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SHOUT OUT LOUD!
Film stars do it. Sportsmen do it. Police do it. The judiciary system does it. Politicians have been doing it as if it is their birthright. We all do it. And now even terrorists have started doing it…ignoring the common man!
Can’t really blame them, can we? No one gives a damn about the common man. Not even the common man himself! The terrorist (akin to some FMCG company salesmen) were given a target of 5k casualties. All they had to do was land up at dadar and/or andheri station. Only one group had the brains to visit VT (CST doesn’t stick…deport me if you must) and let rip. But the others preferred Taj and Hilton. Born and brought up in the suburbs I wouldn’t include Leopold in the category of places the common man visits more often. So the common man was not on their priority list or hit list.
I don’t know whether to applaud this or fret in despair. I mean terrorist attacks were the one source for us to hog the limelight. Check out news channels. If Amitabh Bachchan decided to dye his french beard it would be breaking news. We would know – Which brand dye he used? Who dyed his beard? At what time did he dye it? Did he consult an astrologer for a mahurat? What is the CMYK combination of the colour used? What kind of brush was used on his beard? Was it made of camel hair or synthetic plastic? And so on and so forth. If however a certain Ramdas Pandurang Shirodkar, (I used a made-up name…but for all we know such a man might have actually died…we will never know because no one will care to report it) the sole earning member of his family fell off the ‘packed-like-even-sardines-haven’t-been-packed-before’ virar local and died, the media or political parties won’t be out brandishing their knives asking for enquiries and resignations.
But terrorist attacks, however briefly, helped force media and political attention towards the common man. Had the hypothetical Ramdas died in a bomb blast, his family would at least receive (or could have hoped to receive) a lakh or so in compensation. By falling off the train he didn’t even get his family a monthly second class pass from Virar to Churchgate! A blast in a chawl or market would force the local MLA to visit his constituency before the elections set in. We had the window of opportunity then to yell out our problems while he strolled through the blast area nodding sagely to what the police chief was whispering into his ear about his promotion and transfer to a better area! When the media correspondents appeared and started mouthing about the inhumanity of the blast with the blast affected area and its denizens as a backdrop, we could make huge placards (wonder how no one ever did it till date) about our problems and telecast our real grievances – the packed trains, faulty water supply, poor infrastructure, corruption, bureaucratic red tape, pollution, health standards, onion prices…I could go on…
We had hope as long as terrorist groups didn’t realize that the common man’s irrelevance in the scheme of things had given him resilience to any kind of atrocity. But it seems the terrorist groups have woken up to this fact! With us the show will always go on and everyone, including us, gives a damn about what happens. So we can sigh in relief and return to the grind that is everyday life. RIP Ramdas!
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