Hang on, there!

There is a big noise being made in this country about the sentence passed on the man who planned the terror attack on the Indian parliament a few years ago, a gentleman (or was he one?) called Mohammed Afzal. He is to hang soon, as per the judgement, but could find himself a live man, if not a free one, if those who are pushing for a mitigation of the verdict actually get their way. These well-meaning folk include politicians who should know better, activists who ought to know better and some ordinary folk who need to know better. After all, planning to kill, maim and disrupt is, in almost anyone’s book, deserving of a like punishment, no? I am not usually too bloodthirsty. But deliberately killing anything, be it a man or a mosquito, is not a good thing in my little book. I do relax that rule a little where cockroaches are concerned, but even those I do not do in myself – I close my eyes and yell for my father or the maid, whoever is closest at the time.

But then, to get back to the original point, I find, in our great and glorious country, a big noise is made about anything and everything. It is sort of expected at any and every stage of anything in progress that someone somewhere will get up and shout in protest, be it for renaming a road or for putting a suffering leopard to sleep. People like standing for hours in a huge and treeless maidan, baking in the relentless sun and not knowing at all why they are doing it. People like walking in slow, winding lines through rush hour traffic, getting cursed by drivers and honked at by their cars, threatened by pedestrians and heckled by gawkers, even though they may not hear what is being said. And people like getting the small sums of money that they are paid for doing all this for the local bigwig who has arranged to have them all there for that particular protest, even if he has no clue who they are and where they came from.

Oh, yes, that is a small secret that someone more knowing than me once revealed. I listened, my eyes and mouth round in wonder and startlement, as I was told how crowds are hired for these rallies and marches and morchas, trucked in by the hundreds from the villages in the state and beyond, paid a few rupees and given a boxed lunch and a bottle of sweet drink for their effort. I also found out, much to my pained surprise, that you should never, unless allowed by those who control these processions, try and squeeze through this crocodile of sweating, shouting folk, never mind how urgent the deadline or need to use the loo. I once did, in the company of a friend more aggressive than I was, and suffered for it – one of the marchers took grave objection to our passage and slapped at us with a hard, calloused hand. My friend ducked, I didn’t. I had the bruise on my back for days afterwards.

But why protest inevitabilities, I always wonder. If you know a dam will be built, if you know that a tree will be chopped down, if you know a terrorist will be hanged, why not consider the ifs, buts and whys of the situation and then rationally and logically go about trying to correct it? Will rabble and rousing it, help?