Angry Kya ?!

‘There’s been a bomb blast in Koregaon Park’ informed my flat mate as soon as I reached home after a day of gallivanting with friends on February 13th.

After a moment of shocked disbelief, I frantically called my sister and a few friends to make sure they were okay. After quelling my fears, I sat down to watch the news on CNN-IBN. Watched the mangled bodies being ambulanced away, heard the groans of the injured, observed the damage, listened to the news reporters give an update and wondered …

Wondered... Not the usual question on everybody’s mind- “what do these terrorists get out of murdering innocent people?” No, I had long passed that one. What I wondered was, why is that after ensuring the safety of our dear ones ,a bomb blast invariably becomes a news item to be discussed at the lunch table the next day at work and then later archived as a ‘Oh yes, I know about that incident’?

The 9 people who died in the blast were loved and cherished by someone. We look at them as some foreigners who died in a faraway land, but there were some people halfway across the world that were waiting for their return anxiously.

I believe, we are as much to blame about such incidents as those brain-washed violence loving terrorists.

In my MBA course, we had a subject called ‘Business Ethics’ taught by a very old but very flamboyant professor. During one class he remarked, ‘there is too much anger in the world.’ And I begged to differ. I believe there is too less righteous anger in the world and that’s the reason we have to deal with such problems. What we have instead is half-baked, self–centered, selfish disapproval that passes off as anger.

I’d like to think it was Mahatma Gandhi’s righteous anger that made him resent the unfair treatment meted out to Indians in South Africa. It was Mandela’s righteous anger that made him protest against apartheid. Martin Luther king was angry enough to dream about a world where people will not be judged by their color but by their character.

And one thing I am sure of - when Righteous Anger rises, it purges out evil...bomb blasts included... Time to get a little angry... ? !