What's terrorism without terror?

"So, the terrorists struck again? Which city today? Ah, Delhi. Okay."

Sounds like a familiar fragment of conversation. Too familiar an event?? Tell me, if terror attacks are this routine, do they even manage to terrorise? It's just become an everyday event for the fatigues indifferent people of India, just as used to the recurrent news of Blueline accidents, BMW runovers, horrifying rapes and devastating famines. They happen everyday. We are sorry they happen. And then we move on.

But nobody wastes colossal amounts of funds, risks lives, months of meticulous planning and training on planning a famine and a road accident. Terrorists, by God, are in a profession noone increasingly cares about. No governments fall, no wars happen, nobody almost even makes a point and intelligence gets a few curses and a lot more work to do. Cynics guess that terrorists do it either to show to the powers-that-be who fund them where the money is going much like MCD occassionally builds a road or two to show where the budget disappeared, strictly audit purposes. Or else, it is just some kinda corporate competition between various terrorist groups that they fight over board room meetings and power point presentations that highlight their achievements of the year.

It's almost algorithmic these days how these attacks happen. Multiple blasts in a short duration of time, few people die, city goes on high alert for 24 hours, and people get on with life as police tries and finds someone responsible. News channels have a field day and govts. condemn attacks and distribute compensation. The only people who are directly affected and wounded are the dead and the injured, and their families. Their lives change forever for the worse, but sadly enough, in a country of 1.1 billion, the number is too few for anyone to remember for long, and for the society to bleed as a whole. More people have probably died in the Bihar floods than in a decade of terrorism across the country, and the collective apathy of this society has failed to move us even then. For our generation that has virtually grown up on news headlines of bomb blasts, train sabotage, hijacks and kidnappings, terrorism has, fortunately or unfortunately, become a part of our lives we are used to living with. And if this is the case with people like me, it's not hard to imagine how someone my age in Kashmir feels about it.

Saturday evening when the blasts struck Delhi, I was out with few of my very close friends. We had booked tickets for a 735 movie at PVR Priya less than an hour ago when at 645 we heard that there were bombings across Delhi. At that time we'd returned from a late lunch and were safely in IIT campus, but ten minutes later after a brief discussion we decided to go to the movie anyway. Somehow, the blasts didn't scare me at all. The people I cared about were all safe, and somehow it wasn't worth cancelling the plan and wasting 800 bucks for the 'risk'. We were safe inside the movie halll anyway, we reasoned. So four of us went anyway, and Priya was yet unruffled when we reached at 720. Not surprisingly a lotof peoplendid not turun up for the show, and when we got out at 945 after the movie, everything was shut down and deserted, which meant we hunted quite a bit around the city to find a place for dinner. And then we caught on the news to know how many bombs and how many dead. That's it.

Joke of the day was how Indian Mujahideen isn't even a scary enough name. And why call themselves Indian when they hate India? Organized crime has poor aesthetics, and purpose. Our police and intelligence may not be competent enough, our govt. not sensible enough to setup a federal Counter terrorist agency or something, but I have a feeling terrorism will still die out in India eventually, because our people do not care any more.

Cheers to the spirit of India!