Hope you pardon me for this outrage and this intrusion on your private lives during this time of extreme crisis. If you are waiting for a better time for crisis to strike, please be patient in this city/country for it will be rewarded
I appreciate the humanity in you and the respect you have for those who can only vent their frustration this way but have to get on with their daily life because their life depends on just that.
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With due respect to all those people who have laid their lives down to protect the human life that was under fire in South Bombay, I have some questions for those who are congregating at the so called 'ground zero' (we/the media are so at loss of sentiments and associated vocabulory in
this country that we HAVE to copy sentiments from elsewhere).
The media is being held accountable on other grounds too as you might read here
http://calamur.org/gargi/2008/12/02/week-1-post-2611-the-peddlers-of-dea
th-the-media/
Since the last few days, the 'educated well read intelligentsia and intellectual' people have been focusing only one issue - going to the Taj precincts and raising their voice against the political classes, organizing protest marches or what have you.
Doesn't anyone realise that this very act of going to the South - to the area that has been in focus for the attacks - has turned this so called mass movement into a very fragmented deal?
NO ONE in any other part of this city have really felt the impact of this attack.
There are no movements in any other 'class' of society - be it the laborers or the slum dwellers or the original residents of the city or anyone who lives up North.
There are no angry protests anywhere else but down South.
The working class has gone back to their daily grind of this city, the crush and rush of the trains and buses and the labor class has returned to their daily bread earning ways.
Amongst the dwellers of any other part of this city, from Dadar onwards towards the north - there is NO REPORT of a single gathering amongst them to do something on the lines of what folks are trying to do in South Bombay - raising their voice against those who are to have caused
this mass murder.
Either they have gathered and the media didn't find it worthy of reporting, or they didn't show any solidarity.
People from walks of life like theater, cinema and media and the so called high-society and corporates who have, in a way, been the key targets of this act - (you don't excect a daily wage earner to be going to the Taj every day do you?) - several of such folks live even in the
areas of Bandra, Andheri, Goregaon.
Why have there been NO MOVEMENTS at all in these parts of the city then?
Why don't the common working class, the so called vote banks of the suburbs of the city and elsewhere, feel the same pain?
the slum dwellers or the daily wage earner in the parts of the city I live in up North have no inkling of any damage that they themselves would have felt.
They would have felt only a little bit of glee that - good, now what has been happening to people like us is now happening in the high society.
You see, this problem and its impact has remained only amongst those of us who probably are on FB, or Orkut, those who use the Internet regularly to connect with people, mostly the 'pseudo' intellegentsia like you and me, the reporters of newspapers or the honchos of the corporate world. The rest are living in the land of their daily bread.
Unless these so called common folks of this city and its suburbs, whom the politicos seemingly represent through their vote banks do not feel the pinch, this movement has no impact and there will be NO CHANGE.
You might go all the way to the south of this city, raise a few slogans, have coffee at the hotels and cafe that were razed, and come back feeling smugly satisfied that you did your bit and the world will change... you are all SO WRONG
Tell me show me, report for me please on your blaring media outlets - how many of those daily wage earners will come to the Taj side today and protest in the language of the intellegentsia - English?
how many of these common people will even bother, for they have to go to their work again tomorrow and they will have no choice but to get back home for a new day.
You think you all have the power to change the way these vote banks will think?
I would like to see evidence of that happening.
Only then, I, the angry frustrated and shameless and helpless middleclass resident of this city, will feel the surge of encouragement in me, that NOW I can say change of even 0.01% will be felt BY ME in my daily life.
Only then my dear fellow citizens can we, as Indians, feel that this event has triggered some movement.
Otherwise, this will remain an event an isolated march to protest for a
change which will die down, come the party time of 25th - 31st Dec 2008.
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