Why "Enough" will Never be Enough!!!

Day after yet another round of coordinated and savage attacks on Mumbai, this is what the newspapers in India read,

"Police, Hospitals, State have failed YET again!"

"Day after blasts Mumbaikars venture out boldly"

"Cops are clueless....."

Like millions of my countrymen and women, I could have predicted these without even taking the trouble of visiting the TOI website. Honestly, I feel like throwing up each time I hear this "Spirit of Mumbai" bullcrap!!! Can we please stop disguising our apathy, our powerlessness and our necessity to make two ends meet even in the face of the direst of circumstances, in such heroic terms!!! 

Each time a bomb blast rocks Mumbai, the following happens - 

1. Party in Opposition will automatically bay for blood and for heads to roll in the hope of capitalising on the opportunity to hold another round of elections; as if its performance in providing security ever was or ever would be any better!

2. Politicians and celebrities will gather to sing paeans to the "unflinching spirit of Mumbai"; never mind that their loved ones hardly ever get caught in this blood bath that takes lives of hundreds of less fortunate innocents! 

3. Media houses will behave like ghouls, lapping up all the blood and gore, fanning communal fires, hoping it brings in more TRPS or sells more editions! 

4. There will be a sudden spurt in demand of "Accountability and Action" on the part of activists, the common man and those that swear by the RTI, which will then fizzle out in the next couple of weeks as more pressing demands of "roti, kapda, makan" take their toll!

5. The Party in Power, while making snide references to just how many threats it has squashed "silently", will also float grandiose proposals and promises, which it will promptly forget quicker than the fizzled out demands of "Accountability and Action"!

Whatever happened to the much vaunted proposals of a dept on the lines of the US Homeland Security and a elite commando task force to be based in all the metros?? I can only assume those files, if they even exist, are being used to swat flies on a hot summer day, in the office of some babu, who will probably be at the bottom of the Babudom food chain!!! 

6. And the culprits will almost NEVER get caught; by the time they will be identified, they will either be the guests of honor with our neighbours or if by a sheer stroke of fluke, if they do get caught, then they are given the "athithi devo bhava" treatment by the GOI and our judicial system; and get to live, breathe, eat and be protected with our hard earned money!!

Yes, even writing all this down is making my blood boil! But then, like every one else I will be equally guilty of raving and ranting on public forums, of having a 1001 status updates on FB and Twitter when tragedy strikes and then forgetting all about it till the next one comes along! 

That is the hard truth. Whether we like it or not, we are just too absorbed with our own lives to get into fighting for change, for a cause. We prefer clicking buttons online to actually getting down and dirty. We are not heroes! We are just a bunch of unfortunate suckers who get @#$ed every single day by work, by travel, by bad infrastructure, bad roads, competition, population, pollution, corruption, politicians and terrorism and in the process, just feel relieved to have made it alive at the end of each day! We pay a third of our hard earned money as taxes and we pray that atleast a meagre % of it gets used in something worthwhile instead of landing up in the Cayman Islands accounts of the people we have voted to power. 

But then we forget, we are not the US of A or Israel. Our nation doesn't value the life of its tax paying citizens! After all why should it? Don't the more invaluable, indispensable ones get the Black Cat Commandos so that their high profile asses are protected anyway! So what if a few of the less important people like you and me get killed in a blast here or there? There are too many of us out there anyway!!

So while we continue to rave and rant on FB and Twitter, attacks like 26/11 hardly will make a dent in our lives, our safety, our intelligence, our infrastructure. We will continue to be attacked, we will continue to curse our system and sing paeans to the spirit of Mumbai! 

I wrote the article below 3 days after 26/11. It was titled "When will Enough be Enough?" Someone I knew was stuck at the Taj for 1 horribly long day till he got rescued along with the the other hostages by the commandos. Like every other person living in Bombay, that was one attack that left me rattled and shaken, it showed me just how unsafe and vulnerable I really was! And like every one else, I hoped things would change after what could only be described as the most outrageous public slap to our nation's face! That time the fear and outrage we felt, did make us take things a step further - we walked to the Gateway, we enrolled to vote, we voted, we demanded action. But then like everything else, that fizzled out too! Kasab still is enjoying our hospitality while poor souls like you and me keep paying the price for it! So looks like in our case, Enough will never be Enough!

Anyways read on!! 

"Mumbai or Bombay (as I will always refer to this city), has always been an enigma to me. 

In my over-judgemental, crystal clear, black or white world, this is the one exception where my feelings for the city have evolved over time just as the city itself has transformed over the years I have known it. 

I have lived on and off in this city - 4 times in the past 13 years and each time, I have come back to discover a shift – a city that has only grown darker over the years, like J.K. Rowling’s each subsequent Harry Potter novel.I first came to live in Bombay as a goggle eyed intern in 1995. I can still vividly recollect the horrifying and yet, vicariously thrilling car ride where the cabbie gave me a guided tour of the city & talked of the death and mutilation he witnessed in the 93 blasts with the same gusto as when he was showing Big B’s bungalow! Even today, years later, he symbolizes the zest, the enthusiasm for life, this city stood for. 

And where the first lady I asked for directions on the local train gave me her address and asked me to come home for a meal (my boss insisted that she was a pimp laying a trap, his exact words being “come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly”. But I shall never know how correct he was as he managed to scare me into never going). I remember being surprised at seeing people waiting patiently in queues (!!)- whether it be for hours for tickets to Schindler’s list at Regal or at auto stands in front of railway stations. I remember thinking how different and novel this was from the rest of India where we just believed in “might is right”. I was so in love with Bombay by the time I went back, that I looked for placements in this city only!

Then I moved back to Mumbai after a 4 yr stint in Delhi, when moving to Bombay felt like being out of prison after years of incarceration! I could get home roaring drunk at 2.30 in the a.m. in an auto all alone, I could walk to an STD booth at 12 the night and not give it a thought. Where a total stranger offered to share an umbrella with me in the heavy rains, where women commuters laughed sympathetically at my predicament and offered water to a thoroughly ruffled me after my first attempt to get into a ‘fast train’'; where I was an invitee to a train b’dy party of a fellow commuter, where Sayba Gomantak & Bade Miyan & Ghetto existed… all in all a magical world where everything was picture perfect, if you didn’t mind if your perfect world looking a wee bit dirty and run down. This was a city I loved and I hated leaving it to move to Bangalore (where I constantly found myself fighting with auto drivers and asking them to learn a thing or two from their super efficient Mumbai counterparts!)

The next time I moved here was for a few months before I moved to Indonesia. This time the city of magic was not the same…… something had definitely shifted. It seemed the whole population of Mumbai lived in Andheri, the drains in Lokhandwala market overflowed every time it rained; you no longer sat without a care on the edge of your auto seat thanks to a serial slasher on the loose. And ordinary women turned into raging bullies and didn’t let you get off if you took a Virar local! Where did the women who smiled and offered water vanish to? Did they stop taking the train? Or did they over the years, transform into this violent, angry mob? 

I left Bombay feeling sad. Did the change in name also change the personality of the city?? But my disillusionment was short-lived - Bombay rallied when it was most needed - people standing to form human chains around potholes to prevent strangers from drowning, total strangers serving food to people walking back home after the deluge that ravaged the city. My sister, who was all alone in Mumbai then, and who walked for 2 days from Charni road to Borivli, said that the thought of turning back never crossed her mind – the people standing on the road, offering food, water made her feel reassured that help was just a shout away. So the soul never left the city after all… it just had evolved to breathe underwater for longer periods of time before surfacing to make its presence felt….

I moved back to Bombay again in 2006 – excited to be near my family and back in the city of opportunities. I found that the shift I noticed wasn’t imagined after all – it was far more distinct this time – governed by 2 clear sentiments, very contradictory to each other – anger and apathy. It was a city on the edge – far removed from the world I had witnessed even as close as 8 yrs back… 

My very brief attempt at taking the local train almost made me a victim of post traumatic stress disorder. The first day, I let 4 starting locals from Andheri pass before I gathered up sufficient courage to enter a train. Now it wasn’t just the bullies in the Virar local – most women commuters seemed to be snapping at the slightest nudge – slapping each other while being suspended in mid air in the surge of bodies trying to get in and out. I decided it was infinitely wiser and safer to commute by road – so what if I wasted 6hrs of my life everyday on the commute and with petrol costs that could actually run a household!

The road in front of our house was dug up & left unattended for months. Nothing happened - till the unlikely event of Shilpa Shetty winning Big Brother & causing BBC crews to come to our door. And praise to the heavens above for making Shilpa win, because that helped us finally get the road repaired. Only to be dug up again, a few months later. So we wait again, for another celebrity to win another meaningless contest before our roads can be termed drive worthy again. 

And these days, what we proudly called the most cosmopolitan city of India, is threatened by fanatical, rabid, xenophobia touting hypocrites like Raj Thackeray & gang who go scot-free inspite of all the havoc they create and the poison they sow in minds, demolishing our cosmopolitan credentials to turn us into ‘Marathi manoos’ and ‘the immigrants’! 

If contaminating water and air is an act of terrorism, then isn’t contaminating minds the same or worse? But we just forward a few chain smses or emails and smirk about his ideology or lack of it and consider our job done. Today bomb blasts hit Bombay with a scary regularity - the safest city in India, where I lived alone, without ever worrying about safety, now has me worrying when my sister commutes by train to work or my husband goes for each one of his never ending trips. 

But inspite the niggling worries, we have just learnt to accept them as a part of life just as we have learnt to accept the fact that monsoons will bring floods and death to this city every year without fail. We have just conditioned ourselves to ignore all the blah promises made by the govt. after each crisis. Or do we just not care? 

We have just learned to “adjust”, not just to the ever increasing mass of sweaty bodies on the trains but to the permanence of pot holes on the roads, to the flyovers and bridges that never get completed. We have ‘adjusted’ to the antics of rabble raising, power crazy politicians, and what is worse, we have learnt to ‘adjust’ to every bomb blast that has rocked this city, taken lives and exposed a shocking lack of infrastructure or concern for the safety of the citizens.All we are care about is how does this impact me? 

So we continue to make tut-tuting noises about the spirit of Mumbai, nod our heads diligently to the “enough is enough” phrase that pops up each time, and just move on unconcerned, uncaring; each time, sinking back into the sea of apathy within hours of the tragedy, just glad it’s not us or our family members or friends…

And we give this apathy a glorified twist by calling it “resilience” so that no one ever notices our lack of concern!If Mumbaikars can slap each other about something as trivial as entering a train, I wonder why issues that really affect our life, our families, our safety like floods each year or recurring bomb blasts and the incompetence of the govt in dealing with these don’t make us angry. Why do we adjust to these? And worse, how long will we continue to do so? 

Hasn’t 26th of November hit closer home than any of the previous attacks? Hasn’t it made us realize that terror victims needn’t be nameless, faceless people we see on TV and forget about? Hasn’t it made each of us seethe with anger? But has it shaken us hard enough to wake us out of the "don't think, don't care, just function on auto pilot" mode, that each of us living in this city have gotten used to? 

How much closer does it need to get before we actually act on the much touted “Enough is Enough” phrase and that too not just by signing petitions or forwarding chain mails? Isn’t it high time we all shook off our apathy and took a stand in saving this beautiful city, our home, from merciless rape and degeneration by terrorists and politicians alike? This time, it’s really time to realize and say “Enough is Enough”"