Terror's Tentacles

So since the 7/11 bomb scares in Bombay, Israel and Lebanon in mid-July, and now, most recently, the bomb scares in Heathrow, security has been tightening to an almost more paranoid extent WORLDWIDE than it was post 9/11 in the US alone. This Sepia Mutiny post highlights some of the latest dont's and our resulting sad predicament.

So I'm going to go to New York in September to see my fiance. Among the little annoyances this will entail: My paranoid overly punctual father will demand that I reach the airport even earlier than we normally do, that I will have to move my toilet kit containing my lens solution into my suitcase and risk my clothes getting soaked and sticky because for some reason my solution ALWAAYS leaks, as does my face lotion, I wont be able to wear lenses and look pretty as soon as I land without considerable trouble and bag-opneing etc. I wont be able to listen to my own music on the flight (not that I really do, but suppose if?), and may not be able to take my cellphone with me *GASP* *WHAT??* I seriously dont think I van survive without it. what am i supposed to do, check it in my suitcase? Then how will I talk to my fiance till the airhostess yells at me? Till the time we take off so he knows what time we left and if its delayed. Dude!!!!!

In the last week of June, before he flew out, I had spent a wonderful half houe canoodling with him in the visitor's area in Mumbai airport. When I was in Delhi for a day, he watchmen had let us out to drink tea with my in-laws who weren't flying back with us. When I flew out in the first week of July, I left eh airport after checking hin and hung out with him for over an hour at a nearby hotel. At the end of July however, when I went to pick my fiance up, I suddenly found that visitor's entrance inside the arrivals hall had been banned. Later, I found out when I went to drop him back that after check-in they wouldnt let him go out to spend time with him till he had to go through security. And then he said something that rings so true in our times "This is how they win". Indeed.

By eradicating every opportunity to deeply feel love and loss, by diminishing the trust human beings need to have in order to survive, by reducing quality time in relationships through the enforcement of a certain type of conduct or dress or interaction in public, through the forced imposiion of foreign values that almost hypnotically and magically erase our memories of the BEFORE, except in the time of meaningless nostalgia, that heighten our sympathetic nervous system and cause us to regard every swift move or unpredictability in any individual with suspicion, THIS is how they win.

I hate these few assholes who have made life so qualitatively worse for the rest of us. I hate these people who dont allow me to believe that we are all equal and that all religions are different paths to the same object. I hate these people who have the nerve to impose their beliefs and fears and insecurities upon us, those who dont believe in moderation and true communalism and "Ekantvad ma Samvad" each to his own. I hate those assholes who let these assholes get to them and make life difficult for individuals purely on the basis of colour or a mere physical attribute.

I despair of the world my children will grow up in. I despair that they may not be as lucky in terms of skin tone as their parents have, that they will have to suffer what we have escaped so far. That they will be under constant scrutiny by people less educated, les broadminded, less worthy. People who will kill the faith in humanity that we will try so hard to put in them.

Here's nowhere to escape to now. The fear, in the form of noxious gases, pervade even nature on desert islands.