I don’t live in Maharashtra either and respect the Maharashtrians’ experience of collective trauma. Equally, I respect their individual decisions as based in a very subjective sense of how to absorb and respond to such an event. I have recently moved back to India (though I am writing this from elsewhere) and voted in my first local election; decisions to vote are made on remarkably complex bases here, unlike in Western democracies with a limited number of viable parties, issues and players. I no longer fulminate about their choices, seemingly rational or otherwise (to me). I am not for a minute saying that you are a ‘fulminator’ (far from it) but there are some professional fulminators in the Indian blogosphere who seem as disconnected from the reality of the women I work with in rural AP as anyone can ever be. Getting angry is all fine, but then the educated middle-class needs to support initiatives like Loksatta and other such emerging alternatives.

I am not making any excuses for the incompetence of the Maharashtra government, merely interested in the implication that the alternative would have magically led to less violence being wrought upon a hapless population.

Looking forward to a response.

I am only half kidding. What terrorism hates is normalcy. There is a fine line of distinction between normalcy and indifference. We haven’t crossed that line; that is the reason to celebrate.