Wednesday, February 11, 2009

My best Friends’ Wedding

Haha, an oxymoron in the title itself: ‘Best Friends’, but that’s right. This time my biggest realization during my trip to India has been married people. And I met several stages of them. Married for a couple of years, married for couple of months, just returned from HM, got married while I was there and even will marry in near future.

What happens when friends marry? You make the third person, the concerned person and even you believe that this is the best thing that can ever happen to them and which might be true, but it does feel so animated most of the time.

When your friends insist, you talk to theirs’. “Hi, how are you?”, “How is new life”. “ How do you find my friend ….?”, “ Is he/she bothering you”, “Ae, mere friend ko kuch at bolna”, ‘Pata hai, once what happened ………”. And at this point it’s like the person is saying “Why do I have to bear this guy” and you are saying “Why did my friend make me talk to this person”.

Even worse are your conversations with your friend. You have to ask about the spouse. Oh how is…. And, if they start off even once, you are again into the animation mode. If they do not, it’s even worse. The person thinks, “Isko bhi abhi phone karna tha”.

Things does not stay you and me, they become ‘both of you’ and me. The individuality is lost. May be at work life, they still have the individuality, but in the limited hours when they are not working, they rather stay as “we”. What plans for weekends?” Oh, we plan to but curtains, or we will go to buy a lamp” or some of those trivial stuff which you never thought can bother your friend. All you can say, Thank god, atleast you are not shopping for ‘Pink Chaddis’.

Worst is when you meet them in person. Ofcourse you have to meet theirs’. And then sometime in the middle of the conversation you are totally not part of it and you start feeling kabab mein haddi.

All in all, you just understand that it is time to change and focus on yourself. Do not expect them to “daak shune aasha” but instead “aekla cholo re”

Disclaimer: It’s not a generic behavior. Everybody as one or 2 of the above qualities.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Police Excesses in India

I cannot stop myself from writing about this. Here are 3 incidents:

1) 3 guys throw acid on 2 girls who died but police shot the three people down. Here is a link of the story in ToI.

2) A guy wrongly speed races on his bike at 1 am n Bangalore, police stops him. He runs away towards a house which turns out to be a brigadiers, makes a call from the roof top, in Urdu, and police shoots him down. Link.

3) The fracas began at 2.30pm in Kolkata, when 37-year-old Yadav was about to park his vehicle on the wrong side of Kiron Shankar Roy Road. Policeman Banerjee, who was on duty in front of the high court, spotted the taxi and signalled to the driver to stop. When he didn’t, the constable sprinted towards the taxi, witnesses said. “He was holding an iron clamp, which he tried to attach to one of the wheels to prevent the driver from fleeing. The driver alighted and asked Banerjee why he was using the clamp instead of filing a case of parking violation,” a bystander said. Banerjee allegedly replied with a slap. Link.

The three incidents are of varying intensity and if decided to judge individually, probably you may differ on the sides to choose on each. However, one thing is clear, on all the three incidents; the people who suffered from police violence were not clean. They all had committed some offense. But is this the way a responsible police should react?

However, I am surprised at people’s reaction. Yes there are people who think these are bad acts by the police but I thought that would be a unanimous decision. However, surprisingly people differed. One of the people I asked felt that Police did the right thing. That is why terrorism is on the rise. Nobody is afraid of the police anymore.

Here is what I beg to differ. The job of the police is to maintain law and order. It is not their job to convict people and make people afraid of them. If you see a police on the road, you should feel positive that aah, here is a man maintaining law and order. But the truth is different. We see police with either disgust or fear.

However slow the process of law may be, somebody else cannot take over it. Ideally in all these cases, police should have caught the convict and produced him in the court, but instead they chose to be the judges. When discussing with someone about the first case, I said, police should have shot him on the leg or put tear gas. The other person said may be the police wanted to do that but the shot got misplaced. Come on, why do you pay the police for if they do not even know how to shoot.

And this is precisely why I hate when people talk highly of the so called “encounters”. Yes, those people may be convicts, or may be we can even kill the dreaded terrorists in encounters, but that’s not the way things should happen. It should be for the law to decide these things. If the law process needs to be revived, let’s do it. But police taking over law is definitely not the way to go.

And this is what I think is the difference between first world and third world country. Till now, whenever people used to tell me that India is a third world country, I used to feel sad. But now I know why it is so. Police takes law in its hand because lawmakers take infinite amount of time. Digging deeper, somewhere it boils down to the fact that we do not have the money and resources to have a police which should have the decency to talk like a gentleman even to the most dreaded terrorist in the world. Wasn’t even Saddam tried in the court before being hanged?