What the Hell India: Bomb Blasts

Listening to: Shadow of the Day – Linkin Park

There was a bomb blast in Pune recently. For edjumacation purposes, Pune is here:

One of the most amazing things (and one of my personal favorite things) about India is that it is truly a country that absolutely oozes diversity. You can’t throw a stick around here twice without hitting 2 completely different people. The wonder of this, is that for concentration of people combined with all these differences, the amount of violence seen is relatively low. Unfortunately, it does happen.

So here’s the What the Hell for the day. Bomb Blasts.  The Pune bombs were designed to be a terrorist act that backfired and didn’t cause as much destruction as it was meant to, thank goodness. As with other attacks of this nature, they were designed to cause chaos and fear and had cause roots in both political and religious retribution.

India does have its fair share of terrorists, both domestic and imported. What is unique about the problems that India has of this type is that not all of the terrorism is related to religion, as we are used to thinking in the U.S. In India, politics often inspires this level of violence too. In fact, if you are interested, Raajneeti  is an absolutely excellent movie about Indian politics if you can find a copy with subtitles and are into foreign films.

There are always the wars that occur between criminal factions that occasionally catch an innocent bystander. As you can imagine, religion does play a part in some attacks. India is a secular country. The two main categories of religious believe in this country are Hindus and Muslims. I’m not including Buddhists because they tend to leave everyone else alone. For many reasons, there is much bad blood between the two groups and sentiments against the other group from fundamentalists from either group sometimes wander into the hatred and violence arena.

I get frustrated with action of this type. It tends to lead to bloody, unnecessary, drawn out retributions that are born out of hate for others and what they are/what they believe in.  The tragic thing about this problem is that it is probably impossible to get rid of. Biases get passed from one generation to the next. Backward thinking in people determined to stay that way is damn near impossible to change. With India being what it is, there will most likely always be points of friction when people of opposing views are pushed up against one another. What bothers me about the bomb aspect if this problem is that the perpetrators don’t care about casualties in their personal wars. India isn’t short on violence – but it can never hold its own with modern countries when blowing up different people seems like a reasonable retribution option.  There are plenty of other types of crazy here (postal system anyone?) that wouldn’t hurt India as much in its quest for modernity as bombings do. Indians, this destroys your credibility and makes the world want to lump you in with the scary fundamentalist countries - which really doesn’t do this amazing place justice.  Knock that shit off.

Becky