Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
wrote Dylan in 1962..

I guess he never could have imagined that more than four decades and innumerable deaths later we are still counting.. even the wind must have got tired of blowing an answer no one heeds.

Delhi was rocked by three bloody bombs blasts… one exploded just a stone’s throw from project why.. and I ask who died: simple people doing their last minute shopping, just in time to meet the yearly tryst with ‘dhan teras’ the day on which even the poorest of the poor buys at least one ustensil for his home… women who waited for saturday evening to do their last minute shopping, buy their Lakshmi and Ganesh idols, and the lamps and crackers their children must have demanded..

People die every day… but what makes one angry is when they die as a result of extreme cowardice, used by fellow human beings to espouse their agendas – in the name of religion or man made divisions.

I guess the God in whose name such dastardly acts are committed has no option but to bow his head in shame..

We were all looking forward to next week when festivals of two religions were to be celebrated; do we realise that tomorrow one community may look at the other with mistrust, anger, if not hate..

New agendas of hate will be found, new ways to further divide what was beginning to heal.. What makes me shudder is that masterminds manage to fuel simple people to execute these heinous crime… and they are the ones who ultimately pay for them.

When I look around me I can almost sense the optential executor: the misunderstood adolescent who is beaten at home, the young slum kid humiliated by his school teacher, the young man spurned by his girl friend’s family.. and waiting in the sinsiter wings are those who will take over these weak minds and use them..

Are there lessons to be learnt?

The first one is not to give in to fear and to carry on living a normal life – that is the short term lesson. But there is another one – a long tern one – one that we are trying to fulfill in our little way.