This evening there was a bomb blast at a bakery in Koregaon Park in Pune. A few dozen killed. Not a big deal. Indians don’t mind such minor inconveniences. Indians take mass-scale murders in their stride and don’t blink. We will read in the newspapers about the resilience of the population tomorrow, especially in The Times of India.

We will read how Mr Blue Turban has responded with very strong words condemning the terrorism. Nothing to get excited about. It happens. Indians are resilient. They are more interested in movies — “My Name is Khan” is playing and the movie halls are full. They are Indians who watch Mr Khan prance about. The audience is not comprised of Martians, not even people much beloved of Mr Khan, the Pakistanis. Mr Khan cannot be blamed, though. It is a free country and Indians choose to make a hero of a person who should more accurately be understood to be a traitor.

It appears that Indians have a hard time distinguishing between heroes, tyrants and traitors. A major thoroughfare in the capital of India is named after Aurangzeb, a tyrant who committed wholesale murder. No one really seems to mind. I would not be the least surprised if in time to come, streets are named after Bhutto and Musharraf in India.

As India is a universal adult franchise democracy, the people choose the leaders and if the leadership is wanting, the buck has to stop at the people. Some people blame the media. But the media strictly reflects the sentiments of the people. The Times of India is exhibit #1. That paper’s schemes are basically anti-India to the core. Yet its circulation is in the tens of millions. The Indian public buys that paper. That newspaper may be publishing unadulterated crap. But the reason it supplies crap is that the Indian public demands crap. That’s the law — demand creates its own supply. In any self-respecting population, these sort of newspapers and TV channels would go out of business yesterday. In India, they do a roaring business.

Indians are alright with a few hundred Indian citizens dying every now and then through terrorism. Nov 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai did not faze them. They voted the Congress into power — the same party that pretty much set up the conditions for the terrorism.

The unfortunate fact is that even if a 100 million Indians were killed by terrorism — and that is not likely to happen — but even if 100 million were killed, it would not make all that much of a difference to Indians. There will still be over a billion Indians left. An entire state got ethnically cleansed and all the Hindu Kashmiris were made homeless. Indians don’t mind that. The continue to vote for the Congress party. A few thousands here and there dead don’t matter all that much. Let’s put those numbers in perspective. A few thousand children die EVERY DAY from preventable causes. Does not bother Indians, does it? The Congress party engineers the poverty that kills by the hundreds of thousands every year. Indians find that totally acceptable.

Indians love cricket and Bollywood. The newspapers and TV channels understand that and they do what they have to do. If the media is a prostitute, the leaders of the nation are pimps who are duly elected by democratic processes which include all sorts of fair elections. Prostitutes and pimps would not be in business without the johns. The johns are the most essential factor for the flourishing business of pimps and prostitutes.

It’s all karma, neh?