I had just been reading the morning papers about Malegaon and the bombings of the mosque. It was such a blatant and stupid act of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. It was certainly not in line with Gandhiji and non-violence!

Later in the morning, I was walking into the Lodi gardens when I saw a small board that I read “No plastic bombs”. For a moment I was startled and thought to myself “how naive to put up something like this! If the terrorist was amenable to such simple civil requests, there would be no “war of the civilizations” and no “war on terror”. After this split second I read the board fully “No plastic bags”!! They too are time bombs with respect to our ecology but at a very different time scale and consciousness.

As I continued on my walk my mind wandered to the incident in London soon after the serial bomb blasts there. A policeman had shot and killed a South American lad as he was entering a sub way. It later came out that in South American one is trained to quickly get away if policeman looks at you suspiciously. In London policeman are trained to react if a suspect does not immediately freeze on command. Both read “plastic bags” as “plastic bombs” for a split second, a split second with terrible consequences.

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