Those slaps on public intelligence
You can call it a week of outrageous utterances. Be it Pakistan or the Anuradha ‘Fiza’ Bali and Chand Mohammed saga, there was much to insult the intelligence of the public, and starkly too.
Let’s take them on one by one. Pakistan being a rogue and untrustworthy nation full of brazen and baseless stances is well known to India. So, it’s so-called 26/11 probe could not have come up with any genuine answer to the rising terror wall falling on India rather regularly. But when it blamed Bangladesh for the deadly Mumbai attacks, even the most hardened critic was stunned into bemused silence.
One knew Pakistan would come up with an inexcusable excuse for Mumbai but its flight of imagination was obviously bigger than our’s. An avid drawing room chatterati laughingly suggested that we must heave a sigh of relief that the Pakistanis pointed at Bangladesh. The expected thing for them to do was to actually blame terror outfits in India, maybe even some Hindu organisation with Kasab actually being a Hindu extremist convert!
That much for laughs, but really the way Pakistan keeps getting off the hook for the outrages it so continually crafts and executes, puts India’s fightback power into the abysmal zone. Someone, somewhere needs to develop an Indian backbone to trounce Pakistan’s oft-implemented stunners.
The story of the week was, however, the Fiza-Chand row and the break-up of their heady two-month marriage. Much as the “other woman” is always to be berated as a home-wrecker, Fiza’s outpourings through the media and her fight for her lost cause were quite saddening.
To top it all, U-turn taker Chand suggested that somebody else used his cellphone to send those steamy and love-dripping sms’ to Fiza!
That Chand had the audacity to actually propel such a flimsy lie is a commentary on our social thinking. After all, man can do no harm and Chand is no exception. He has merely destroyed the life of a woman and walked out, rather causally to be with his “first love” and family which, incidentally, would give him all the power and money he wanted.
Thanks to the increasing shortness of public memory and electoral expediency of most political parties, Chand may well get back to the top echelons soon.
As for Fiza, who is desperate fighting to bring her tormentor to justice, should be seen as a valiant trooper rather than just a woman scorned. After all, by merely making a wrong choice, she has lost everything — her religion, her identity, her job, her dignity and her status on the social ladder. Chand Mohammed also apparently made a wrong choice. But he is safely home without much of the trauma that afflicts Fiza. If this was not so commonplace in what is blatantly known as a man’s world, it would have been downright criminal.
So, while Fiza may fight to the bitter end and still fade away into oblivion or may be even desperate death, Chand will live on with a silent first wife, a forgiving father and the power of a family that has enough up its sleeve to actually couch the wrong of its favourite son. So much so, that one would not be surprised that when all is calm and away from headlines, Chand may get back to Fiza secretly and offer her a brand new prospect of a secret relationship. And Fiza, who would by then be felled by desolation, may just accept and join the ranks of all those reconciled women who dot the global landscape for various reasons.
You see, travesties have their own way of re-appearing in different garbs, be it through the position of Pakistan and the support it still manages to get from two widely different spectrums of world power — the US and China — or through the unfortunate sagas of the Fizas of this world.
Let’s take them on one by one. Pakistan being a rogue and untrustworthy nation full of brazen and baseless stances is well known to India. So, it’s so-called 26/11 probe could not have come up with any genuine answer to the rising terror wall falling on India rather regularly. But when it blamed Bangladesh for the deadly Mumbai attacks, even the most hardened critic was stunned into bemused silence.
One knew Pakistan would come up with an inexcusable excuse for Mumbai but its flight of imagination was obviously bigger than our’s. An avid drawing room chatterati laughingly suggested that we must heave a sigh of relief that the Pakistanis pointed at Bangladesh. The expected thing for them to do was to actually blame terror outfits in India, maybe even some Hindu organisation with Kasab actually being a Hindu extremist convert!
That much for laughs, but really the way Pakistan keeps getting off the hook for the outrages it so continually crafts and executes, puts India’s fightback power into the abysmal zone. Someone, somewhere needs to develop an Indian backbone to trounce Pakistan’s oft-implemented stunners.
The story of the week was, however, the Fiza-Chand row and the break-up of their heady two-month marriage. Much as the “other woman” is always to be berated as a home-wrecker, Fiza’s outpourings through the media and her fight for her lost cause were quite saddening.
To top it all, U-turn taker Chand suggested that somebody else used his cellphone to send those steamy and love-dripping sms’ to Fiza!
That Chand had the audacity to actually propel such a flimsy lie is a commentary on our social thinking. After all, man can do no harm and Chand is no exception. He has merely destroyed the life of a woman and walked out, rather causally to be with his “first love” and family which, incidentally, would give him all the power and money he wanted.
Thanks to the increasing shortness of public memory and electoral expediency of most political parties, Chand may well get back to the top echelons soon.
As for Fiza, who is desperate fighting to bring her tormentor to justice, should be seen as a valiant trooper rather than just a woman scorned. After all, by merely making a wrong choice, she has lost everything — her religion, her identity, her job, her dignity and her status on the social ladder. Chand Mohammed also apparently made a wrong choice. But he is safely home without much of the trauma that afflicts Fiza. If this was not so commonplace in what is blatantly known as a man’s world, it would have been downright criminal.
So, while Fiza may fight to the bitter end and still fade away into oblivion or may be even desperate death, Chand will live on with a silent first wife, a forgiving father and the power of a family that has enough up its sleeve to actually couch the wrong of its favourite son. So much so, that one would not be surprised that when all is calm and away from headlines, Chand may get back to Fiza secretly and offer her a brand new prospect of a secret relationship. And Fiza, who would by then be felled by desolation, may just accept and join the ranks of all those reconciled women who dot the global landscape for various reasons.
You see, travesties have their own way of re-appearing in different garbs, be it through the position of Pakistan and the support it still manages to get from two widely different spectrums of world power — the US and China — or through the unfortunate sagas of the Fizas of this world.
Published in Sunday Pioneer on February 8, 2009; http://www.dailypioneer.com/154957/Those-slaps-on-public-intelligence.html
Comments
Post a Comment