Some Man, the Common Man...

Dear Nation,

I am one billionth of those that constitute you. Other than exercising my voting prerogative, I rarely come out to express my opinion in public. There are millions like me, snug in their existence, not easily roused by turmoil or tragedy outside their immediate realm of concern. But 26/11 changed that. Unbridled, uncensored opinions have been flowing from all corners, only to show that this time, your citizens finally have more than superficially been impacted, and they are no longer willing to tolerate nonsense. Good for you. A nation awakened is a nation aware.

But, awakened, yes. Aware, you’re not. Thousands like me have been grappling with an entire gamut of emotions over the past week, ranging from shock, disbelief, anger, disgust, insecurity, and expressing themselves boldly. The Common Man (CM), it seems, if the media pundits are to be believed, has finally come of age. We heard over –the-top reporters cry hoarse over the end of resilience for the CM, we heard the most honoured celebrity guests on the various news channels refer to themselves as the CM, we read countless blogs and open letters of protest, ire, exasperation from the Who’s Who of the newly constituted ambit of the CM.

Long live the CM! Now that thou hast arisen, do not slip into a slumber again!

But alas! The newly constituted CM is delusively misled into seeing itself as such. Even when emotions run high, rhetorics fly live across TV bytes and when, try as we might, they and I will still NOT become your common man. I’m sure you’ll agree mother nation. Excuse me for my poor grasp over statistical data, but we, the non-common men and women who check into the Taj, dine at Wasabi, and are invited on NDTV 24X7 to express our opinions in times like these, constitute a miniscule percentage of your population. The Common Man, we cant be. Maybe the gentleman who drives us to all these places and the ayah who baby sits our children while we dine out at these places are, but for us, the tag is a misnomer.

The real common men were the nameless ones who lost their innocent lives, unsung, un-telecast, un-interviewed in the mindless shootout by the terrorists at VT station. The other common men who share threads of their common-ness with the ones gunned down at the VT and Cama hospital felt the same insecurity, terror post the attacks, as the Chanel laced glitterati friends of the elite dead. And yet, not one of them was invited into the studios to vent their ire and disgust. Clearly, this time the national crisis further widened the us and them divide even in near-identical respective tragedies.

I wish our prime time news channels had ventured beyond the promenade of the Taj and the Trident to ask the people sitting in the interiors of states like Bihar and UP, Assam or Orissa their response to this horrific act of violence. They may have been surprised at the nonchalance of the real common man; such things happen in their backyards everyday, just that the live telecast makes a dramatic impact.

Everyday, in the name of caste, religion, land or language, innocent people are lined up again the wall, much as in the same way at the Taj and Trident, and gunned down mercilessly. Of course, as a macabre foreplay to the imminent bloodbath, the helpless women in the lot first get gangraped, (talk of multiple drama) and are then forced against the wall with the rest of them and gunned down.

But as long as they are a bunch of dalits, or people belonging to a certain community, or poverty stricken citizens lying in a pool of blood, such ‘small’ news reports don’t touch our lives at all. Infact, they don’t even get intercepted by our social consciousness radar. No TV crew, no live (or recorded) footage, no honoured guests voicing discontentment on air, no ‘we stand united against terrorism’ SMS’, no candlelight vigils at India Gate and no white-tshirt solidarity. If this is not homegrown, and most of the time, state sponsored or at least state patronized terrorism, what is? But you see, it’s the real common man dying there, not people like us, and sadly, that common man has no way to raise his voice with the rhetoric of ‘Enough is Enough’.

Brutal death, whether it comes inside the lobby of the Taj, or in a leaking thatched hut in a village, I suspect, the trauma must be the same. As would be the final moments of terror and horror in the eyes of both Gucci-ed bodies with a hint of wine as well as the emaciated half naked ones.

Dear Nation, I know you’re used to murder mayhems in cold blood, so much so that you’re kind-of immune by now. And therefore people like me have never spared a thought for homegrown homespun terror tragedies. I’m surprised at my (and of others like me) capacity to remain calculatedly detached at one form of terror and not the other. I’m appalled that I weep for one set of dead, and not the other, the numbers and varied demographics of which runs into many many thousands.

Have we as a nation become so numb that unless there’s minute by minute real life drama played out in front of us, we choose to remain blind to the 26/11s that happen everyday in the country. Must be the reality-TV hangover. I’m not even sure if the public outrage against the Mumbai siege, and the way the nation mourned, would have been the same had the news channels not kept on continuously flashing the nationalities of the terrorists and the evidence of the Pakistani hand; or had they been Hindu terrorists instead. As the bonechilling reports of the ruthless bloodbath kept trickling in, bit by bit, in the first couple of days, I saw even the liberal Hindu voices losing their objectivity at the gory images, and turning around to friends and family expressing livid anti-Muslim sentiments. Fortunately, the one front on which your citizens did emerge triumphant this time was in showing the maturity to check this community-targeted rage quickly, and in turning it against the politicians.

Our anger at our politicians is a natural response to their incompetence, apathetic politicking, and single-minded pursuit of power. But as your citizens, it’s time we too started sharing some responsibility. It’s time we recognized the social dichotomies among us and turned from being passive recipients of news bytes (and not always only sensational news) to active seekers of answers. Just as we need to make our politicians accountable, we need to make the media also take on the responsibility of reflecting the truths about you in an unbiased, sensitive, balanced way. Half unbaked truth is no truth. It is time that people like us recognize that nameless people like ‘them’ who fill up our ambient backdrop are real people. They are the real CM. Then alone we can ask the relevant questions. And stand united in protesting against injustice of any form. Injustice, which is also beyond our immediate realm of living.

Lovingly yours,

A Citizen