Get over it !! How can I ?

To say Mumbai is back is like asking us to get over it. I cannot. Because those images that were beamed into my living room right through the siege in Mumbai are not from a film. It was all real. It was all life.

To say Mumbai is back is to try and sleep over it, which we had been doing all through the years that we have been affected with terrorism. And we could see the result. I am not ready to accept Mumbai is fully back on its heels. Nor am I willing to agree, as an Indian, that life goes like it did before 26/11. Because its not.

What I had witnessed, through the medium of television, was my own helplessness. A sense that has prevailed upon me, even as I was at a distant shore. It still does haunt me as I think about it. And not a day has passed without thinking about it. Nor do I see it happening in the near future.

And it does not help when I read reports like this. An organisation that makes thousands of crores of Rupees in profits every year (Its a money bearing tree, in the words of the Railway minister, to take a quote from one of his Lok Sabha speeches) deciding to spend a paltry Rs. 60 crore to modernise security systems on its premises. Is that all we are ready to spend to secure vital and high-density areas like railway stations. What are we learning from 26/11 ?

It makes me wonder what has happened to plans like this that date back to December, 2004. Has this proposal been implemented ? If not why ? If yes what was the feedback received from the officers on the ground level using them ? Was there a study ever conducted on the necessity of providing sophisticated weapons to officers guarding key installations like the CST and the like ?