Good riddance LTTE!

Velupillai Prabhakaran is supposedly dead - according to the Sri Lankan government. There is a website being maintained in faraway Europe that claims he is alive and well and indeed in good health. In any case, he is no longer the LTTE supremo, because there is no longer an LTTE.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. The LTTE was never put together to achieve an ultimately noble goal. It was fostered to build a dictatorship and there would be only one dictator. Organizations like the TULF and the TELO, which all had the claim of fighting for a separate Tamil Eelam were crushed by Prabhakaran's power, their leaders killed and their infrastructure eliminated.

That is how power hungry zealots operate. That is how the Hitlers and the Stalins of the world operate. For a country like India, being Sri Lanka's neighbour, it would seem strange, but that is not how the LTTE has been projected, especially to the people of Tamilnadu, many of who feel a pang of sadness for Prabhakaran being eliminated.

It really wasn't our business as Indians, but we did send in a peacekeeping force, to help out the Sri Lankan Army against the LTTE. We also, as Indian Tamils, offered support to the LTTE, and it is no secret that ex-Indian army personnel helped train some cadre of the LTTE. The Tamil cause has been around for a while, and with all its noble intentions of maintaining a Tamil brotherhood around the world, ended up helping the LTTE.

To repay that gratitude, Prabhakaran decided to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. Big mistake. Successful operation, but that one single act of terrorism on Indian soil completely eroded the sympathy the organization had amongst many Indians, and made it very easy for India to toe the EU, UN, and US line in branding the LTTE a "terrorist" organization.

To my mind, there were never any doubts that the LTTE was a terrorist organization. A fine fighting force, they perhaps were, but at the end of the day, they were a terrorist outfit. If I have a political grouse against the way the Indian government is treating me, I am hardly the person to accept a bunch of gun toting idiots as heroes if they had the same grouse. Go militant, and you're already accepting you don't know how to win an argument through peaceful means.

Besides, if Sri Lanka was treating ethnic Tamil people differently from the rest of their countrymen, that was something internal in Sri Lanka's affairs. So, why would we as Indians have any viewpoint that even remotely supports the LTTE?

Expressing solidarity with Sri Lankan Tamils is hardly reason to consider the Sri Lankan government an enemy of sorts. Today, in Tamilnadu, a lot of people harbour ill feelings about the current Sri Lankan administration, based purely on heresay that Tamils are being treated badly in that country. If the LTTE had been treating Tamils very well, there is no evidence of any of that. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence of Tamils being dictated to, forced into combat situations, and accept the hegemony of the LTTE and its supremo.

The question Tamil people in India need to ask themselves is - Am I an Indian or a Tamil first and foremost? The choices are simple if we are Indian first. The LTTE is a terrorist organization that did something on our soil we cannot forgive them for, and are automatically our enemy. So, the Sri Lankan government did something very right. If we are Tamil first, then if we are also sympathizers of the LTTE, we have a problem.

Of course it is ridiculous that the government of Tamilnadu is keeping a strict vigil on Tamil emotions that may erupt out of sympathy for the LTTE, and a resentment of their military capability being decimated. Nobody in Tamilnadu cares enough about Sri Lankan Tamils that much that we are about to let our normal lives be disrupted by our outpouring of support for people that are part of a humanitarian tragedy right now, one that is well beyond our sight, and well beyond our immediate concern.

What the Rajapaksa government has achieved is clarity. Every other government before his did not tackle the problem with the single minded devotion that his collective has been able to put together. Here is a lesson for India. Going after terrorists is a military objective first and foremost. You cannot negotiate with terrorists. If you know where they are, go after them. Forget about everything else. I hope this example is followed in Kashmir, and I hope the US does this to the Taliban and the Al Qaeda and all the other idiots around the world.

At the end of the day, the LTTE is no longer in existence. They had a bloody long run, and a few of their remnants from around the world will plan some crazy attacks. No doubt about that. The Tamils and their militant ideologies are not to be underestimated. But the LTTE is no longer there to accept and nurture their militant sympathies.

I don't care how much they cared for a Tamil Eelam. Their methods were off kelter by a large margin and if they thought they could kill for their reasons, they should be ready to die for them. Good riddance, fools.

The fate of being Indian.

I just returned from a death ceremony. A senior cousin of mine died
this morning. Five people involved in a head-on collision with a bus.
All dead. None of them had a chance.

It was sad seeing the community having to come together to support the
family after the loss. A father had lost one of his two sons, a son
had lost his father, and a village had lost one of its political
voices, apart from a community of chartered accountants having lost
one of their own. This is all just my cousin, mind you, and I can
only imagine what the loss of the other four lives could add up to. I
just don't know the others well enough at this point, apart from that
they were all precious in some way or the other.

It is consistently the same feeling - life is precious. Only on the
rarest occasions have I heard people actually celebrating the fact
that someone could pass on without suffering, and after having lived a
great, full, fun life. Blessed are those who get to do that, and
blessed are the ones who come to enjoy their company.

The majority of us live with health risks, physical danger, terrible
lifestyles not withstanding. These are just facts of life, and we
just don't need to add to the list. Terrible drivers are a fact of
life too. And they stand a very good chance of getting us killed.

I found a few conversations discussing fate, the inevitability of
death, and the philosophical perspectives were all well worn ones.
What frustrated me was that there were no rational conversations about
how the accident could have been avoided, so I had to investigate. I
asked the question straight - what exactly happened?

As it turns out, the Scorpio was driven by a 19 year old with a
reputation for rash driving. He tried to overtake a bus at speed,
thought he could muscle his way before the bus from the opposite
direction could come through, and all five on board paid the ultimate
price. It also turns out the 19 year old did not have a driver's
licence.

There you go, I pointed out - no fate, no inevitability of death, and
no God's wish. Just plain stupidity, bad driving, bad judgment, plain
old Indian incompetence. I wonder why people have to be so
incompetent even while having an argument, so much so that they cannot
differentiate between someone trying to get a point across, and
someone showing disrespect. It just doesn't matter, they said, it was
fate that made them let the kid drive!

It is interesting that everyone in the Scorpio had gone to send off a
political figure and were all active members of the AIADMK. To me, it
doesn't matter what party, but I could not help but think our
politicians are not even capable of being responsible about their own
safety and behaviour, so what the heck are they going to do about the
nation.

People, it is time to move away from dogma. It is time to rudely
shake people out of their stupor, for the time is gone when other
people's stupidity affects only them. It affects us all. It is fate,
I am willing to concede, that we are Indian. It is impossible to
choose where we are born. That is simply not in our control, so it
just could be fate.

What we do have control over is the Indian trait of blaming fate for
all our follies and failures. It wasn't fate that hundreds of people
lost their lives in Mumbai on the 26th of November last year. It
isn't fate that thousands of us die in road accidents every year. By
no means is it fate that our children are malnourished, badly
educated, and many of us are living below the poverty line. We need
to get this act of being Indian together, before we lose all semblance
of a rational existence. At the very least, those of us who are
rational deserve our chances of surviving against this dogmatic
incompetence that is uniquely Indian.