17 July,2011 08:23 AM IST | | Paromita Vohra
It was a marvellous thing that one man put up a Google spreadsheet with four names of those offering help to people affected in the July 13 bomb blasts, before leaving office and reached home to find the list had swelled to over 200 offering uncommon blood types, cars, a place to stay a helping hand. It was being widely circulated online.
Illustration/ Jishu Dev Malakar
One of the remarkable things about Mumbaikars (no, not their indomitability) is their ability to jump in to get things done -- like those folk who manifest from nowhere to unravel suburban traffic snarls with confident hand waving. Similarly, people jumped in to help victims of Wednesday's explosions.
And many didn't. Maybe they were fleeing from fear, or unwilling to get into some police jhanjhat but either way, they still took a moment to take photographs or videos of the carnage on their cell phones. As if, if there's a picture of it, we no longer need to feel or really think about something too much. The picture allows us to disengage from what we are seeing and take our automatic positions of writing glibly hateful status updates, say we are 'napunsak' if we don't attack Pakistan or kill Kasab, demand that there be more CCTV cameras. Will any of these measures end the violence?
A couple of days before the blasts, here's something the CCTVs recorded. A busy traffic signal in Coimbatore. Two-wheel and four-wheel drivers waiting for the red light to turn green, seemed to be idly watching some activity to their left. It was four, reportedly drunk men bludgeoning a 29 year-old man to death with a big stone. No one expressed shocked, or appeared even to look around to see another's reaction, or try and rouse some support. They just killed time watching a man being killed as they waited for the light to change colour. When it did, the traffic moved forward with that easy, sliding grace that looks so good in silent long shots, leaving only the camera to look at the dead man.
So yes, we will put up more CCTV cameras, we will have more news channels, more cell phone camera-wielding citizen reporters, so many eyes in the sky to whom we will give the responsibility of showing so that we don't have to take responsibility for what we see with our own eyes.
How else can we watch well heeled folk in Ahmedabad loot TV sets from gutted Muslim owned shops in the 2002 riots or mourning women beat their chests while funeral processions of young Kashmiri men are carried through the streets, naked mothers protesting against army rapes and murders in Manipur, the Gujarat government 'losing' all the papers related to the 2002 riots and not feel horror, compassion or move towards reflection, questioning, self-questioning? And with this curiously unseeing gaze we demand an eye for an eye. We get it too sometimes, just as do the terrorists.
Because how else can we see and remember the bomb blasts of 1993 and the justice pending in that regard but not the communal riots of 1993 and the injustice unaddressed there? Or demand to know what the administration is doing about the explosions of 2003 and not demand accountability for the state abetted genocide of 2002? Maybe because an eye for an eye leaves you with only half your vision, so you can see only one side, be condemned to play automatic parts in a cycle of violence, while the eyes in the sky watch.
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.
