The terrible Indian internet debate.

Usually, in an argument, especially an interesting one, both sides have compelling viewpoints in great disagreement with each other.

In a high quality debate, both parties learn a bit more about each other, and walk away better informed, better educated, and perhaps better prepared for the next round, which will hopefully lead to some sort of resolution.

On the 7th of December, listening to Kapil Sibal in the press conference, after having followed his none too brilliant reasoning on a few other issues, I finally understood how an argument can completely lose its purpose, when one of the parties is not just ill informed, but also is incapable of being better informed.

Kapil Sibal wants to police the internet.  Make no mistake about it.  He wants censorship of a medium that has brought tremendous benefits at a very low cost to nation and consumer.  But he doesn't understand it.

Apparently, there is some "material" out there somewhere in cyberspace that is incendiary, communal, and potentially dangerous.  According to this article in The Hindu - http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/article2693232.ece, -- Earlier this year, the government circulated rules which made it incumbent on internet intermediaries — like Facebook and Yahoo — to exercise due diligence to block material deemed, “threatening, abusive, harassing, blasphemous, objectionable, defamatory, … or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever.” --

What can be unlawful about an opinion in any bloody society?  The internet is a free speech zone, plain and simple.  Whoever writes whatever they write in cyberspace is not a broadcast, and it would be absurd to expect the same rules to apply to the internet content, as we could to print, television, and radio.  We're already warped in imagining all media are the same!

Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdulla has said he has had mobs throwing stones at him, when some idiot posted something nasty about his personal life on the internet.  So, he supports Kapil Sibal's grandiose ideas about curbing certain type of content on websites.  The truth is, the problem is not with the internet, it is with the mobs!  They need to grow up and join the vast majority of internet users who can easily distinguish between mischief and information.  They can easily distinguish between blasphemy and mockery, sarcasm and wit.

If I remember right, Indira Gandhi was murdered because it came on government controlled radio and television that the Golden Temple of Amritsar had been destroyed by an operation authorized by her.  If I remember right, it was also news of her assassination that was maliciously and meticulously spread by Doordarshan and AIR that caused riots, murder, rape, and looting in many parts of India.  Why was the government not intelligent enough to stop that information spread?  Bad judgment?  Then that is a case of incompetence!

If I remember right, it came on television that the Babri Masjid had been destroyed.  Why was there no media blackout of that incident that led to untold misery for the nation in the form of terrorist attacks?  When traditional media has in its own rigorous way, caused the suffering of untold millions, why try to censor the internet, which has a much better track record?  So far, not even one major incident of national shame has been sparked off by anything on the internet.

Repeatedly in the press conference, Sibal asked, "Have you seen the material? Have you seen the material?", and nobody in the press had seen it.  So, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology is making a fuss about something that only he has seen and considers inappropriate?  Sorry Sir, it is YOU who needs to grow up. How about making the URL public, and we'll decide for ourselves if we need to flag it down?  If the majority of the users of that intermediary flag it down, guess what?  The "material" is taken out!  You don't have to spend national resources doing this, idiot.

The internet is self-regulatory.  And of course we know no untoward incident can possibly take place by a photoshopped image of Sonia Gandhi controlling her pet monkey Manmohan Singh.  Heck I even agree with the message!  Even if I didn't, I could always counter it with Advani as a destructive chimpanzee.  Nobody would take that seriously either.

What Kapil Sibal is missing here is that the internet is a community without authority, but plenty of democracy, and that is precisely why it is trusting of itself and other members in it.  It is fully capable of allowing and regulating its own freedom, because there are clearly defined spaces within it, where the playing field is level for all players, and the extremists are treated like dirt in any forum.  This is the greatest experiment in human collaboration and so far it has been fantastically successful.  Example: Wikipedia, which is a free, editable encyclopedia, has the fewest errors of all encyclopedias in the world.

Devoid of any sort of overbearing authority, the internet is fully capable of flourishing and nourishing humanity.  Governments and leaders are not.  Here is why governments and leaders are afraid of the internet - it offers a level playing field!  If a minister tweets a stupid message and gets an intelligent retort, he is exposed immediately!  It does not TAKE a newspaper to spread that retort universally.  All it takes is a cheap cellphone and a brainwave.  This is what is threatening Kapil Sibal.  And it should.

Here is why - For getting a simple subsidy on a solar power installation, from a scheme announced by the government, it takes two and a half years, if you are not willing to bribe anyone in the ministry of renewable energy and resources.  Kapil Sibal sent notices to some intermediaries like Yahoo, Facebook and Google asking them to remove objectionable content and has not heard from them - since October!  Only three months to evolve a whole new paradigm for a phenomenon that encompasses all of humanity, but two and a half years to honour a subsidy scheme started by the government by itself?  Sounds like double standards to me!

If an intermediary should be responsible for providing the platform to a supposedly objectionable activity, (only Kapil Sibal thinks it is objectionable!), then think about this - why is the Indian Railways providing the platform for sales of illegal DVDs?  The law clearly prohibits piracy of movies, but on any train running in waking hours, bootleggers are welcomed and allowed to flourish on Indian trains.  So, Indian Railways should be shut down?  How come ISPs are not held responsible for illegal downloads of movies?

Citizens have realities, governments have excuses.  In a people vs. the government argument, for me, somehow, it is already very very hard to sympathize with inefficiency, corruption, and sheer megalomania.  Add incompetence to this mix, and it is a potent reaction from me, to what Kapil Sibal is suggesting.

For its part, the internet intermediaries do take down material which violates guidelines of decency.  These guidelines are far more fiercely enforced in the collective, by the collective, than any government could ever dream of.  If you flag something as abuse, and there are enough flags, that material goes OUT!  It happens faster than an Indian Government minister can even possibly fathom.

Almost all developments that have come about because of the internet, like online banking, shopping, and communications have helped India enormously.  The end user is in ecstasy compared to the inefficiencies of standing in line, filling out paper applications and the endless list of aimless time wastage.  There is no public outcry about how corrupt the internet is, even though pornography and other evils are rampantly on display.  The reason is simple - the internet is also incredibly personal.  It is as personal as my prayer to God.  If I pray that Sonia Gandhi die of some disease, that doesn't mean prayer should be made illegal!

Kapil Sibal wants these intermediaries to provide the government information on who posts what material, information on the physical identity of those expressions, so that he can prosecute.  But he doesn't want to restrict social media, he says!  I guess there won't be any restrictions when society has been prosecuted and imprisoned.

It should surprise none that Babudom would be under threat.  It shows our Babus that they are irrelevant.  No wonder you will never get any e mail reply from most government officials with "official" e mail addresses on badly designed government websites.  If fact, you will get delivery error reports within seconds.

On a scale of real and pressing problems, objectionable material on the internet cannot rank in the top 95% compared to killer hospitals, corrupt governments, infanticide, illegal mining, black money, graft, rape, farmer suicides, murder, terrorism, and nepotism.  Material on the internet has no bloody chance of trying to compete against any of this. 

So why this attention from Kapil Sibal?  The answer lies in ACCESS.  So far, despite all the problems and incompetence, the citizen had no equal platform to challenge viewpoints and ideas in the open.  You had to have power and money and influence to throw your voice out there.  Today you can compose a song and reach millions as the "Kolaveri" kids have shown us.

It is this same ACCESS that prevents internet content from causing riots on the streets.  If you show a picture of my God having sex with a crocodile, I can bloody well post a picture of your God being raped by my dog!  Who takes this kind of crap seriously when you can hit back in EQUAL measure?  That is what this access provides us!  That is what other media do not provide us with!  If MF Hussain showed his work ONLY on the internet, there would be no repercussions on the street, because if he paints my goddess nude, I can.... you get the point.  There is no need to seek out the person in the real world, because we can hit back right there!

Even the case of the Danish cartoonist who is suffering the fatwa against him for the depiction of Mohammed the Prophet in poor taste, took on those dimensions only because a newspaper was involved.  It is hard for the common world citizen to stand equal to a newspaper in ANY geography.  But if it had been a purely online contest, chances are his stupid depiction would have been flagged down by users as blasphemous and that would have been the end of that.

Truth is, the internet has spawned a global mindset where we fundamentally see and respect one another as humans.  We know certain things are sensitive to certain people and netiquette is far ahead of cultural etiquette in many ways.  Even typing in capitals is considered rude in cyberspace, but these parliamentarians have no problem admitting murderers, rapists, and criminals of varied hues into hallowed spaces of national governance, who beat each other up while on duty representing us!  Where is the damn comparison?

With the proliferation of cameras and cellphones and the internet, images of rank incompetence quickly reach a vast majority of us who would react and make noise.  Traditional media could pick and choose what was appropriate for our consumption.  The internet doesn't care!  Everything for everybody!  And it has worked beautifully so far.

If something works beautifully, the only thing that can stop it from flourishing is authority.  That is what Kapil Sibal is trying to provide us.  It is time to kick his honourable rump out of office along with the bunch of cronies that don't understand the first thing about community.  They don't understand the first thing about many other things, either.

But this is what I am most irked by - If our great Indian civilization is capable of taking so much pride in itself, then why do we fear our own freedom so much?  Do we need political punks to even tell us how to behave with one another?  I really do not need Kapil Sibal, the fool who thinks the country lost no money on the 2G scam to tell me how to express myself on the internet.  Decency be damned!  Clear your desk and get the *#&@% out of the way, fool.  You are just rank incompetent for this debate.

- BSK.

A Nation of Passive Opportunists.

Anna Hazare has re-written history.  In fact, he has ensured the history of India is being written again.  He did the same thing Mahatma Gandhi did to the British - occupy high moral ground and blackmail the powers to succumb to his demand.  This word "blackmail" has a negative ring to it, doesn't it?  That's only because it conjures up images of cheap, witless psychopaths getting something they do not deserve, through devious means.  There's nothing devious about Anna Hazare's means, so clowns like Karan Thapar should stop acting like they are experts of this word "blackmail".  Long live the blackmailer, for the victim is the villain in this case.  Forty two years to pass a bill that gives us the right to prosecute the corrupt?  Enough of this, indeed, Annaji.

The mediocre always has to be pushed, prodded, woken up, beaten, and thrust into action by the extreme to get it to out of its inertial slumber.  India is a nation of massive mediocrity, dying to get worse, but somehow not allowed to by economic pressures.  We are not a non violent nation at all, as some of us would think.  We just choose the safer option because we're afraid of violence when it could turn against us.  What kind of influence do political parties regularly have on the "hapless" masses?  Any local MLA can call upon the services of murderers, thugs and rowdies to beat up any citizen that dares question any move!  This is why we are passive, not non-violent. 

But, we're opportunistic!  Anna Hazare gave us the opportunity, and we pounced on it.  This was our opportunity, not to clean up the nation, but to let our frustrations out.  We might get something out of it, but we might also forget all about it by the time the final draft of the Lokpal Bill comes out around the 30th of June this year.  It is a good thing indeed, but the movement that Hazare talks about is yet to happen.  It takes a fair amount of stamina to fight the system, especially when every moron around us has subscribed to a corrupt system.  Easier to pay the bribe, and get things done smooth and quiet - can this attitude change because of a Bill?  Most definitely not.  It still takes the citizen to approach the Lokpal and complain!  This takes work!  How can we Indians be expected to do work that doesn't pay?

Given the opportunity to get rich through corrupt means, without a major risk of being punished, most Indians would not hesitate for a second to jump into the cesspool.  How is the Lokpal bill going to address this mindset?  It will not, and it is indeed not the aim of the bill.  Given the opportunity to get "ahead" through corrupt means, short circuiting fair competition, most Indians would indeed do exactly this.  How else would we have fake pilots flying our aeroplanes?  We are cowards and we feel sick about it sometimes, but we convince ourselves we are being smart about it.  This is what our intelligence is used for.  Centuries of training in survival have taught us to flourish by staying out of the way, like germs.  Germs don't threaten enough to invite extermination, but are dangerous enough to keep us sick and unproductive - exactly what India is today.

How is the Lokpal Bill going to work, when it becomes the duty of the germs to inform the body of the invading disease?  We love the dis-ease.  We thrive in it, we thrive because of it, and we love the calmness of the sick patient, who has given up all hopes of fighting back.  In other words, this Anna Hazare character is a pest who is making us come out of our slumber and telling us we don't have to be germs anymore, because the patient is willing to let us lead a healthy existence within her body.  God bless Mother India, but how will the sheer masses of incompetence cope with an India that wants to throw out corruption?  Corruption is what keeps our masses lazy, well fed, and uncomplaining.  What can replace this incredible fuel?

We want opportunities.  Opportunities to further our laziness, opportunities to further our economic goals, and our sense of entitlement and power.  These have always existed.  Now, we also want opportunities to "feel good" about ourselves.  This is a new want, a new addiction in new age India.  We didn't want our boys to win the world cup because they played the best cricket and were truly deserving of the honour.  We wanted them to win so that we as "Indians" could wave the flag and yell at the world.  This is very sophomoric and idiotic of course, but it is also very American.  The USA is the country for us to look up to, for some reason.  No wonder a lot of our idiots have started putting their hands on their unfit chests when OUR national anthem is playing.  This again is nothing but an "opportunity" to showcase our patriotism just like Americans, but it has indeed become the opportunity for us to show how stupid we are, since even the Americans are supposed to do it not for their national anthem but for the Pledge of Allegiance!

There is nothing wrong in wanting to be Number One.  So, the pride we feel in our cricket team is natural.  How about doing something about the #119 we have in the Human Development Index?  See, we do not have the shining, sexy, fashionable opportunity for doing this.  It is not going to be quick, it is not going to be jingoistic, and it is not going to be vocal, so this process is going to be dull, unattractive, grinding, and horrendously time consuming.  We may not even be around when we get within #100 of this pesky index!  So, indeed we are not going to even try!

Anna Hazare didn't just provide the platform.  In this age of media glare, he provided the stage for many of our clowns to show up and perform.  The government yielded, not because it was morally forced to, but because it did not want to look like a failure on this stage!  It is all about perception, and performance on the stage!  No wonder Bollywood is completely in support of Anna Hazare although it produces movies with underworld money, has actors who shoot down wildlife, and even those who buy machine guns from terrorist outfits!  Was India outraged when Sanjay Dutt came on TV feeling bad about the terrorist attacks of 26th November?  Of course not!  We forgot that he had immersed himself in criminal anti-national activity but remembered him for his role in Munna Bhai or whatever crap.

We have become a nation of simplistic, easily manipulated fools.  We are no longer capable of critical thinking.  We go with what we like or dislike.  Anna Hazare is rather hard to dislike.  He is also not in the grey area, where critical thinking becomes immensely necessary.  He is out there in the white area, which is easy to sign up for!  That is why we chose to support him, not because we understood the full import of this Lokpal Bill and his blackmail tactic.  It takes the threat of calamity to force India to act in any haste to do ANY good.  We Indians love the foreboding threat of anything larger than life.  That is why we love our movie heroes to beat up fifty villains.  If he was human, it would require fifty of us to help him, and that won't be so interesting would it?

If we had to vote for a Supremo, a dictator or a king, (called "President" in some countries), we would gladly switch to that system.  We have grown up for centuries with kings as our benevolent dictators.  We even fondly recollect those times as the golden past of India.  The BJP even has a king Ram as their idol, so I wonder why nobody has asked them what the heck they are doing in a democracy while talking about a king all the time!  We do not like democracy really, because it puts responsibility on us.  If we could be slaves, we would.  That is why we make kings out of our elected leaders, and they gladly accept!  That is why they loot, and we applaud.  Look at those statues Mayawati has built of herself, and we know exactly what "opportunity" means for an Indian.

So, how to we function in the collective?  We do not!  We did not choose democracy.  It was chosen for us.  And now it may be too late to switch to a benevolent dictatorship, because too many of us would want to be the dictator.  So, we have this farce of a system where we elect people who don't have to listen to us or serve our interests as soon as they are elected.  Now, we're going to have the means to throw them in jail for corruption.  What about our own apathy, our incompetence, and our complete acceptance, even sympathy, for the crooked?  After all, we're the nation of really passive germs, who totally understand the need for survival.  How do we switch to intolerance?  We should suddenly thrash the peon who wants ten rupees for his "coffee"?  Or refuse to pay a donation that will ensure our unfit kid's a seat in that engineering college?  How are we going to change ourselves?

Our media has played a massive role in popularizing Anna Hazare and his campaign.  But this is not a service it embarked upon performing.  This was a big enough story to carry at the top.  Viewership!  Numbers!  Money!  Opportunity indeed!  From the World Cup to the IPL, the news channels were forced to fight for scraps.  Now Anna Hazare has provided them with phenomenal gravity.  It's a good thing this did not happen during the India-Pakistan match!  Very clever of you, Annaji!  Perfect timing!

Now, whatever happened to our sailors captured by Somali pirates, the Adarsh building scam, the 2G scam, the Commonwealth Games scam, and the thousand of other scams?  None of them are worth our attention now?  Eerily, it is time for something to come crashing down.  People must die for us to pay attention.  That is what Indian lives are worth - to bring viewership to our TV channels.  Aha!  Now, there's an opportunity!

- BSK.

The Opening Ceremony Comedy Show!

Whoever asked for these bloody Commonwealth Games?

Why does our wonderful former president Mr. Abdul Kalam have to have his name twisted to Abdul Kalam Azad by a fumbling idiot called Kalmadi?  Why does that same idiot have to talk about a "Prince Diana" attending these games, when she is neither alive nor was ever a prince?  Was this idiot even awake while he was filling the microphone with his unprofessional filth?

Why do we have Doordarshan doing something it was never meant to do - covering something live that moves more than its mouth?

This idiot Kalmadi never mentioned athletes amongst the people he extended his "Namaskar" to.  For a guy who is reading from a piece of paper, the least he could do was make sure he doesn't swallow words like "Association".  He said, "Assoshun" a few times.  Clearly he isn't cut out for reading a speech, or mouthing one either.  He couldn't do much about falling bridges either.

If an airline pilot with the same level of incompetence performed the equivalent of these tasks in his job, the plane would nosedive, throw its doors open mid-air, choke most of its passengers, catch fire, turn upside down and mow into a hill in a fireball. 

Who are these clowns still running that embarrassment of a television channel called Doordarshan?  Couldn't they get anybody better than the idiots who were reading out names of countries from the screen, telling us of their populations, and when each country got its independence?  Isn't that in itself a reminder of the dark side of the whole "Commonwealth" idea?!  I wish they had shown the Brit royals each time we were told about each country's independence from them!  I wish we had the humour to be told how many years each country had been looted for by her royal bitching highness BEFORE they got independence.  Instead, we were told to notice how "happy!" Prince Charles was, when the Wales contingent showed up.  To me, the prick and his entourage looked the same when other contingents showed up too.

How much of a genius would it take to see "swimming" below the flag bearer's name and figure out that that person is a swimmer?  Do we really need to have someone telling us that person is an "athlete" when we can read "athletics" below his or her name?  Who else is going to show up at a sporting event?  A fortune teller?

"Here comes Kenya!  All the way from Africa!".  Seriously, where else the fuck would the Kenyan contingent come from?  Jupiter?  Who are these juveniles telling us which country's flag is what colour and informing us, just in case, of this marvel of a projection system that projects the same flag on the aerostat for the same country!  Hurrah!  We got that right!  What kind of fucking nonsense is this?  This is not Doordarshan in its year of inception either.  The CW Games may be a first, (and hopefully last) for India, but these idiots with the exclusive rights to telecast the CWG have been around for a long, long time.  Should they not know their job a little better?

We were also told that the magnificent drummers below were beating the crap out of their contraptions to keep the athletes happy.  No shit.  I would have thought they were frightening stray lions.  Even worse - we never got to hear those drums, because we were filled in with an incessant electronic drumbeat that ran right through the programme.  Horrible, unless we got Energizer to sponsor that shit.

Why the fuck do we still refer to Charles as His Royal Highness?  He may be to his own people, but not to US!  Isn't that the whole POINT of being an independent country?  None of the assholes in New Delhi seem to know yet.

And why is Charles talking about peace all over the world?  Didn't the Brits send their military monkeys including one of Charlie's sons, to participate in the greatest bomb shag of all time in modern history in Iraq?  Peace be damned if it is a Muslim country?  Bloody hypocrite son of a bitch.

Who writes these goddamn speeches?  "Over the next few days - thousands of athletes will take part in competition" - this came from Pratibha Patil, no less than the President of India.  "And my dictionary has thousands of words!".  DUH!

Everybody spoke of challenges and how they were overcome.  Anybody with a brain bigger than a pea will know that there were NO challenges, just incompetence.  If New Delhi was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale, and Kalmadi had to dig himself out of a pile of rubble, drinking urine for 12 days, THAT would have been a challenge.  Incomplete building structures and falling bridges are not challenges - they are FAILURES! 

A bridge the army built in 6 days stands in place of what could have been built 6 years ago and collapsed.  This is not a challenge overcome.  This is a rescue act pulled off by professionals.

How have we finally made this event a mega showcase of our delusional powers?  How we can fool ourselves that this is some sort of success!  We are spending 70,000 crores and making 450 crores.  So, this cannot be about money.

If this is about pride, what pride do we need to salvage from Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, Lesotho, Malawi, Nauru and a whole host of insignificant countries?  Sure, we can showcase this to the other "significant" countries, as our grand spectacle, but seriously, who gives a shit about a country that has more people living below the poverty line than Sub Saharan Africa?

This is also touted as the first "Green" Commonwealth Games.  Hello?  It's getting its electricity entirely from fossil fuel burning National Thermal Power Corporation. (Who in their own words are "one of the world's cleanest fossil fuel power generator", not "generators".  Bad English be damned for now)  Who the fuck are we fooling here?  Why even utter painfully untruthful rubbish like this?  I mean, is the greatest opposition to these games coming from the environmental lobby?

Put all rubbish before our people, beat the drums, do the dance and say JAI HIND!  And all is well.  No fucking questions asked.

On and on our speeches poured out - ".....diverse and beautiful nation with heritage and culture.  I am sure you will all experience it."  NO!  What people will experience is what is available to them.  There won't be any diverse and beautiful nation with heritage and culture in the stadium or the village.  It will be all security, security, security.

The cultural part - we're fail proof - we have professionals there!  It's a good thing there is no quota for Bharatnatyam dancers and Kalari performers.  Duds are likely to kill themselves if unleashed in these arenas.  All good, nice to see.  It doesn't matter how many people understand what is being sung - at the very least we will sing it right.  But Oh, Lord!  Chaiya Chaiya???  It's a tribute to the common man?  Which common man dances on trains with sexy women?  If there was one, he would have been danced, not Shah Rukh Khan!

Did I just say we are fail proof with the cultural part?  So I am contradicting myself here?  Whoever said Bollywood was part of our culture?  It is a rowdy beast we have ready for all occasions.  For some reason, we showcased a cycle shop.  Okay.  Then we had politicians campaigning - all part of the Indian landscape one supposes.  Fine.  But all dancing to Chaiya Chaiya?  How the fuck is this a tribute to anything except mediocre unimaginative programming?  Mumbai Dabbawalas, with paint dabbas!  Fine!  The masala chai?  Okay.  How about showcasing some rapes, molestation in public, burning brides for dowry, illegal mining, and some shitting in the open too!?  Oh, we already showed that in the village!

For some reason, right on live television, Two girls fell down doing some acrobatic standing on men's shoulders.  Poor things.  I hope they got paid for the show they tried to put on.

The biggest of the uncultural, demented, gimmicky clown shows has to be A R Rahman.  And who are all those barbaric assholes dancing behind him all the time?  Who are those idiots he had behind him with saffron and green gloves and muscular bodies in white chiffon?  Bloody beefcakes on the entertainment industry unemployment list?  They looked like thugs to me, and do not represent anything but the most mindless things we put together in the name of entertainment.  They did not look one bit Indian to me, nor did the stupid song sound Indian.  Sure it sounded like Rahman, but was it in any way fit for the show?  Whatever happened to Balamurali Krishna and Ilayaraja?  They would have put on something magnificent and they would not bow to his royal freaking eyeness as well.  Does anybody in the Organizing Commitee even know the real geniuses we have?  Heck, Bappida would have belted out something fantastic.

As if the CW song wasn't bad enough, Rahman the copycat had to perform Jai Ho! What the fuck for?  The idiot has made this song his go to song.  If all else fails, he throws this on your face with that, "I got the Oscar for this.  What the fuck do you know?" attitude and regularity.  He got paid 5 crores for repeating his old shit?

India, thy middle name used to be mediocrity.  Now, thou art, from every part, oozing it. 

We're losing it.

BSK.

PS: In hindsight, there was plenty of comedy during the Opening Ceremony.  Even beyond all the agony, one had to be swayed by the sheer scale of cacophonic insult unleashed upon us.

Foolproof Indianness.

26th November 2008.  Mumbai.  A few of our policemen died in a hail of terrorist bullets.  The bulletproof jackets they were wearing didn't save them.  In another case, a famous cop was not wearing a bulletproof vest, and was killed, and now the Maharashtra government has submitted its affidavit to the courts investigating the incidents.

According to that affidavit - "The bullet-proof jackets had been ordered by the Maharashtra government way back in 2001 and could withstand bullets fired only from 9 mm pistols and carbines."

These shocking admissions were made in an affidavit filed by Deputy Commissioner of Police Vijaysingh Jadhav on behalf of the Maharashtra government in the Bombay High Court on Wednesday, the day when a special court concluded hearing arguments in that 26th November terror attacks.

Similar jackets, which are not meant to withstand fire from AK47 or and SLR, are used even by the "military forces", the affidavit said.  Great!  So, what are they supposed to withstand?  Water guns?  Pea shooters?  Firecrackers?

The state government told the High Court in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) that the jackets used during 26/11 were ordered in a time when the "threat perception" for the metropolis had "not taken into account an attack that would include simultaneous strikes and civilians held as hostages."  Let's put that a little more honestly - "We never thought we'd get attacked, so we didn't give a fuck what we wore".  What do civilians held as hostages have to do with bulletproof vests not being bulletproof?  Also, simultaneous strikes.  How many cops do we have?  Just one?  Don't we have simultaneous traffic lights?

To the question whether the jackets were of standard or not, the answer was that it could not have saved Karkare because the officer sustained injuries to his shoulder and neck, which were not covered by the jacket of standard design, the affidavit pointed out.  Oh, great.  So let's forget the bulletproof jackets for now, and let's focus on the foolproof bullets that aimed away from the areas the jacket covered.  Brilliant.

Way back in 2008, we had police officers coming forward and telling us about jackets procured by the police through which "every single bullet went through"!  Yes, even when shot from a long distance.
http://www.mid-day.com/news/2008/dec/011208-Mumbai-bullet-encounter-specialist-Vijay-Salaskar-Mumbai-terror-blast-bullet-proof-jacket.htm.  In other words, these fools never really had any bulletproof jackets!

Let's take a step aside and ask ourselves how much of a deep rooted incompetence this has exposed.  First of all, "carbines" were probably last used in World War 1.  These are the long barreled guns with smooth insides, that don't even put revolutions on the bullets going out.  Who needs protection from these antiques?  This is not some museum coming alive every night.  Even local gangs have more powerful guns these days!  So, what kind of morons are sitting around taking these purchase decisions that are clearly completely useless?  What kind of a brainless system do we have to be endorsing in order to spend money on things that have absolutely no meaning in buying?

Terrorists are efficient because they have to be.  They need to cause maximum damage with minimum investment.  So they get the best weapons, choose the fittest and mentally sickest amongst themselves, prepare to die, and go in all guns blazing, pun intended.  To oppose them, we don't need any of their madness, but simply a mechanism that works.  We need people that can shoot back, a chain of command that knows what commands to issue to whom and when, trained people who can pull the trigger when their guns are pointing at the targets, and machines that work.  Period.

While under attack is not the time for chaos and confusion in the ranks, miscommunication amongst various government organizations, and missed opportunities.  It is never a good time for any of this, but if we test any of our government controlled "systems" we will find them not working.

We gave our government offices computers a long time ago.  For sure, at the very least, ten years ago.  The Regional Transport Offices are amongst these.  The police departments of various states even have claims on their websites that they are proud to be part of many new e-government initiatives. (Example: http://tnpolice.gov.in/chiefmsg.html).  Ask a traffic policeman if he can pull out his walkie talkie, bark a number, and get the name and address of the owner of any vehicle he just saw running over ten people.  The answer is NO!  As incredulous as it may seem, there is no access to that simple bit of information!  There is a whole official procedure to follow before this gap is bridged!  That is where our government monkeys are, with or without computers.  Fuckers just don't know what to do, except blackmail the public into paying bribes for the simplest tasks, and maintain total bankruptcy of functional ideas.

Of course this points to corruption, incompetence, and a host of other endemic problems, like apathy, non-action, and finally, to sum up - Indianness.  It is time we defined this for ourselves, since we seem to have a hard time acknowledging that "Indianness" is indeed all the above rolled into one.  This is a word that deserves to be in every dictionary.  Only we Indians can fuck up something of importance so badly, that even after lives are lost, we're grappling not with the gravity of the situation, but with the process of concluding a "matter".

I'm not entirely unhappy policemen died, because most of them are corrupt bastards.  The majority of them are unfit, insincere, not interested in service of any kind unless it is performed to obtain a bribe, and are just puppets of politicians.  It is just fantastic that their incompetence in Mumbai was exposed by terrorists in such a short period of time, instead of our public interest, the judicial process, the media, and our Indianness combined spending the next fifty years telling us that our cops, their jackets, their guns, and their stupidity is a complete waste for the nation.

Are our policemen dispensable?  Clearly, they are.  Nothing of note has happened now that we have lost a few of them in terrorist and Maoist attacks.  Their deaths haven't made any pockets of civilization more in danger, or lacking protection.  The police forces of almost all states are nothing but drains on the budget, magnified several times by their incompetence and immunity from speedy prosecution.  So, why do we need them, if they are not impeccable in their duties and manners?

Where it most mattered - doing their duty, they were found wanting, and if they are that inefficient, they can die.  For heavens sake, there is nothing heroic about dying in a war you're not even fit enough to fight in, so let's stop making heroes out of unfit, uniformed thugs we hire to do our dirty jobs and look the other way when they take bribes, grow fat, and kill people in fake "encounters".  Police custodial killings in India are rampant.  Now we have them selling dead bodies.  How low can these weasels go?  It's wrong to generalize the entire police force of this country thus, but if they can take collective pride, they can also take collective blame. 

It is absolutely shameful that this country supplies substandard equipment to personnel employed to do critical jobs, but we don't need to take any moral responsibility for the personnel themselves being substandard.  If there are IPS officers facing charges of molestation of minors and abetting suicide, they can bloody well figure out how bulletproof their own jackets need to be and they can shoot the pigs that supplied faulty equipment.  They once again failed to do their jobs - that's all there is to it.  And the same can be said of many, many Indians who're not earning their keep.  It's just part of our Indianness.  When we get bitten because of it, that will simply add to ... what else?  Indianness!

- BSK.