Since the bomb blasts, I have been reading lot of posts on news sites and blogs about mumbai and mumbaikar spirit. What strikes me most is the way things are being portrayed. Most of the media and blogs are lauding the city and its people for coming back to normalcy in a day. Its the 'never-say-die' attitude of mumbaikar!!!Helloo..Arent we forgetting something here? Shouldn't the city stop to mourn the dead? Shouldn't there be some action about such a horrible thing?

I know, there have been lot of incidences of people helping total strangers in whatever way they can . Slum dwellers, bystanders, taxiwallahas, people in cars and just about everybody has rose to the occasion. There are soo many incidences that make me feel proud, happy, sad, helpless, revengeful, all at the same time. No words of appreciation can do justice to such selfless acts.

But is that all? It was an emergency and the situation called for such acts. Once the hour of emergency is over, people are back to their routine. There are 'specials' in rediff, ibnlive and ndtv about mumbai 'moving on'. Only, ndtv has reported things in a 'matter-of-fact' tone. Others are bragging about this and labeling this as the 'spirit of mumbai'...come on..this is not something to be proud of..instead, you must feel bad and ashamed that people are soooo forgetful(forgiving??) and may be even meek in accepting things so easily and 'moving on'.

I may sound harsh. May be my anger is directed in the wrong direction. I dont know. I am just feeling bad at the way things are turning out. In a day, mumbai is back to normal. Soon, everyone will forget the horrible tuesday. Soon it will no longer be a news. Media will find some other sensational news(may be a celeb pair splitting up? or some not-so-celeb-as-yet smooching some other not-so-celeb-as-yet to celebhood? whatever). And soon this will be a news from someother age, archivied. At this rate of 'moving on', no measure can/will be taken to ensure that such things dont repeat, and ofcourse they repeat. I am sorry.

Last tuesday(july 4th) was the big day when we were supposed to present our POS tagger and chunker in national workshop on AI and come home richer by 4k. We had put in 2-3 days on the presentation and demo. All we had to do was just go there, blabber something, demo the system, collect the prize money,certificates and come back home. Simple.

Now, how can I get soo (un)lucky and have such an unadventurous day? last tuesday happened to be the 4th day of 5 day rainfall that mumbai experienced last week..man, did we have an adventurous day or what? Aniket has a well written account of the whole day on his blog.

That was written as a post on cse.mtech1 newsgroup, so iitb specific lingo may creep in here and there, just skip them.