Sachin the only good in a cesspool of bad

Now that Sachin Tendulkar has finally clinched one of the most epochal moments of this century and changed the world order for good, one can settle down like dust on drawing room furniture and look back at a week where Tendulkar was the only saving grace amid tumult and turmoil.

A lot of bad happened around the 100th good. For starters, Team India lost the match to Bangladesh and marred the maestro’s most magical moment forever.

But over and above that, and on a more serious plane, baby Falak stared out of the news pages in a white body bag. The little one, battered and shattered, lost the battle of survival after 56 days in hospital. It was a blood curdling picture — a lone mother at the burial site staring helplessly at her dead daughter. Apparently, Munni was all alone at the burial but for one relative and two-three cops. And, she had gone for the burial after spending long hours in court, attending to a hearing in the Falak case. One wonders where the media and all those well-wishers were when Falak was taking the final journey into another, perhaps better, world.

It speaks volumes about our collectively dead conscience that Falak had to be laid to rest in such utter loneliness. In her death, there were many prayers that sought her demise. After all, with one brain portion removed and the rest of her body broken at so many points, it would have been an agonising life had she lived. Doctors said, at best, she would have been a vegetable even though they fought all odds to prolong her short life.

That was Falak — the resounding slap on the insensitive world we populate, where alarmingly this will not be the last incident of its kind; where the cops will still look the other way; where nobody will look within to analyse why such things are allowed to happen; where rogues like the ones involved in the human trafficking racket around Falak will only prosper. Till we stop it ourselves, cleanse the system we inhabit and play an active role in moulding society into a better direction, Falaks will come and go at regular, and increasingly frequent, intervals.

Not just Falak, there was yet another gangrape of a girl in Gurgaon and the night passed into day without much of a hullaballoo. Girls being picked up from almost everywhere has become so routine that even administrators have developed the gall to suggest they be grounded before 8 pm. No one is talking about the impunity with which the crime of rape is growing and getting shockingly wanton and commonplace. Apparently, the men who did it this time were youth from the belly of Jajjar, an urban village some miles from Gurgaon. They even ignored the cops on the phone who told them to not commit the crime! If this is not bizarre then what is?

Imagine, cops managing to access you on phone while you are committing a crime. You know you will soon be traced. And yet you ask the cops to take a walk, you gangrape the girl and you move on! Such brazenness, such confidence that nothing will happen!

But then, if an IPS officer can be trampled under a tractor without the perpetrator fearing a backlash, lawlessness is obviously at its peak. Talk to cops and they will tell you that even among the crime syndicates of Mumbai in those bad old days, there was an unwritten code of conduct among the criminals — no one would kill a policeman because the backlash would be decimating to take.

No longer so. Much before the case of the slain Morena cop went to the CBI, his fellow policemen had ruled it was merely a case of drunken driving by the tractor operator!

Back in Delhi, in our esteemed Parliament, Independent India’s biggest farce unfolded to a shocked nation and an equally stunned Government. Picture this: A Railway Minister presents the Rail Budget which is hailed as a good Budget by the Prime Minister and his Government. Next we hear is that the same Railway Minister’s head is on the block for tabling the ‘good’ Budget! Yes, coalition politics often lands parties in curious corners due to allied pressure, but this one took the cake. Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi, we now hear, will soon be sacked and his proposed Rail fares rolled back. This, when the Union Budget that followed the Rail Budget, has already punched the aam aadmi in his vulnerable stomach! Everything will be expensive, even breathing, from now on! But Rail fares may be rolled back! Why? Because, it is easier to handle public loss of face than dealing with Trinamool’s Mamata Banerjee. That’s the reality of politics — dirty, directionless politics.

Indeed, on all fronts, last week was a slideshow of how deeply embedded we have become in the malaise of negativity. The bad thing about this is that we are comfortable where we are. Some oohs and aahs about the situation later, and we settle down. Such passivity deserves the state of ruin we live in so why complain? Just lie back and ignore, till the next horror comes along.

So, till we drag ourselves to reform and overhaul, let’s take the good in and the bad out — let’s just sleep with Tendulkar’s bat and get up to his next best.

Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 18 March, 2012