong. They aren’t even sure as to what the ideals of the outfit are. They decide to take up the complete arms training to improvise on their robbery skills.

As the training starts, so does the hypnotic speeches, screening of videos and other such elements which start bringing out an influential change.

They camp gives him a feeling that he has never felt before, a feeling of belongingness; something that his lost childhood had never felt. He realized that his family was the ‘camp’.

Slowly he started submerging himself into the complete idea of ‘jihad’ and is chosen to go on an advanced training camp with some others. He is trained well for a militant combat. He is lavished with things he has never seen before and he is materialistically happy.

The day arrives when he has to set out for his mission after it is promised that his family will get a LARGE sum of 1.5 lakhs after he dies.

He starts on the mission with a bunch of his friends.

All his friends’ family get the money promised to them except his.

HE DOESN’T DIE, HE IS CAPTURED ALIVE.

In police custody he said this “ I want to see my mother”. He also repeatedly screamed to his captors to kill him.

He said he ‘repented’ the things that he did.

This is Ajmal Amir Kasav’s life!!!


He wasn’t BORN a terrorist, he didn’t even want to be one.

What was it that changed him from a laborer to a robber to a TERRORIST??

What made this man change from a troubled child to such a young man??

What went berserk?

Was it poverty? Was it hatred? Was it greed?

Or was it just plain destiny!!!

I and I guess all of us need to check on these BIG question marks!!!

( This is the start of my so called ‘analysis’ on why these men turn up to do such brutal things? Is it just money ; like any hitman demands? Or is it the communal ideal that marks ‘terrorism’ apart from others.)

Something for today- I just saw CNN-IBN and they have this innovative thing called ‘CITIZENS AGAINST TERROR” campaign. You just need to log on to the CNN-IBN website and you can use your webcam and internet to shoot a clip of what you wish to be done against terror/ something that the common man can do( I guess common man can do everything) . If you do not have a webcam ; then you can visit any CNN-IBN ‘citizens against terror’ kiosks in your city when you are returning from work or college and just speak out your idea.

The ten selected ideas will be sent as ‘Citizen charter against terror’ to the Home Ministry’; I don’t know as to what good it will do after that( if home ministry will REALLY look into it) but still, I guess we do have a chance to be heard :)

So try and do this today :)

See you all again on ‘analytic journey’..

( P.S--THIS POST DOES NOT IN ANY WAY UNDERMINE THE DEATHS OF SO MANY HUMANS IN VARIOUS ACTS OF TERRORISM WORLDIWIDE.IT IS JUST AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND AS TO WHERE EXACTLY THE ‘ROOTS’ OF TERRORISM ARE)

I wonder......

( I have been jotting down in my diary every other day yet I have kept my feelings there not bothering to post it here, I just thought as to why not, I may as well let the world know.)

( Everyone is talking about the armed forces and the cops and their contribution to saving a number of people all round the world, THAT IS TRUE! , I adore those men out there, ever ready to fight till their last breathe to save ‘us’. But somewhere amongst all these, I WONDER, why did this all ‘have’ to happen??? WHY did this whole theory of ‘TERRORISM’ arise in the very initial place??’ I wish I could answer all this. Maybe the guy who was captured during the Mumbai attack will say things which will help me in this realization.)

I am neither a dove nor do I have a branch of olive in my mouth…yet…

It hurts. Doesn’t it?

When we see so much blood and gore around us.

It hurts when we see those brave men fighting and protecting us from the terror. It hurts to see young boys choose ‘terrorism’ ( jihad as they say to make it look great) as an option and ‘death’ as an ultimate choice.

None of us can forget the image of the young guys at the Chattrapathi Shivaji Terminus who fired shots like crazy and killed so many. These were the only shots or images we could access through our media.

I can’t forget their faces, they seem so like any other friend of mine; casual and determined. Only difference is that they are no softies like they looked. Almost 200 people paid with their life for all that they did. I can’t forget the anxiety I felt when I called up my friends in Mumbai to check out if they were safe. I can very well imagine the state of ones who were waiting with bated breath outside the hotels and hospitals for their loved ones.

Terrorism word has become a cliché today. Turn and look around, you will find it everywhere.

When I heard of the Mumbai blasts, I was shocked and even more so because Tamil Nadu is hit by the cyclone depression from Bay of Bengal and there has been non-stop rain and thunderstorms here. This obviously means power cuts. I got the news of the blasts almost 5 hours later and I was hurt.

HURT!!!

Every ‘Indian’ must be hurt. Right?

Not exactly hurt but angry? I was.

I was angry and I was hurt. I shed tears and I screamed at the terrorists and also at certain politicians who were doing nothing but rattling off insane words.

I cried when I saw the dead bodies of so many people, some charred and some with blood all over.

I was hurt when I saw so many people in anguish waiting at the hospitals. Something seems to keep gnawing at my heart.

When I saw the dead bodies of the various officers and commandos; I stood up and gave them a royal salute. The whole NSG , ATS and the police force out there, my heart was filled with pride as I gloated over the fact that they were ‘my army, my ATS, my police and my NSG’. But nothing has made me stop thinking of the terrorists too! WHY? The question is as simple as that.

WHY?

Why did they have to choose that option???

I don’t think anyone forces the decisions of life on anyone and if they chose to spread terror then that is what they chose to be their destiny. For a person like me or for that matter any normal human being that option seems so crazy and stupid and foolish and what not.. I do not have words to frame here. I am sorry. Those terrorists had immense determination, infact anyone who stays fighting almost 48 hours+ with hundred of armed men as opposition surely needs to be determined and maniacal. These terrorists seem to be one such group.

Just imagine if they had NOT been terrorists!!!

They would be extremely talented young men out there in some specific field doing their jobs and making a name for themselves.

I do not know how politically these things will be handled and am not going to sing a song of love and harmony either which may convert terrorists into saints.

But this questions keeps gnawing my self as I do not seem to get any satisfying answer to the same.

I wish ‘terrorism’ did not exist.

I wish for a lot more things.

I wish I was in the Indian Army.

I wish I could do something better than just writing blogs about this. I wish….

( This is part one in my series of blog that will try and go deep into this issue, not just the Mumbai bombing but also any terror attack in the world and try to find an answer as to WHY these young lads choose this path to attain their so called ‘martrydom’ )