Madam, Jung josh se jeeti jaati hai, hosla bulaand ho to kuch nahi dikhai deta hai sivay dushmaan ke!!!!
________________________________ From: Archana Sharma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, 3 December, 2008 4:02:51 PM Subject: Re: Editor Mumbai (Times of India) I really liked this article. We don't have hose pipe to reach the fifth floor and we want to attack another country. Why?? BECAUSE WE ARE ANGRY!!! His comment on TV journo is also good, though sometimes unfair...as the TV people did show what he was saying he would rather see. But i agree with him that TV reporters personalised this attack as it happened to people they regularly meet. Ashok Kamthe, Karkare, Salaskar, Sabina Saikia, Page 3s. IN THE AFTERMATH By Bikram Vohra The TV commentators who babbled on about the shards of glass at the Taj hotel where they always dined and partied and spent wonderful hours with the high and the mighty, were unable or unwilling to access the curtain of grief that shrouded the 180 odd faceless people who were also victims of the same bullets from similar guns. Not to mention the 370 wounded who did not even get a walk on role. If they had all drowned in a ferry collapse or a multiple bus crash it would have rated a one day also ran on the news. Ironically, for the majority of the dead, it still did. Boutique terrorism hit India's rich and that was intolerable in its audacity. Not that the death of the rich and powerful is acceptable but the nexus between the divas of television (our one conduit of audio-visual brainwashing) and the upper crust of the victims had a certain 'personal' element that became tedious to the core. It almost reached the point of narcissistic self indulgence. A billion Indians were literally compelled to watch the interpretation of the most horrendous attack on their country through the prism of the page 3 people. Like AIDS, bird flu, disasters and other sundry diseases, terrorism must learn to confine itself to the backstreets and not dispatch its stench into our air conditioned sinuses. That was an affront. Rather than give us the rage of a dead major's father dismissing a chief minister from his door (a fleeting ten seconds) and discuss that ramification in the greater context we were given hours of the iconic status of burning wood and mortar. Rather than share with us the horror of a hotel manager's family burning to death we were given hours of broken windows and gasps of dismay because this was the spot of the years of exclusive café au lait soirees. Rather than give us the anguish to further firm national resolve by lauding the return of a crore of rupees given by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi to a heroic police officer's widow we were given drivel on the television about the delightful eateries and the plates on the floor. Was all this not trivializing the attack on the country as much as worrying about some Ram Gopal Verma accompanying the former Maharashtra CM, Vilasrao Deshmukh to the Taj in the aftermath? Suddenly, the and the foot in mouth mumblings of the State Home Minister took centrestage and marginalized the top questions that should have been not only asked but never allowed to slip away from focus in these days. I'll ask some of them for you. Why did the commandos not have thermal vision capabilities, infra red goggles and gas canisters? Besides, how come the Anti Terrorist Squad have such poor survival equipment that they were so easily mowed down. You can't fight an AK 47 with a 9 mm pistol that is most likely to jam on you. Where does the money go for these purchases? What is the budget for equipment? The public must know. In 1962, India took on the Chinese with single bolt .303 rifles wearing tee shirts and canvas shoes in sub zero temperatures in Nathu La and Jalap La. We got thrashed. Has nothing changed? There is no doubt that India has the stuff. Yet, it never came into use the way it should have. Today, thermal imaging of hotspots inside a construction (where heat sources like human bodies can literally be seen shimmering in green and orange) are common in anti-terror warfare? I ask you. Why does India have to buy an AN12 aircraft for the NSG? The country's air force already has enough in its fleet? When the Indian president or PM flies on a trip three state of the art aircraft are kept out of the Air India fleet. And the airline schedule reworked. By the same token, in computer savvy India why did the facilities not have detailed maps of the hotel layout available to the commandos, a subject that never arose, what with TV indicating that the soldiers went in blind. You do not have to read spy novels to know that using fibre optics to see 'inside' walls is a global given. Why did we not use these techniques? How much of the alerts and warnings were actually top priority and who leaks material from RAW to the television including photos of crucial evidence like credit cards and munitions during an ongoing operation? Well into the third day the terrorist set up was given a minute to minute account of everything going on through TV channels including senior army, navy and police officials vying for the microphone with their detailed accounts of the occurrences. These senior officials conducted themselves with the same sort of mindless idiocy seen at cricket matches when the camera pans the public. Finally, piety stepped in and sanctimonious anchorpeople refrained from showing LIVE pictures of grenade launchers. Give us a break. They should have kept it on. The footage would have totally confused the terrorists. The 3 hour delay in getting fire engines to the Taj was an indictment of our public safety system. People died because of it. Yet, nobody is asking for a commission of inquiry into the medieval efficiency that seems to exist in the firefighting process. For shame, the worst video shot was begging the hose pipe to stop being a noodle and push the jet of water to the fifth floor. This, from the hi tech hub of the world. In New Delhi, the government made first day menacing gestures to the leads pointing to Pakistan and now, as I write this, it seems a dressing down of the Ambassador of that country and some window dressing in the form of some low level ISI fellow is all the gauze and band aid we are going to demand for this gaping wound. Today, people have the will to demand a change. A billion people is a lot of energy. But it will be sapped by the power of television and its uninformed, arbitrary and aggressive appetite for making the singers more important than the song. Television already runs our lives. Its fatal charm mesmerizes our decision makers. Now, it will decide the value of our deaths. Bikram Vohra has run 12 daily newspapers, five of them in the Middle East. He has written over 22,000 articles in over 100 newspapers and, was till recently, Managing Editor of the Bahrain Tribune. He specialises in aviation and political commentaries and can be contacted on [EMAIL PROTECTED] Add more friends to your messenger and enjoy! Go to http://messenger.yahoo.com/invite/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VaniV88-89" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/VaniV88-89?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
