The face of terror

Or does it have any? It was a Friday afternoon and I had come out lunch with my colleagues in East Bangalore (RMZ Infinity, Old Madras Road). It must have been around 1:45 PM when a colleague got a phone call from a relative asking if he was safe.

Safe he was, but the call brought anxiety to the table faster than anyone’s imagination. There was a bomb blast in South Bangalore! Even before we could rush to the closest TV screen, in retrospect, 9 bombs exploded in different parts of the city. Of course we didn’t know then - but we did fear that it can’t be an isolated bomb blast and that serial blasts are going to follow. No place was safe. My mother usually goes out in the afternoons for her ’satsanga’ sessions and the first thing I did was to call her and tell her not to step out of the house. My wife is luckily in Delhi, so thankfully the anxiety was half of what it could have been. Then I went to office, picked up my computer and directly drove home. Not sure if that was a good decision or bad (since hypothetically the office premises were safer than the roads).

Thankfully the bombs were low intensity and not much damage was done - of course two lives were lost and some people injured which IS huge damage. Enough to shake everyone a bit though, and as if that wasn’t enough what followed a day after was Ahemadabad - which was much gorier than Bangalore. Even hospitals were not spared with some explosions in front of the civic hospitals.

Who is India Mujahideen and does it have a face? Will we get to see that face? What is their motive? It’s not as if terrorism is something new to India but I hate it when people like you and me become so casual about it. We say that life must go on. We go out shopping the next day because we think the traffic will be less. How insensitive can we be!

We need to bring a stop to this. Why should innocent people lose their lives like this? Who is it helping and how?