Incoherence.

There is a madwoman at the Park Circus crossing who goes up to cars and drools on the windowpanes. There is one on Park Street. The Baghajatin madwoman chucks plastic packets at passersby, and there was this madman on the bus I got onto yesterday who held up a small pink plastic comb to his ear, and spoke into it as if it were a cellphone till everyone on the for-males-only side crept away and off the bus.

Then, he looked at us women on the opposite side, and grinned, and said, Ki, Kemon dilam?

I cannot translate that.

Madness is a force so huge and so overwhelming in its magnitude that it's no wonder it invites instant fear. My mother is of the opinion that terrorists are mad. The news channels are of the opinion that they are inhuman. I don't know what to think, except that madness and inhumanity are not all that similar. Maybe they're just convinced? All mad people believe in something with an intensity bordering on the unnatural - that they are kings, that they are prophets, that they are animals, that they are pieces of furniture. So yes, conviction. But if the conviction is that of wrongdoing against one, and if you add a sense of injury to that, you get a cornered animal, is that right?

You're discounting self-pity. I've always hated that. Humanity works on the principle that there shall be wrongdoing, that there shall be carnage, that there shall always be something wrong somewhere, but to mope over the fact that you have been wronged while the world laughs is stupid. The world always laughs. And if you, in your wronged, self-pitying frame of mind are enveloped into a framework that instills some discipline in you and trains you to fight back, that is when things get dangerous. That is when you're in a state that is part cold-blooded sanity and part cold-blooded insanity.

It is so easy to feel wronged. I was at the Tull concert yesterday where there was a problem with seat allotment. The people who couldn't be seated in time for the show to begin were arguing with the ushers. Wronged, you say. We, seated, self-righteously aware of the fact that we were punctual, felt annoyed because we couldn't see or hear due to the altercation. Wronged again. I don't really know what I'm talking about, except that in the blueprint of the the larger plan of things, something is always wrong. We are all hovering over that line between sanity and insanity, and it is so easy, so easy to just step over the line. All it needs is some conviction. And these people seem to have it, they have this conviction that overrides our conviction to fight them, like an agenda that overthrows all the agendas we've classified as combat weapons.

Look at me trying to play psychologist. I'm sitting here with the television and the newspaper telling me things. The kettle is on in the kitchen and I have to keep my ears open for the whistle. I have to do so many things today, and I need to make a list, and I'm sitting here writing about something I have no right to sound preachy about. I have relatives in Mumbai, but they are all right, and no amount of imagining can bring home the what-ifs of the situation to me. I don't even know what my stance is because I don't understand. I don't understand how good and evil work. I don't understand how compassion and sympathy work because I cannot now remember a time when I didn't see headlines like these. In the midst of all the natural disasters and the accidental deaths and the shootings and the films being made on them, in the midst of announcements of foreign policy and celebrations of winter weddings, I have only realised one thing, that this is a ridiculous country to live in. This is a ridiculous world to live in.

Right now, I have already moved on to thinking about my exams. Because when someone does a Ki, Kemon Dilam? on you, you may condemn and recoil and try to escape, but you can't do anything.

And yes, I understand that this is a very self-indulgent, very pointless post. Tell you what, don't comment. This was just to clear my head, because there are some things that I don't like being worried about because of their general futility. You could say I'm angry, you could say I'm confused. I don't know. I'll cover this up tomorrow. In a year yesterday will only be a memory. In ten years it will something one looks up in the archives. The other side to feeling wronged is to become numb, and we have done a fabulous job of it since Before Christ. As a country, as a people, as a civilization. So chin up.

In my world, I'm the only sane person.

In a minute, I shall log off.