MUMBAI MASSACRE HAS SET ABLAZE MANY A MINDS …

This is the Mumbaikar living inside my mind that is making me write this , but what I feel is not because I was born and bought up in Mumbai , it has more to do with feeling completely helpless .

As a 30 something living in Pune for the past 3 years now I can safely say that I am almost a Punekar in many ways , but many a times I feel , come what may ,you can take me out of Mumbai but cannot take Mumbai out of me .

Even after the serial train blasts when I went to Mumbai and travel by western railway I could feel the tension in the minds of all the fellow passengers.

Somehow while the news telecast was on during the 26th to the 29th of the Mumbai Massacre, I was constantly reminded of the character portrayed by Naseeruddin Shah in the move “ A Wednesday”

It is the feeling of watching Mumbai burn, once again at the hands of cold blooded terrorists and seeing such a massive operation against our financial capital that has started this chain of thoughts in my minds.

A close pal of mine got married on 30th Nov – Sunday at Raichur in Karnataka, many of his friends who were to travel with us by train on 28th from Mumbai in the Kanyakumari Express backed out due to fear.
I being in Pune had to take a lot of flak from my family because they were so scared to let me travel in “troubled times” when even riots could break out.

But I just asked myself one simple question , If I don’t go for this wedding I will be one of the many people who are as helpless as I am and are too scared to live normally again .

Even on the eve of the wedding celebrations as we landed in Raichur early Saturday Morning the atmosphere was such that we rushed to our hotel rooms to watch the news, it’s only when Operation Cyclone ended that we managed to really smile.


Yesterday evening after the wedding, as I sat with a bunch of friends we started talking about the attack on Mumbai and what is the role we must play.


There is so much anger bottled up inside all of now, a lot of questions unanswered like:
1. Why did our government not pay heed to all the information received about RDX coming into the city?
2. Mumbai is never going to safe again, should we stop going out, if yes which are the so called safe places ?
3. We pay taxes and offer Z security to our top officials, what does the common man get in return?
4. Why didn’t any one from the police , army or the politicos stop our news channels from giving away vital information to terrorists who are well equipped with satellite phones and even if the cable connection at Taj and Oberoi was disconnected , the entire world was watching the same news .
5. Why don’t we provide updated equipment and gadgetry to our police?
6. Why did the media pay homage only to the Top officers who gave up their lives , what about the other policemen , were their lives not as valuable , why did any news channel show their funerals ?
7. What is the future of our country in such times?
8. Why don’t we have a strong leader like Indira Gandhi on whom the people of this country will believe?
9. When 9/11 happened in USA the government managed to create a central agency with the support of all federal states involved to assure the citizens of America that their safety was the foremost concern now?
10. Why does the world’s greatest democracy not have the infrastructure to handle a crisis?
11. If our government does not react now, the message we will give out is that we are incapable of protecting our people and terrorists will continue to create mayhem, are we just going to sit around like ducks and become easy prey?

What came out as a convincing answer to the above thought process is that we as citizens of the country must come together and create as much awareness as we can about the above factors.
Of our discussion must be born a strong leader .This leader needs to have people who work at the very grassroots and educate the masses who are so poverty stricken that the basic questions faced by them are how to procure the next meal or ensure that they have a place to sleep at night. Think about it for a person who’s greatest challenge is sustenance cant be blamed if he helps terrorists for money , that’s probably why the people along the border are suspect to have helped the terrorist ship RDX into the country .

By having a day where we all wear black, light a candle or go for a peace march we are saying we are united in times of pain, why not channelize this energy?

While speaking to my mother –in-law yesterday who told me about a citizen’s forum meeting to be held in Mumbai on Wednesday (its on facebook too group called – FIGHT BACK ), she asked to that even the youth in Pune must do something similar.

It is with this thought process that I came up with the name:
CITIZENS FORUM FOR A PEACEFULL AND SAFE INDIA.


I have decided to approach people in Pune to come forward and help with organizing a meeting on Sunday the 7th of Dec’08 to take this idea forward and spread it to as many lives as we can touch and do something constructive to create a safer country, how will we do that, what’s required to do it – is what we want to hear from the people of Pune

Keep reading this space to know the progress.