Let's be hungry and smart

The story of Additional Commissioner Sonawane being burnt to death by the kerosene mafia he caught red handed, cut through our dull cynicism, leaving us horrified and angry. Venality has long ceased to matteru00a0-- it took casual brutality to make us notice.

Or unflappably corrupt governments did not respond with their default smarmy BS. Apparently, say the papers, they are rattled. Not by the brutality, which is, after all a routine thing in our so-called free country, where the burning of a man and his children in a car does not count as a rarest of rare cases of violence, and a court can call the Staines murder a crime of passion.


Illustration/Jishu Dev Malakar

I suppose hatred is passionate. And the need to protect your turf if you are the kerosene mafia is also passion. Whatever.

But the government is rattled because 24 lakh state employees went on strike and protested on the streets against Mr. Sonawane's murder. In response to this, the government was knowledgeable and efficient enough to arrest 164 adulterers in just one dayu00a0-- along with setting up enquiries and the usual whatnot.

The widowed Mrs. Sonawane responded by saying she has no faith in the government, and of course, she's right. None of us have faith in anything. But not having faith is easy. Having faith means we have to accept some political responsibilities. And without some political action by citizens, change is hard.

The news from North Africa these past weeks has proven it. In Tunisia, protests started in December, when a man immolated himself because the police confiscated his produce cart. A series of street protests and demonstrations have since ousted President Ben Ali who ruled Tunisia since 1987, staunchly supported by the US and France for his zeal in persecuting Islamists.

Subsequently in Egypt, thousands of people converged at Tahrir square near the parliament to protest against the corruption and repression by the government of Hosni Mubarak, which has ruled since 1981. This is a country where public demonstrations are banned.

Students, workers and opposition activists in Yemen have followed with protests against poverty and unemployment. While these protests caught governments off guard, the clamp down has come of courseu00a0-- both through police retaliation and the blocking of sites like Facebook and Twitter which have aided the proliferation of protests. Despite it all, people are persisting.

It's a long since we have seen street demonstrations in our citiesu00a0-- a common sight till the mid-90s. This is hardly because we are now a prosperous and just society. But we seem to have just enough freedom and mobility to keep us in check.
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Just enough so we can afford to not have faith. We can do our fashionable little online protests and indulge in little creative, candle-lit flourishes of dissent resulting in the odd action from the system, and so convince ourselves that we are all playing democracy-democracy.

Just as long as we don't threaten some corporate agendas and serious structural corruption, it's all okay ufffd you let the government and all be, and they let you and all be. Those who want political cred animatedly discuss social networking as the new revolution.

Well, maybe Facebook and Twitter will create a revolutionu00a0-- because they are our latest disguise for the political inertia in which we forget to guard our freedoms, creating exactly the oppressive conditions that leave us with no option but to protest on the street.

There seems to be no escaping the fact that we have to be well fed and stupid, before we get hungry and smart.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com. The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.