Bomb bay

Mumbai: Mondays are normally lazy. The hangover of the weekend was still in the air and one was aimlessly browsing on the Net when, at 1:45 pm, a website gave the chilling news of a series of blasts in the heart of the city .

Within the next 10 minutes, even before the office knew what was happening, our famed infrastructure of cell phone networks and landline collapsed in a heap. And the rumours began to spread. Two blasts were multiplied by two or four and repeated to every soul around. My wife, who is a teacher, was told in her school that six blasts had taken place and two of them in a school in the western borough of Andheri.

One can imagine the panic and the agony of trying to get the children organised and send them off in their buses when one does not know what's going on since the communication lines are down. It was finally 4:30 when she got through to me via a tangled web of contacts and friends and was assured that I was all right and that she was fine. This is a very personal example, but multiply it with the vastness of the megapolis and you will get an idea of what must have gone in the heads of score of people in Mumbai.

The story is familiar by now — every two months a blast goes off in Mumbai and the city goes through the familiar cycle of bandobast and nakabandi and other shenanigans to eventually return back to normalcy. It was seen during the Mulund blast in the local trains, in 1998 when a series of blasts occurred and, further, when the mother of all serial blasts took place in 1993. It is unfortunate that we have still not learnt our lessons.

Every blast brings out a whole lot of comments from every corner but the same comments are relegated to the dust the very next day. Security goes from being breathless to so easy that a kid can enter the city, plant a few crackers and go away. It is only after a few people are killed that our security personnel get into the act, almost as if they can catch the thief by bolting the house shut after the thief has got away.

That brings me to an interesting phenomenon in this city. I learnt about this fact when I was casually asking my vegetable vendor why he could not deliver the veggies to my flat every week. He said the watchman of my building had increased the 'permit money' to double of what he normally paid; hence he could not get into the building. This permit money is a small sum that the watchman takes to allow anyone who pays to enter our building. Pay the money and no questions are asked.

Tell me how much will it take to make the watchman allow someone to plan a few kilograms of RDX and who will know if the deed is done? Look around in the evenings. Every street has desperate people with no means of a square meal. Now tell me, can you or me get one of them to plant a bomb in a rickshaw or a cab? The answer is yes, we can. Then tell me why are the anti nationals doing it themselves, when it is easy to get a hired hand who is desperate enough to do the same?

Why don't we look at the size and problem, which still exists after yesterday's blasts? The loopholes are so large that they cannot be hoped away by increasing the police presence or by bringing in the elite NSG. The core problems of unwanted population and extreme poverty will allow these acts to breed and spread. We claim to be a great nation but refuse to act or take up the responsibility of being a great nation.

Let us accept the fact that we are a nation of cowards and whiners, who will ask on prime time television to let off terrorists, because our mothers and fathers are on a hijacked plane. We are also a nation of small minds who will not hesitate to call a bandh this week or the next so that more antisocial elements can get together and get Mumbai to bend to their whims. Who cares if another day is gone with crores of rupees lost; after all whoever calls for the bandh will get a chance to prove that his might works in this city.

For a change, why cannot we get together and behave like a 56-year-old nation that we claim we are? Or is that the idea of a nation a failure like the Brits claimed once upon a time? A nation is known by its character; not by the immature way it reacts to crisis. We must hang our collective head in shame and come together to hold each other's hands and show that we are strong, instead of asking for the head of the chief minister.

That's the least one can do for this resilient city.