Nerve Endings Firing Away

Any email list that involves almost 400 people scattered around the world is bound to include an occasional crackpot; often to the amusement of others. To make it more interesting, if the email list comprises of opinionated bloggers then the exchange of thoughts can vary from downright reasonable to insanely crazy. The Collective Bloggers email list set up to counter the ban against Blogspot and Typepad in one such motley bunch and in the past week has hosted nearly 1500 email messages. The discussions have been largely civil and even insightful as people pooled their technological and legal know-how to counter a serious breach of civil liberties. Of course, once the blanket ban was lifted and the issue hovered around censorship of specific blogs, the collective opinion wavered a little. Once again, the difference of opinion remained civil.

Then out of the blue, came a crackpot Sunil Shibad who first attacked Neha for not having any locus standi on the blasts in Mumbai because she was in London. Apart from being an active ‘DesiPundit, Neha is known in the blogosphere widely for her activism and role in popularizing blogs. I dismissed it as yet another NRI-hater who was bitten by the green-eyed monster. Such people are often dismissive of individual choice or simply big-time hypocrites. Given an opportunity, they would leave the shores just as easily forgetting their earlier claims of ‘love for their motherland’. Otherwise they are simply unable to break away from the status quo and get temporary relief by berating those who have managed to avail of opportunities presented to them.

But this guy came back and hurled one insult after another indulging in ad hominem attacks after having no reasonable responses to the counter arguments offered by other bloggers. After a particularly scathing sarcastic response by Kiran, he latched on to that to garner sympathy. He proceeded to flood comment boxes everywhere by pasting Kiran’s statement out of context (Kiran’s response here) and calling upon people to defend their ‘city’. His argument — I live near Hinduja Hospital and having seen blast victims have a larger stake in Mumbai’s affairs than those who live abroad and merely coordinated the information dissemination post-blasts or post-cloudburst. He throws in the tag of being a Mumbaikar when clearly he doesn’t understand the spirit of the city, which we having lived away for a while now, haven’t yet forgotten. His arguments have gone from ridiculous to utterly loony after dragging in Capt. Kalia from the Kargil war to Siachen Glacier. If you have a good 30-40 minutes to spare, you should check out the entire thread here; there are couple of other threads where he has dropped his precious pearls of wisdom.

Now normally I would ignore such crackpots who have narrow view of the world around them. But something about this guy slurring the name of Mumbai by propagating lies just got me pissed (probably some good ol’ English beer might also be blamed). Now after having realized that simple logic and reason will not work with this dude, I am resorting to sarcasm which I am not sure he will understand. Other bloggers like Neha, Gaurav, and Dilip apart form Kiran of course have joined in blasting this guy. He has even played the ‘legal action’ card and invoked the Nazis.

Yup! Blog cat-fights can be such fun. And navel-gazing in the blogosphere is one of our favorite activities so please spare me the “I don’t think you should write on this” tripe. I am gonna enjoy this until I get bored. Join in if you want a little break.