Courtesy Ameel, I have some great news for all my readers. Melbourne Business School (MBS) has been ranked the number one full-time MBA program in Australia and 26th world-wide in the Economist Intelligence Unit 2008 MBA rankings, released in September 2008. That's the highest world ranking ever for any Australian school. Ain't this SOME news !!!
Anyways, here's the full story :- http://www.mbs.edu/go/news/mbs-ranking-highest-ever-for-an-australian-business-school
The shocking, unfortunate and moving events of the last week have brought back into public focus, the total, or in some cases partial, failure of the various national security setup including the Police, the Intelligence and the polity. Like all other fellow human beings (I refrained from saying 'Indians' because this act would, for obvious reasons appear equally dastardly for all 'humans' regardless of their race, religion, cast or nationality), I am appalled at the amount of destruction. This in a country which is amongst the elite group of 20 nations economically, demographically and militarily. What a shame!
Having said that, everyone (more so, every Indian) is seething with rage and wants answers from the government, action from Pakistan and moral support from the International community to pursue and punish the perpetrators of this act. Every self-respecting Indian wants vengeance. I endorse this view completely. There are endless debates on Indian TV on who's responsible and how we can fight the terrorists better. However, the one point everyone seems to have missed completely, is 'prevention' or 'Root Cause Analysis'. Without doubt, we must answer an act of war such as this, with determination and sincerity; but not only in fighting the terrorists but also battling terrorism. What I am trying to bring to public attention is nothing new. It’s pretty much an undisputed and accepted ideology that effective and long lasting peace can be brought about not by simply addressing the symptoms of terrorism but also by simultaneously investigating and then assuaging the terrorist mentality – the hatred within. Let me reiterate, no efforts must be spared to punish or eliminate those who’ve done and/or planned such activities – I am an advocate of Capital Punishment and I also support the so called un-civilized punishment methodology of the Arabs, Taliban etc. A punishment is no good if it doesn’t evoke the ‘fear of god’ in the most hardened criminals (leave alone you and me); it’s objective is to deter further crimes and therefore I do endorse a measure of barbarism as far as that goes. Once we’re done punishing those responsible though, we need an equal amount of dedication and commitment to find out what’s causing all this hatred.
I am sure the reader realizes that to do what an Asad Kasav did or what other ‘Fidayeen’ do, takes an infinite amount of hatred. We need to sit down, do some retrospection and introspection to find out what must have caused some people to hate us so much that they’re willing to sacrifice their future, their career, their ‘just-about-everything’ so they can go around killing innocent men, women and children in the name of ‘Jihad’. And we need to address it if we want lasting peace and brotherhood. Think about it, you and me are seething with anger over the incidents of the last few decades, but are we willing to do what the Fidayeen do? No, because we’re not angry enough or rather our hatred hasn’t reached a stage where we’d be willing to give up everything and get on the path of guilt, destruction and misery. Of course, some ‘experts’ might argue that the terror factories do what they do to not out of hatred alone but out of a sick addiction to the feeling of power. And they’ll say there are no issues to resolve – the terror masterminds just want to kill people for the heck of it and no amount of peace-building measures would motivate them to give up arms. And these ‘experts’ may be right – albeit in some cases, not all. I believe we can establish trust, love and brotherhood in most cases. Let’s take an example, that of the Kashmir issue. This issue highlights both points of view very well. On the one hand, one might say that the militancy in Kashmir is nothing but an imported problem. It’s been proven more often than not, that the battle of the Kashmiris is being fought by the people outside it. So no amount of peace-process in the valley will bring the elusive peace as long as Pakistan’s involvement is not out of the equation. On the other hand however, have we, in the last 60 years of India’s Independence, been able to being about growth and prosperity in Kashmir the way we have in say Maharashtra or Punjab ? The answer is a firm ‘No’. Through our shameless governance that stinks of inefficiency and ‘kut-niti’ in place of ‘raj-niti’, we’ve created enough reasons for the peace loving Kashmiri to get totally disgruntled. Pakistan has simply exploited this opportunity to hit us, and hit us hard. Not once but on several occasions. I say let’s set-up a hundred schools, a hundred hospitals, a few industries; let’s just really spend (not on-the-paper spending) on Kashmir even half of it’s allocated yearly budget. I find it hard to believe there still will be disgruntlement and hatred. Once that happens, peace will very much be on it’s merry way. I might be totally wrong, but there is certainly no other option left to try.
To conclude, I will repeat what’s usually said – Prevention is better than cure. While it is critically important at this juncture to provide symptomatic relief to this nemesis of mankind, it’s also necessary to remember (after all the trials and punishments and improvements in the terror-fighting mechanism) to look for a way to stop people from hating us so much. It’s not really that hard to spread the language of love, it takes an effort and it needs a first-step.
