Mumbai in our soul

A strong nation state means more than just a security apparatus. It means that you can protect the nation against all man-made or natural calamities: terror, hunger, floods, wars, mass farmer suicides, fake encounters, apocalypse now.

Amit Sengupta

It's time to think of a paradigm shift. It's time to redifine time and space, time-present and time-future, stand up and act, wear our trousers rolled. It might seem impossible, but history stands testimony that it is the margins who define the mainstreams, across the spectrum of defeated and demoralized time.

As it is now.

As it was yesterday.

As it bound to be in the days to come in this condemned country called India - gloating and bloating as a mythical nuclear and economic super power, where ten terrorists can take the entire might of the protected, armed State to ransom and destroy the unprotected, unarmed, civil society.

Think about it. It is possible to posit a scenario which is not as self defeating. When the indifferent middle classes and the upwardly mobile can consider that India belongs to the vast unwashed masses also, and not only those who are the fat cats. That this India, united, across the class and caste and religious spectrum, can actually work out a paradigm shift and change the world...

Editors and politicians sometimes speak the same language. They think and speak alike. They said it is time to work together and avoid the dirty and vicious blame game. But then the papers carried the terror 'ads' scoring brownie points for vote bank politics, even while hundreds were trapped between life and death, and others were dying and dead. Live. The BJP ad said vote out terror; the Congress ad said, don't forget Kargil and Kandahar. And the papers: they carried the ads. Make money even when the funeral pyres are alive. Live. And the human screams in the burning rooms mixed with deadly explosions.

Two things: the papers could have said, sorry we will not carry the ads. We don't care for this damned money. We believe in what we write - the nation is above all considerations in this moment of unprecedented crisis and tragedy.

But, predictably, they did just the opposite of what they wrote, they betrayed their words and values - they carried the ads. So what is the locus standi of their high moral ground vis-a-vis the goddamned politicians?

As for the politicians and political class and the ruling and opposition alliance, let us be clear that this is no popular cliché, this is a truth, as bitter as bitter realism: across the political spectrum they have sold their souls and ideology, the nation or the nation-state is the least common denominator for them; they have completely and effectively subverted democracy, including electoral democracy, so that no honest individual or collective can fight elections and seek a stake in power or administration or alternative destinies; they have divided the nation into electoral blocs of caste, communities and religion, and violence or tragedy is just about yet another factor thorough which this fragmented mass can be manipulated; that they are brazenly corrupt, wealthy and unaccountably rich  -- well, most of them  are and no one knows the origin of their wealth because they don't work and they are not professionals; they have effectively subverted the Indian Constitution and they know it; they are entrenched with the power-broker feudal and corporate classes and it's a successful and self-propagating nexus; and of course, they are transparently short-sighted, crude, insensitive, inegalitarian, without a social or human vision, amazingly inefficient and incomptetent, low caliber men and women who are controlling the destinies of the nation. Our destinies. Your destinies. And they care little for human values or human life, despite the rhetoric.