Saket Vaidya, aka Vulturo, The Prince of Darkness
So here we are with another episode of our brand new Technology Podcast, Tech Ka Masala.
A lot of Google stories broke this week – the Offline Calendar, The Internet Bus, Voice Based Search and finally Google Earth 5.0. And then there were those Microsoft Mosquitos and of course, the $10 Indian Laptop epic FAIL.
Episode 2 was released last night. Feedback appreciated.
The podcast can be subscribed to via RSS or iTunes. Thanks for listening.
This is India’s 9/11. At least for now. The Suburban train attacks of last year were the 9/11 of last year, and Parliament attacks were the 9/11 of their time. In fact, going all the way back to 1993, the blasts that killed more people and damaged more property were, in a Back-to-the-future kind of temporally warped way, the 9/11 of 1993.
I’ve always felt that comparing Mumbai’s terror attacks to 9/11 was lame and wannabe. Find myself amused by the way Krish Ashok puts it.
(0)I feel extremely jaded writing about this, especially when I am not writing about anything else otherwise, but this just has to be said. Another terrorist attack on this country shouldn’t be that big a deal given the fact that we have one every other month, but then I guess this has gone too far.
The terrorist menace that the city of Mumbai and this country has been dealing with for over the past twenty-four hours just changes the dynamics of everything. I consider myself to be fairly desensitized against information about crimes against humanity, like terrorism for one, as long as personal kin is uninvolved. But with things turning out the way they have, I’m experiencing a plethora of new feelings.
Of course, I’m angry. And frustrated. It is only human to feel those things. But more than anger or frustration, what bothers me is a feeling of helplessness. A feeling that we are being subdued. That we are being personally violated. And that we can do nothing about it. This is disturbing. And I’m horrified.
All recent terror attacks in major Indian cities shared one common facet. To use a cliched expression, they were all acts of cowardice. No, I mean seriously. You plant 8-10 bombs in different areas using anonymous vehicles and innocuous items without drawing too much attention. The bombs go off. You have fled by then. You may get caught later but then that is just a risk you take. On the other hand you may not get punished at all.
This is different. This involves you taking to the streets, hotels, railway stations and other public places with an array of sophisticated weapons in your backpack and a smile on your face. You personally killing as many ordinary people as you can, fully comfortable with the knowledge that you are going down yourself soon. It is one thing to dream of something like this when you are feeling particularly evil, or another if you are playing a modern-day first person shooter. But this is reality – You can’t respawn here.
You can’t be a coward if you do this in real life. You must have serious balls. Either that, or you must be completely mental. Whatever be your reason, this scares me. And it scares everyone, more than it should.
Earlier this afternoon, some unidentified blokes managed to take out Benazir Bhutto using the tried and tested suicide strategy. Kind of sad, what?
And I can quite imagine that this must come as a godsend for numerous TV channels, newspapers and rest of the media operating in and around this region. Heck, the 24×7 media boom has left us with such a huge scarcity of real news, per se that most of the media outlets are dying to turn everything and anything they can get their hands on into ‘news’. An assassination or two definitely helps, when it comes to newscasting fodder. And the death of Benazir Bhutto is so much more cooler, than say a Teji Bacchan for example.
Apart from carefully put together clips of Bhutto waving to the crowds, Bhutto giving interviews, Bhutto as a child – not to mention the current footage which I’m sure will include a lot of live rioting, soundbites and suchlike – imagine the opportunity for all the analysis, speculating if Musharraf is really the evil (No marks for any correct guesses). Or maybe what the United States should or should not have done. The possibilities are endless.
Its gonna be a fun-filled week of television programming. I’m not watching any TV, but I can bet half my kingdom on the fact that right now, Aaj Tak must be broadcasting this mish-mash of Bhutto related shit, repeated over and over, intelligently titled “Bhutto Ki Maut” or “Ek Haadsa” or some such thing.
This is good news for the blogosphere even – there is going to be an insane proliferation of Bhutto related posts wherever you look. These opportunities are great for getting rid of bloggers’ block, I must say! Even twitter is abuzz with all this shit. Bhutto is fucking everywhere!
Sadly, for people like me who have really low attention spans, the question is “What next?”. Tell me something new, please. News and politics is so bloody monotonous and boring. Too bad people like Bhutto have to lose their lives to keep the continuity going. I just heard from a colleague that Bhutto was this hot rocker chick during her Harvard days, attended Woodstock, and that sort of a thing. May her soul rest in peace, and all that.
Sometimes, I think life needs to have a higher purpose. Don’t you agree?