A nation of marshmallows

Even stray cattle in the West have it better than the humans in India. It is a sorry and true reality. We simply are a bunch of cowards who spend hours, decades and centuries on the rhetoric of the indomitable spirit of India who let the country burn to the ashes time and again, waiting for some divine intervention. We’re simply a nation of walking zombies that are training targets of terrorist factions the world over. Here, the common man is too busy in pulling each other down at workplace, home and the road, often being more concerned about who’s walking with whom and wearing what rather than who’s mercilessly slaughtering them.
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Taking a cue from this spineless broth, the even more cowardly leaders are chosen who fill their coffers and let the swarming locusts – the Indian populace – die in agony. The journalists here are busy writing ornamental obituaries and barking at the leviathan governments, trying to sell the pictures and videos of the terrorist attacks on the motherland, feeling gleeful deep down inside for the fact that terror activities give a boost to their economies.
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Just like a hungry dog looking at his master for a morsel of food and a rub on the back, we look at the West to condemn the atrocities on our soil and feel safer. We want them to ‘allow’ us to take an action (even verbal) so we can be so self-righteous about it.
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One terrorist attack on America killing a fraction of a fraction of deaths that have culminated on Indian soil resulted in the senseless and cold blooded bombing of all the parties to the act and they did not stop, no matter whatever the condemnation was, be it human rights or disruption of world harmony. They strip the world at their airports, stick hands in our private parts, pick up immigrants from their houses, humiliate them and yes, they make sure that not one drop of American blood falls at the hands of a terrorist. What do we do? We take a moral stand, a God forsaken hollow moral stand that was taught to us by our imperial masters centuries back.
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<a href= "http://zeenews.india.com/Special/story.aspx?sid=MAH&aid=719616"target="_blank" style="color:red " ><b>Blasting the fabric of India – A Timeline»</b></a>
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We call ourselves a nation? Do we even know what love for a nation is? More worried about the traffic jam after a blast than the act’s impact on the country, we have forgotten what it means to call ourselves Indians. Go to USA, UK, Israel, Korea, Germany, France, Italy, Iran or dozens of other countries to see what patriotism means, don’t look at India.
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TERROR STRIKES AGAIN - read our headlines as if we were reading a comic book of a masked crusader. AGAIN? How did we let that happen? AGAIN? Let’s play cricket. AGAIN? Let’s sing songs. AGAIN? Let us sit at Jantar Mantar. AGAIN? Let us burn a few candles. AGAIN? Oh, social networking activism will avert it. WTF!!!
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It is about time our leaders, the ones in power and the ones who are not, came out and announced that they are the united face of the cowards of India who have elected them time and again and will do so, because we are a democracy and optimism of divine intervention of millions of cowards will always speak louder than a few ‘unrealistic and pessimist’ ones who don’t want to get into the rhetoric of politics and paperwork.
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Procrastination is heard of the world over when it comes to delaying the payment of bills and meeting friends; here in India it applies to internal security. We’re told that an unprecedented billion dollars will be pumped to boost homeland security, of course via the time tested super corrupt channels where the uplift of the concerned babus is for sure, after all, they have to support their kids and extended family, maybe even have a few kilos of gold and notes for their afterlife. Our Home Minister uses the choicest of words and calls the effort of police units after the blasts ‘splendid’ adding that ‘people are going back to work now’ as if these were the two things that defined his role. Please slap me too for being born here, please do that PC!
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The nation has been turned into a joke, a bad one, and the joke is on us, for we are trying to be optimistic of some miraculous solution after over a dozen brazen attacks. Consider this, in our country, the chances of you and me dying out of a terrorist attack are more than us dying in plane crashes or bird flu.
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You and I are more interested in knowing the reaction of cricketers and Bollywood stars on the bomb blasts. We took the vision of our forefathers and turned it into a curse, the curse of being a passive Indian. The question is not how we’ll live with that, it is how we will shut up those who speak otherwise?