These are the days

These are the days when we fight wars to end violence. Sit back and watch murder, live, coming to your homes. All for the greater good. And later it is so easy to point at The Boss, The Media, The System as the root of all those problems no one is willing to define. As easy as drawing a pair of horns over a picture of the Headmaster, a couple of hasty giggles, then the board is wiped clean. And you know that you have been clever indeed.

Not many people saw him fall, and those that did pretended they hadn't. He didn't look disfigured at all when I last saw him, sleeping there on the cold pavement. His arm was bent behind his back and his chin tilted up towards the broken window nine storeys above. There were yellow cordons and the jarring scream of sirens in the night. The body was carried away in the early hours of the morning. The police crew grumbled about the paperwork.

A three-inch report on page seven covered the robbery, squashed between the matrimonials and the civic letters. My neighbour used it to manure her begonias.

He worked for a small eatery part-time, delivering Chinese food to the IT sector. Used to ride that secondhand motorcycle down electric wire roads in the dead of night. Someone replaced him that evening. The last paycheck was labelled 'Return to Sender'. You see, he had become just another one of those persons who get snuffed out every other day, caught in the crossfire between behemoths like The Law and Crime and Politics, entities so much bigger than the individual and obviously much more important.

At least India's population is being kept in check, they said.