What YOU can do to prevent terror attacks
As we all know, very recently a large number of people in Mumbai had their carefully-built lives shattered in a few minutes of synchronized bomb blasts organized by terrorist groups allegedly helped by Pakistan.A lifetime of hard work, a lifetime of accumulated dreams, were reduced to charred flesh and blood-spattered splintered bones in a few minutes.
Anyone of us could have been the victims. Anyone of us might be the victim tomorrow.
India's "leaders" have followed their usual strategy of praising the "spirit of Mumbai" and claiming that "life is back to normal".
They forget that life is never back to normal for people who lose their limbs, and the near and dear ones of those who lose their lives or limbs.
More than two hundred people died. More than seven hundred people suffered injuries. And these are just official Government figures. We all know how (un)reliable the Government figures are.
The common people are stuck with the incompetent useless leaders they have elected. Some of them, such as Home Minister Shivraj Patil, do not even have the grace to stand up and admit that they failed.
There used to be a time when Ministers resigned when they failed to carry out their jobs.
Shivraj Patil, in spite of multiple terror attacks of increasing frequency -- Akshardham, Delhi on Diwali, Kashmir, Mumbai, Mumbai again, Varanasi, and now Mumbai once again, has not even spoken up as to what steps are being taken (if any) to stop these attacks.
He is just sitting tight hoping no one will notice that it is his job as Home Minister to ensure the safety and security of India's citizens.
In a situation such as this, is there anything YOU as an individual citizen can do to reduce the chances that you or your near and dear ones will fall victim to an attack tomorrow ?
I know what you have been doing so far. You have been cursing the idiotic "leaders". And your friends have been doing it too. And you have all realized, after 4 days of cursing, that it is not helping the situation in any way.
I have a suggestion as to what YOU CAN DO which I am confident will reduce the chances of death and destruction coming your way in the future.
It will only work if you are serious about following this suggestion though.
Hear me out.
If you don't believe this will work, then let me know. Either write comments on this blog, or just send me an email at h a r s h v a r d h a n 0 5 AT y a ho o DOT c o m .
Okay, now hear me out.
First, you need to ask yourself why it is that USA has had only one terrorist attack (on 9/11) in the last 5 years, whereas India keeps suffering an attack every couple of months.
Have you ever asked yourself this question ?
Do you know what the answer is ?
Maybe you think the Americans have more money, better technology, and that's why they can stop attackers.
That is part of the reason, but that is not the answer.
The answer is that the Americans haven't forgotten 9/11 yet. When they forget, they'll get lax, and no amount of money or technology will be able to prevent the next one.
Indians had forgotten the Varanasi blasts. The Nagpur blasts. The Ayodhya blasts. The Delhi Diwali blasts. The Red Fort blasts. The IISc Bangalore attacks. The Parliament attacks. The Srinagar Assembly blasts. The Mumbai blasts. The Calcutta blasts. The Jammu blasts. And so on....
Indians forget. The dead victims don't have any say anyway. The family-members of the injured or dead are promised assistance, which they never receive. So they disappear into slums, become prostitutes, or beggars, or housemaids, or commit suicide, or starve to death; in one way or another they vanish from public memory.
The non-victims forget the victims and move on.
For this selfishness, the non-victims earn punishment in the form of future blasts. Future terrorist attacks.
The only way to make sure that attacks will stop in the future is by refusing to forget the victims. Refusing to allow them to fade away into oblivion.
This will be a long and time-consuming process. It will require all of us to remember the news that we saw last month and earlier, and forgot.
It will require us to go and find out the victims of the last fifteen hundred or more terrorist attacks of various kinds and various mangnitudes killing over 140,000 and injuring many more (according to official figures, which usually understate casualties) in various parts of India over the last 58 years.
We will have to remember the victims. See how their families are doing. How many received the compensation the government had promised after the attacks that had destroyed their lives.
How many children had to give up studies and start a career in begging after their parents died in blasts. How many widowed wives had to become prostitutes to feed their children. How many lost their eyes, hands, or legs and lost everything.
After we take stock of this enormous past history of such large numbers of terrorism victims that our society has failed to protect, families whose lives were destroyed by terrorists and who we have heartlessly forgotten, pushed aside, and "moved on", we will understand what is happening to our society, and how we can prevent it from happening.
We will only then understand what sacrifices we will have to make to stop this terrorism problem once and for all.
This will not be an easy task. But if it is not done, I can assure you, the terror attacks will continue. And mark my words, even if you escape them forever, someday your child, or your grandchild will be a victim.
Every difficult task has an easy beginning. Here is what I suggest you should do over the next couple of weeks.
Talk to your friends. Talk to your family members. Try to remember all the terrorist attacks that happened in various parts of India in the last 5 years.
Make a list of these attacks, in the following format:
Date. Place. What happened. Casualties.
Example:
"11 July 2006. Mumbai. Train blasts. 200+ killed, 700+ injured".
After you finish making this list, send it to everybody you know. Also send it to me. Either write it in comments on this blog, or send it to me by email at h a r s h v a r d h a n 0 5 AT y a h o o DOT c o m.
I will put up the details of these numerous terrorist attacks for all of us to see and remember the victims.
If you personally know any victims, send me their photographs, and information on how they are doing; whether they have been able to get back to a normal life yet, etc.
We must all remember these victims, and understand the enormity of their suffering.
We must tell all our friends and family and everybody we know about what happened to these victims and their families.
We must make sure the idiotic media and the stupid politicians think twice before declaring "Life is back to normal".
We must build the understanding among the people around us, that something big has been happening to us; a lot of people around us have died, lost their eyes, arms and legs, near and dear ones, and lives.
That will build in us the will to make sure this does not continue.
You think you already have that will ? Believe me, you don't.
You will see that will in yourself when you see the full details of all the 140,000 innocent Indian men women and children who have died in 58 years of terrorist attacks, and the many hundreds of thousands who have lost their ability to live a decent human life due to crippling injuries.
Let's compile this information and show it to everybody we know.
Let's force the media to stop saying "everything is back to normal".
Let's force the government to take action.
We need a critical mass of people to be aware of and participating in this action. Tell everybody you know about this exercise we are going to do, and ask them to join us.
We will succeed if there are enough of us.
Separately, we all are weak. Together, we will be strong. Nobody will be able to stop us.
Help me carry out this plan I have outlined above. If you have questions about my strategy, ask me. I will explain things better if they are not clear enough what we are trying to do.
If you do so, I assure you, together we will be able to come to a point where you can be sure that these terrorist strikes against the people of India will become a thing of the past. The country will get itself proper leadership, and the perpetrators of these activities will be effectively countered through intelligent use of the enormous resources available to the Indian Nation.
Give me your time and attention, and your enthusiasti help, and I will give you an India that your children will be proud to inherit.
posted by Harsh Vardhan @ 6:44 am
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13 Comments:
ur blog was good.
and fine, harsh.. v can do so what u have req. to.. but what is the anti-terrorist action that u have planned? write it as a blog so that the plan becomes clear..
Dear anonymous,
Thanks a lot for your feedback.
I will clarify the issue you raised in a future post soon.
Please bear with me for a short while (a day or two) so that I can carefully outline the plan, and why I believe it will work.
Thanks,
Harsh
Good post.
-Harshal Vaidya
www.lakhpatipage.com
Dear anonymous, Harshal, and others who emailed me,
Thank you for your valuable feedback.
I have added a new post at What YOU can do th prevent terror attacks II clarifying what I had said in this post.
Thank you,
Harsh
my dear..u r wrong in the very first few lines of ur post....why u all believe tht pakistan is behind all these terrorist attacks?..this is another thing tht your politicians spread without any reality behind it...its an easy way to divert indian's anger and hatred towards pakistan though they themselves deserve to stand all tht...havent u notice how easy it becomes for them to say tht 'PAKISTAN IS INVILVED after every terrorist attack'..they say it sometimes even before properly investigating...so plz think abt it..u r befooled by ur government in every way..pakistan itself is facing terrorism and if it can have this much power,will it not use it to safe itself from terrorism first?????
dua ali
The only thing I can do is to leave India.
hi,
how do u think that remembering the past events ie creating awreness abt the past wud lead to prevention of terrorists attacks?I would like to know in what way it wud prevent?
Here, in Brasil, we have hunger, crimes, and alot of poority, but i´m happy cos we love each other and that is THE ONLY WAY to stop any terror, loving one another. And i´m not religious....at any kind...but i hope someday you will see that. Otherwise, while money ir rolling up there, teh war goes on...
Brazilian Hugs
solution mode is necessary, so whats the solution - how to make realize our government realize that we do not want to forget these attacks? how to make media work in favor of that? can we do something the same way as terrorists are doing - Gaurilla war? Where is the money coming from? where are the waepons coming from? Who is bringing them in? what motivates them to work against their own country?
Is the solution as per "Yuva" justified or as per "Rang De Basanti" or as one of my friend suggested - runway and leave India?
I agree - if we do not change it now, we are justfied to be killed in next attack, all of us would deserve it.
Who is responsible? officers - their Ranks? Can we ask them information regarding what they plan to do in public interest?
Suggestions? comments?
Excellent points.
Running away and leaving India is not going to work; no Indian is safe anywhere on earth if India is not strong enough to take care of them.
In spite of what they say, people worldwide are still racist. You can see how many Indians, especially Sikhs, but many Hindus too, have been victims of hate-crimes after 9/11.
We must stay and fight. It is okay to go abrad, but even then we must continue the fight from abroad, by sending money, and raising awareness.
India needs soldiers today. We must all be soldiers, whether in India or abroad.
The first step is raising awareness. To do so, we must get ourselves heard. We must create enough momentum behind our view-point that the mainstream "secular" (anti-Hindu) media and our politicians are forced to stop ignoring our views, the Truth.
At the same time, we must all individually excel at our jobs, educate and empower ourselves, and prepare for the coming battle.
We will need a large army of well-educated, powerful, and financially strong India-lovers to carry out the steps we will need to take over the next several years to reclaim our motherland from the criminals and Radical Islamists who have captured it.
It will be a long and hard struggle. There is no short-cut.
We must patiently grow our organisation, our voice.
This blog has about 10,000 regular readers now according to my estimates. if each of us can get one new person who shares our views to join our community every 3 months, we will grow into 160,000 in one year. Another such year and we will reach 2.5 million. At that point we will amount to about 10% of India's online population and no mainstream newspaper will be able to ignore what we say and still retain credibility with the online population of india. So they will start reflecting our views in their online editions. That will force them to reflect the same views in their print editions too, otherwise they'd look like hypocrites saying one thing online and something else in print.
This will allow us to reach the entire literate population of india with our views -- about 650 million people. We will be able to make them aware of what the "secular" (anti-Hindu) "leaders" have been hiding from them, and misguiding them about, for so many decades.
At that point, I am sure, we will be in a position to force India's leaders to stop taking us for granted.
Our power lies in our numbers. We must leverage that.
We must not give up hope.
We must not try to do too much too fast. We must remain patient and keep making progress, however slow it may be.
As I showed above, if each of us can "convert" one friend of ours into a particpant of this blog community, we are assured of victory in 2 years.
We will win for sure. We just have to stay patient and work every day, making progress little by little, keeping our patience, and without losing hope.
Jai Hind !!!
Hai Harsha and other friends....
The post that u ve suggested is good, but u all are seeing the religion in a wrong view...
some peoples take religion in wrong way for their beniefits, either it could be hinduism or islam or christian...
One thing i would like to tell.. Any religion which ever is there, all are for peace, happiness and good social envirnment to be made among everyone.
Our country is a secular, dont break the good relationship between hindu brothers and muslim brothers in the name of religion...
Dear Syed,
There is no need to spend your valuable time on "changing my view on Islam".
I recommend you and other educated and non-terrorist Muslims like you to spend some effort in changing the terrorists' view of Islam.
Also spend some effort in helping counter the influence of Muslim clerics in continuing vote-bank politics. How can you call the country secular when such a vast majority of Muslim voters vote according to the fatwas of the Shahi Imam ?
Until these things are done there is nothing to be gained out of trying to change my view of Islam. Our view will depend on what is being done by followers of Islam.
Muslims have lots of places on earth where they can live safely. People like me are not allowed to live in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. We have only India. We have to do our best to make sure that our future generations continue to have some place on earth where they can live.
I hope you find my position reasonable. If not, I am sorry. I refuse to agree to the suicide of my own community by continuing to acquiesce in tolerance of Islamic fundamentalism, religious violence, and lack of secularism in the name of secularism.
Harsh
Dear Harsh
This maybe an old blog and I'm not sure if my comments make any sense. Firstly, I can't understand how can remembering and edifying the vicitms of terrorism prevent terrorism. In my opinion, it will only give rise to further tension and hate among communities. And what makes you think that only Hindus are affected by the terrorism in India. And what makes you think that Muslims can go and live in other Islamic countries. Don't you know that a large number of Indian Hindus live in Saudi Arabia (besides Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman etc.). I have been to some of these countries and I don't find myself at home there, although I am a Muslim. To me India is my home, and I am as much pained by the terrorist activities as you are. Moreover, if you need to make edifices about terrorist acts and victims, then we should do the same for the victims of communal riots, communal prejudice, atrocities against tribals and lower caste people of India. My suggestion is that we create an atmosphere where all of us can meet and share each other's pain and pleasures, and most importantly, learn to tolerate each other.
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