Complacency Won't Work...

This post is actually in continuation with my previous post, which was on the New World Order. Both these posts have been sparked off by the latest terror-strike that took place in Pakistan – where some gunmen opened fire at the Sri Lankan cricket team. I, like almost all others, can only be thankful to God that no serious harm happened to the Sri Lankan team.

This incident has not just ignited another round of abusing and finger-pointing towards Pakistan and failure of the state in preventing such an act on their soil, but also managed to actually send across a message that this can happen. Well, it happened in India on 26/11 – less than three months ago…didn’t it?

Last night, I was channel surfing – shuffling between various news channels and there was a lot of buzz about how wrong such an act is…so on and so forth. There were some statements being issued by Indian ministers that “cricket is safe in India”. Amongst all this, on one of the channels, I came across an interesting discussion taking place. I wouldn’t take any names – but the fact is there was one gentleman who said something very different, which was the most interesting at the same time. He was asked, “…as an international sports person and a public figure, do you think Pakistan should be excluded / boycotted from the international sports arena?” To this, the gentleman replied thoughtfully…started by saying “Look, I understand what happened is wrong in every sense; but I still think that we should not exclude the country basis this incident. I know that I am in minority to think so...but I still feel that cricket or any other sport should continue. What we need to do is to understand and accept the changing scenario of world or terror…”

I think the last statement was the most interesting bit for me. It actually made me realise, for the first time, that today we are probably dealing with the most organized form of terrorism that our society / civilization has ever seen. If this is not understood as this, then we run the risk of underestimating its power and thus run a bigger risk of becoming complacent.

Let’s actually look at India for instance, after the parliament attack in Dec 2001 – did we not feel that this should never ever happen again? Well – true to the word, since then there have been no attacks on the parliament; just that terrorists made a mockery of our security on 26/11, which was bigger than the attack on our parliament.

The point here is – today’s world has terrorism as a part of it and there is just no point in acting ignorant to this fact. We have to find better ways to protect ourselves and even better ways to fight terror. One can no longer say – “Ignorance is Bliss”!!!