Spirit and all...

Every news channel today was glorifying the mantra of "The people of the city celebrated holi showing their spirit and resilience" in the face of the recent terror strikes. NDTV had one of their women quizzing one foreign national about it with the latter replying "I was in London last July. The spirit shown by the people here in Varanasi is similar to the spirit of London back then". All hail the "spirit". Like Alaphia mentioned in one of her previous posts, people celebrate holi or get back to business because it is human nature. It is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to glorify either. If you think only the people of Varanasi suffer from terrorism, then that reflects a very myopic view of the world and life. Terrorism is not only Islamic, it is also Hindu, Christian, Jew and Budhist. We can read about them in the papers. I read about events like the tsunami and terror strikes, sometimes reflect on it, sometimes get hurt, angry, frustrated, sometimes i just read it just like i would read any other article, desensitized to the atrocities and sufferings because of the sustained and unfailing occurances of such events. I get on with my life. I go to work, i watch movies, listen to music, hog my food gluttonously and drink hard. To show my spirit? No, its because i'm a normal selfish human being. If at all i should feel guilty or ashamed it should be because i don't make a difference to all this and NOT for going to a pub the same day some crazed terrorist detonated a bomb. For the same reason, i have no delusions of grandeur of showing my resilience and spirit. What pisses me off the most is that the news channels, having got their prime time fodder, need the next sensational item to feast on, and voila, they have the good old spirit and resilience shit. What actually gets lost is the focus on the cause, prevention, evil of the crimes and justice and retribution for them. The media is no different from the politicians in obfuscating the REAL issues behind a veil of rhetoric and jingoism. I would like to ask the reporters to go ask a relative of a maimed victim about his/her spirit and resilience. "What do you think about this year's Holi? Isn't the spirit of Mumbai great?".

P.S: I didn't check if they had any SMS polls on this one. Do you think Varanasi has the best spirit and resilience among the Indian cities after a terror attack? SMS 'Y' or 'N' to 6688.