Showing posts with label Pakistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pakistan. Show all posts

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Osama, Obama and Why a Terrorist?


Last week while going through my timeline on twitter, my brain crashed, went abruptly into a reboot and booting was only possible in safe mode. That meant going offline, disconnecting myself from all sources of media. But was that possible, yeah you all predicted right, it wasn’t. I was soon back online. Going through my timeline, flickering through web pages, looking at some, where it said Obama killed Osama and sometimes in pursuit of being fast, the other way around.

But it was a treat for the media and the twitter world. Both sections went abuzz. For media it was something they dream every day, a spectacle to be given proper coverage. So totally senseless articles such as TOI’s fictitious description of the Navy SEAL also made their way in, once again displaying new lows our Journalism has achieved. But apart from these a bigger question loomed.

I have always been confused, thinking about why people choose the path of becoming a terrorist. Everywhere one sees, it is said that a terrorist has no religion one country etc. But although the former one is very controversial, the latter one seems to have been found. Of late Pakistan has been seen as a country which not only shelters terrorism, but also is now the hub.

But all these things aside, again the same question rises how one can take the dramatic step, how can one be so brutal. Have we ever thought who is a terrorist and who is not or we choose what our media tells us to? I decided to take some help from a professor of ours. Professor Google. As I expected there is no internationally agreed definition. We all think a guy who spread terror is a Terrorist. Well if that is the case I have faced a lot of terrorists in my time at school and college. So as it is goes, it is up to a nation’s discretion or the big daddy controlled UN’s.

They say everyone part of the Al-Qaeda pledged allegiance to Osama himself. A guy who they thought lived in caves, away from the riches that he would have inherited. A guy who was a veteran of a war that saw the Soviets bite the dust. A guy who people thought has only one mission, to see the west go down. But was it that people chose to be a terrorist just because of that one guy. If it was so, then I guess we’ll soon witness the end of Al-Qaeda at least.

I decided to go some years back, some 30 years, when Punjab was under militancy. Another person having credentials of the same magnitude emerged there also. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was seen as a charismatic man, a man who revived a movement of extremism in Punjab. Whose only motive in the later part of his life was to have a separate Sikh state known as Khalistan, exactly on the lines of our beloved neighbour Pakistan. But then many horrifying incidents happened including Operation Blue Star, fake encounters killing many innocents and finally normalcy returned. Punjab was peaceful, En route to being prosperous again. What happened later, the politics is a different story although.

So I decided to do some thinking and came up with an answer. The reason a person chooses to be a Terrorist is the same why a person chooses to be a Cricketer or an Actor. They all get influenced by someone in that field. But then as I have a habit of contradicting myself, I couldn’t refrain from saying isn’t it those role models come after one has picked up a trade or is it really the other way around? Well this has one again left me scratching my head. If anyone of you readers have some theory please feel free to comment. For the moment let me scratch my head a bit more, I think I have some itching problem #$@)*%