p.s. politics of grief

for us city-indians, human tragedy is an everyday occurence. they stare at us out of the sixth page of the newspapers, at the traffic lights, outside the movie halls, from the valley of narmada. everywhere. however, we preserve our sanity by walking past them, looking past them without acknowledging the humanity of the victims. unless, of course, there's a bomb blast in one of the cities that reminds us that the violence may lie much closer home than we imagine.

i'm pissed off that the people of the cities and the media are out in droves commiserating over this 'national tragedy' only because this time, the trajectory of loss ran through their homes.

without being disrespectful to the grief of those who have lost their dear ones, i confess i have no tears to shed over mumbai and srinagar. of course i am very very sorry for them. no one deserves this. not the ones who died, not the ones who are left behind. had the events touched my life more closely, i might have said different things. still.

i don't know what the politics of the blast is. fingers are already being pointed at kashmiri/islamic terrorists. maybe true. maybe the violence was as mindless as a boy going berserk with a gun at his school, or maybe it's a desperate attempt of someone pushed against the wall, left with no other means of protest.

whatever the rationale or lack of it, how was this tragedy worse than any other human tragedy elsewhere in the country? is it because this was not sanctioned by the state, unlike the killing of protestors in orissa? or maybe the bloodshed makes for better footage than villages and ways of life being annihilated inch by inch by a rising river? or because there actually wasn't any profit to be made out of it, as opposed to the suicides of farmers consuming pesticides bought with borrowed money? on the other hand, shutdown of mumbai means a financial loss running into crores.

i just don't know what to think and what to feel. i feel disloyal for not weeping the way i wept over the beslan tragedy or when the two towers fell. i feel like a bad person for wanting the news channels to move onto the next byte now. two days of the same old footage is enough. or perhaps too much tragedy makes you immune to grief.

or maybe, for better judgement, i just have to wait for it to happen to me.