Life's a crazy mess!

An interesting conversation sparked up the other day while we were traveling to a site in Delhi. My manager and another of his colleagues were with me in a tiny cab which apparently had more accidents than engine parts. We were talking about some incidents that had occurred recently in the country and eventually ended up having a discussion on drugs.

It is known to most students in the country that drugs are very much in business and available cheap. Local panwallahs near colleges are often the easiest links to get 100gms of Weed for a amounts that can be considered pretty much like pocket change. And this is surprising?? Think again!!

We often hear from our conservative parents that such things are true only in places like "Bangalore", "Bombay" etc....me being from Kerala, they continue to vouch for the state and tell me that the state is a real nice place and doesn't have any influence of sorts. Reality, however, contradicts! It may be true that my college didn't have much of an influence to this and if it did, I was unaware of the same, but move out of the place and into most other cities and tourist hubs and you're bound to find a stoned foreigner or student walking around. The pretext of coming into the country for "religious" and "spiritual" peace is more or less a couple of words that just mean nothing if you were to look at it carefully. The reason why India is known to be mystical and magical is probably because half the tourists who come in here remain 'high' through their stay here and....well it's kinda obvious what happens then right?

So what exactly am I talking about here? An external link may help : High in the mountains...

Video Reports of the same : Video

A coincidence? Maybe not....with things happening around the country (and the world for that matter) it was bound to come out sooner or later. Kudos to the reported and CNN-IBN for covering such a controversial topic! And yep, the 3.9 million tourist inflow (as of 2005) may just surge higher after this report...

Last night I was unable to get a wink of sleep and spent 2 hours walking around my tiny room wondering what to do. Spent sometime online (yep nothing new) and then after a couple of blog reading and commenting I moved on to gaming and then a book and finally the newspaper. I've been keeping off the paper in Delhi lately since it's the Indian Express and the paper hasn't really caught my attention much owing to it's very brief content.....until last night ie.

The Front Page of Saturday's Newspaper had a disturbing tale to tell us and it shocked me.

Children all over the country seem to be going missing and not many seem to care, or atleast don't seem to notice. We often find kids walking around the roads and traffic signals begging for alms, we given them a cold shoulder and just walk by. How often do we stop to think twice or maybe ask them where they're from? I'm sure we being Indians love to know what's happening in our neighbour's house or maybe Amitabh Bachan's family but little do we care about the children walking around on the streets with tattered clothes abused psychologically, physically and often sexually. And where do they come from? Probably homes like ours or maybe our neighbours' (where we so often poke our noses into).

The recent Nithari case was a wake up call. And yet we fail to understand that this is just one of a million other similar occurrences around the country. A whopping 1,047 children go missing in Kerala alone, as per the article. This from a state that boasts to have one of the best Police forces in the country. I shudder to think what the numbers are in other states or of the many that go unreported! A child going out for a haircut, another to play cricket or another out to meet a friend....all missing, and we aren't just talking of young children but some as old as 16yrs.

Fear sets in one's mind just picturing this and I wonder...."How safe are our kids??"

Gurugiri v/s Gandhigiri