I have been reading Domain by James Herbert , a fiction in which a situation of London being shattered by 5 nuclear blasts for the past week, when I got to know about the London Blasts , the scenes of the book that I had so meticulously came back to me ... scary ... yeah , even by my eccentric standards , scarry.
I m a person who never cares to look at the city while commuting to and fro office. I just sit in the car, my nose delved deep into the book I am reading. After the blasts though , as I continued with the book , ( read the review in the next post) , the images in NDTV just kept coming back to me ... and as someone( I forget the name of the guy ) who proclaimed "it is the price of occupation" , so did I think .. that they probably deserved it , but the hoary images never left me ... I had to tear my eyes off the book and look outside , I then saw my city ... Bangalore , a city that Ive come to dislike , nay, hate for the past 2 years , a city that had been my dream and now is my Hades , a city to which though I am a native , feel like an alien ... a city teeming with unlimited traffic and huge skyscrapers destroying the symmetry of the once "pensioner's paradise" .
Imagination is a wild unruly thing , jumps up at you when you least expect it . My mind's eye imagined a blast here , in the very heart of the city , where my car was stationery for the minute stuck in the traffic, the 24 storied building crumbling down , a case of now you see it , now you dont , streets black as soot turning red and brown with blood and bodies , the one of those umpteen couple walking down the street hand in hand lying there dead / dying ,
my mind imagined the worst , I hate blood , the very sight of it , but my mind refused to shake off these images ... even if I tried to physically block them by shaking my head , my mind imagined a man bloody and hurt his clothes on fire running out from Bangalore Central ... imagine holding him in your hands , your washed and pressed kurta turning a crimson red , looking into his pleading eyes for one moment and his dead glassy eyes the very next second... The blasts that had seemed so distant until then, seemed here and near , sun was shining brightly but I shivered , for hadnt we all read reports that Bangalore is a possible terrorist attack site? I could hear the sirens , smell the odour of blood ... and feel the futility of it all.
War ... but against whom ? By whom? For What? By What? So you win the war , what do you win then? a pile of bodies , carcasses and piteous cries of the dying? a piece of land , a conviction that your religion/belief is greater ? Yes , it will be the greatest , for who else will be around to refute it? Ashoka embraced Buddhism after his greatest win .... did he do so because he understood the answers of these questions? If yes , will we need another great war to teach us the lesson Ashoka learnt? But then Ashoka lived because he did not have a Nuclear weapon , today , every country has one .... how will Ashoka ever re learn the lesson again if he has more occupying issues like fighting cancer and radiation sickness?
well , here i go musing again , forgetting that war is mindless , and so is my vision of a destroyed Bangalore ... a terrorist attack can never kill Bangalore ... it's fate is already written , it has to collapse with the sheer pressure of traffic ! No Mr Terrorist , don bother with this city , it will die anyway.
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