Ambar wrote:
Walk around Javeri bazaar, dalaal street or any other crowded,conspicuous,previously targeted places in Mumbai, and you'll notice despite attack over attack there are hardly any cameras. And it is not just cameras in public areas, even shops don't bother installing cameras outside their businesses .
Cameras?
Ambar ji, think about it. What if you were a sadhaaran cop who collects a handsome supplemental income by shaking down small business owners, motorists, and aam-janata for "hafta"?
Would you ever want a camera around anywhere, to (by chance) record you doing that?
And what about all the people who pay you hafta for being allowed to continue their various semi-legal and illegal transactions? How would it look, if cameras recorded them going about all those activities which you, as an officer of the law, are supposed to stop them from doing?
Going many steps up, what if you were a top cop, or an MLA or MP, whose entire career is financed by the handing-up of hafta from many levels of bribe-takers down below? What is your interest in changing the system? I mean, cameras may catch potential terrorists in time to stop them, but terrorist attacks take place maybe 1 day a year, in 1 city a year if that. What about the other 364 days, when thousands of things that should not be recorded on camera keep all this lucrative financial machinery contributing generously to your wealth and status?
Of course the rot goes all the way to the very top, to Sonia Maino, P. Chidambaram and all the others who clear 1.77 lakh crores per scam. Many Indians are painfully aware of this. But who recognizes the glaring fact that this vast black section of our economy has such a huge and direct impact on our internal security, on the lives and property of India's ordinary citizens? Even if they recognize it, do they care?
In another couple of weeks, BRF will see another "Happy Independence Day" thread. It will be bad form for me to ask the following question on that thread... so I will ask it now instead. What's "happy" about it? What's "independent" about us? We're still a colony. We are still ruled by mercantile classes, the very same classes who once sold us out to the Mughals and the British, and who don't give a rat's backside about their fellow citizens losing life and limb to terrorist attacks, industrial accidents, infrastructure-related disasters, train crashes, famines, shortages, floods, or anything else. We are expendable. The black economy, however, must be nurtured at all costs.
Only we on BRF come up will come up with suggestions like security cameras in public places. Only we on BRF, imagine (hilariously) that India might one day mount an Abbotabad-style raid to take out Dawood Ibrahim!
We aren't nationalists, we aren't ahead of the curve, we are just unspeakably naive and (I fear) increasingly out of touch with reality.
