Consider yourself warned: Another hanging coming up
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Half-awake and bleary-eyed I scanned the newspaper headlines this morning. “Death sentence for Yakub confirmed” it declared. That jolted me like an intravenous caffeine shot and I woke up thinking “Oh EFF!!”
I had no idea who he was but from reading the name I know that this will be a long-drawn painful issue that will have various media entities grinding the same story over and over again, to offer no new insight. Then suddenly, just before some major political issue we’ll learn that Yakub was executed the previous night in top secrecy in some random city. Then more stories will emerge about how his wife didn’t receive his letter and his mother made biryani that no one ate, etc. The Arundhati Roys of the world and capital punishment haters will all scream themselves hoarser than the last time they screamed themselves hoarse.
This will be followed by LeT and a bunch of other perpetually angry freaks yelling even more and declaring that India “will pay for this.” Like we don’t already. But it seems to comfort them to believe that they’re actually threatening India, so they will. Who do they think WE are, the USA? That the government will actually spend trillions of US$ in systems to protect the people, complicate air travel, detain international suspects illegally, sustain two wars and use the NSG (National Security Guard) to assassinate people we don't like? Ha! Idiots.
After this, the government will helpfully “warn” all cities to expect “some attack, somewhere, by someone.” Based on this supremely specific "intelligence", all state government representatives will quickly retract like leathery turtles and sit safely holed up in their high security homes and play teen patti.
Then we’ll hear that there’s been a bomb blast in Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad…not all of them together but there seems to be some sort of algorithm which decides which sorry ass city is next where citizens buying tomatoes in a market will die while the government sits around and lets that happen. Anything between 1 and 999 people could die and all of that depends on a complex karma equation. But does it really matter how many of us die, there are plenty more Indians where we came from ...right?
Since most of the rest of us have schools, responsibilities and jobs to go to, we’ll first check to make sure everyone we know is fine in the most recently bombed city, and then quickly write a piece on Facebook or Twitter that more than adequately expresses our anger at the system and the futility of it all. Then, we'll go about doing our jobs in the best way we can.
Some folks will yell at us for writing updates about an issue rather than joining politics and fixing it. Because you know, politicians fix everything.
Rinse. Repeat.
It’s all become so predictable now that anyone can be Nostradamus.
(Yakub, incidentally, is Tiger Memon’s brother.)
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Half-awake and bleary-eyed I scanned the newspaper headlines this morning. “Death sentence for Yakub confirmed” it declared. That jolted me like an intravenous caffeine shot and I woke up thinking “Oh EFF!!”
I had no idea who he was but from reading the name I know that this will be a long-drawn painful issue that will have various media entities grinding the same story over and over again, to offer no new insight. Then suddenly, just before some major political issue we’ll learn that Yakub was executed the previous night in top secrecy in some random city. Then more stories will emerge about how his wife didn’t receive his letter and his mother made biryani that no one ate, etc. The Arundhati Roys of the world and capital punishment haters will all scream themselves hoarser than the last time they screamed themselves hoarse.
This will be followed by LeT and a bunch of other perpetually angry freaks yelling even more and declaring that India “will pay for this.” Like we don’t already. But it seems to comfort them to believe that they’re actually threatening India, so they will. Who do they think WE are, the USA? That the government will actually spend trillions of US$ in systems to protect the people, complicate air travel, detain international suspects illegally, sustain two wars and use the NSG (National Security Guard) to assassinate people we don't like? Ha! Idiots.
After this, the government will helpfully “warn” all cities to expect “some attack, somewhere, by someone.” Based on this supremely specific "intelligence", all state government representatives will quickly retract like leathery turtles and sit safely holed up in their high security homes and play teen patti.
Then we’ll hear that there’s been a bomb blast in Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad…not all of them together but there seems to be some sort of algorithm which decides which sorry ass city is next where citizens buying tomatoes in a market will die while the government sits around and lets that happen. Anything between 1 and 999 people could die and all of that depends on a complex karma equation. But does it really matter how many of us die, there are plenty more Indians where we came from ...right?
Since most of the rest of us have schools, responsibilities and jobs to go to, we’ll first check to make sure everyone we know is fine in the most recently bombed city, and then quickly write a piece on Facebook or Twitter that more than adequately expresses our anger at the system and the futility of it all. Then, we'll go about doing our jobs in the best way we can.
Some folks will yell at us for writing updates about an issue rather than joining politics and fixing it. Because you know, politicians fix everything.
Rinse. Repeat.
It’s all become so predictable now that anyone can be Nostradamus.
(Yakub, incidentally, is Tiger Memon’s brother.)
