he's coming, he's coming. oh darn. he's not...

some days back, these obscene posters were put up all over chembur. huge hoardings for the bhoomipujan of the chembur-sandhurst rd monorail link. they bore pix of manmohan singh, sonia, gurudas kamat AND a big shiny unbelievable long, whizzy and phallic-looking monorail train. each poster had a different monorail train from the other, depending on the ingenuity of the dtp guy and which country his photostock-cd came from. one was yellow, another was red, a third was white and blue. all had 'chembur' written on the train. one was morphed on to an actual flyover above the market - and the flyover was labelled 'chembur railway station'. yeah, right. the gandhi maidan had been cleaned, grilled and painted, roads around it freshly paved (three in all), the footpath blessed with paver blocks that actually fit.

and now, all that is over. without even a whisker of our dear pm's beard landing at the domestic airport. nearly all the posters have come down. luckily the roads and footpaths haven't been dug up yet in a fit of civic pique. what saddens me is the overall ad-hoc-ism and expeditiousness of our approach to everything. i think this marks and mars each of our institutions, our responses and our processes.

the pm is coming, so quick, patch up roads on his route. don't do anything about the bad roads all over chembur in general (forget about the rest of mumbai); the broken paver blocks that people trip on; the homeless slum dwellers struggling in mandala; the noxious dumping ground in deonar and the colonies next door; a simple thing like the rusted, broken play equipment in diamond garden and other public parks - and so much more. i'm only talking about a few of the issues in our part of chembur because it strikes me as funny how even in this tiny microcosmic area, the pm's visit-that-wasn't did not bring anything more some pots of paint, and repairs to three roads.

this ad-hoc band-aid type approach of ours is everywhere. amit's mns friend was telling him about the numerous people he saw dying at cst when he happened to be there that fatal night - the cop, a friend of his, who told him to stay inside the chowky and stepped out only to be shot instantly; the street child who took a bullet to his brain; the overworked cop who wrote 600 panchnamas in one night and got them photocopied at his own cost (i believe cops have to do this, only to be reimbursed - sort of - when they retire. no wonder they are easily bribed); of the rusty jammed revolvers our cops use (and we all know about the hockey-goalkeeper-type bullet-proof shields they are given, don't we?). his stories are profoundly moving. and i wonder if he sees the irony in all this. just last month the mns was holding the city to ransom - beating up people, killing them. it was interesting to watch an interview with Mr Zende, the vt station announcer who saved many lives. his hindi-speaking UP colleague was with him that night, and while zende spoke, he switched off the lights in time and helped the continued broadcast of messages. NOW do parties which polarize people - the mns and the shiv-sena-bjp - see how stupid and petty they are? will the bjp ever see how myopic it was and is? how religion, ethnicity, language - nothing in the end is more valuable than or matters more than human life? and how easy it is - when you're having a good time kicking someone small - for a larger boot to find you and kick your head in?

i doubt that would have been top-of-mind when advani, munde and modi zipped to their various assignations in mumbai on what, the day after the attacks? they stood outside the oberoi and the chhabad house looking like idiots and daft wankers, causing near-riots. but votes are all, right? and what about so-pretty-it-hurts rahul gandhi who spent the whole of thursday - 8 hours of the actual hostage crisis day - at some party where among other things, cricket was played? wow.

another example of our immaturity is the rash of vaguely unsettling sms's doing the rounds - the anti-raj thackeray ones specifically. i hate the thackerays as much as the next rational person. but that message had this weird, sinister quality to it - it was annoyingly petty where it could have been a lot more profound. as if the mumbai cops (marathi or otherwise) who fought valiantly to reduce the damage - some of who died doing it - didn't count; that somehow being 'sons of the soil', they were simply cannon-fodder. i mean how small is that. why must we - in our attempts to be witty - sink to the level of idiots?

though i've totally rationed my tv-viewing, i watched a bit of times now last night, and the channel's coverage had me shaken. another instance of how quickly and easily we resort to wrong-doing. they seem to have 'exclusive' coverage of kasav the terrorist's confession and some more 'exclusive' cctv footage of the cst shooting. tell me, did all of that come for free? no bribery happened to oil that footage, those words out of there? now isn't corrupting officals for the sake of trp's expeditious and wrong? doesn't it ease the way for the next set of bribers to come in? the tone of their reportage as well - i think arnav goswami is a self-righteous little prig, but that fair, gaunt guy they have? he sounds a 100% bigot, and simply way he spoke could bring up the communal pitch. he went on and on and on about 'madrassas spewing hate' so much that i wanted to ask him if he'd heard of the rss.

the whole of our terror porn - starting with our dear star-struck cm - frightens me. when the nsg guys were requesting tv channels not to show their strategies on air, these same self-righteous announcers didn't care to respond. and they kept showing stuff - never forgetting to add those magic words 'exclusively brought to you by your channel, ...' - in this breathless, semi-orgasmic way. it all shows me that between our daft politicians and our trp-hungry channels, we haven't a hope.

the few things that do give me hope are peoples' reactions, the anger of the bereaved. Mrs Karkare's refusal of modi's tainted bucks, for one, and Sandeep Unnikrishnan's father yelling at the kerala cm (i mean, it doesn't get more humiliating in malayalam than poda patti). it's that pitch of post-bereavement rage, when your loss is so huge that even the smallest thing will drive you to anger beyond despair - the white-hot fury when you feel that with everything gone, you have nothing left to lose. i know because i felt it 8 and a half months back.

there's no hope for us, really. not unless someone funnels some wisdom into our heads in small trickles.

or does an obama on us.

(ps: after i posted this, i read paro's piece, and i think it says a lot that i felt as well but couldn't articulate... please to read. also look at the first post - her friend's comments on what she feels is wrong with the media. very taut and again, manages to focus my anger the way i couldn't!)

Comments

Space Bar said…
Thanks for this...there's just too much roiling in my head to post or make sense of this. It's all unbelievably crass and I often think there's nothing that will get us out of the state we've brought ourselves to.

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