You may say i'm a dreamer, but am not the only one...

It is all so depressingly, so sickeningly familiar now. You're in the middle of something - a random, mundane activity, perhaps looking forward to the evening cuppa cha, and then a breathless phone call, text message or a friend in person arrives to tell you ahead of anyone else that there have been multiple blasts in city X, Y or Z.
Your eyes widen in shock and concern, and you gravitate towards the nearest television set, also frenziedly scanning your memory for names of friends and other loved ones living in that city. One after another you text or call them all, and more often than not, get through none. On TV, newschannels scream 'Breaking news', and correspondents at the site of the tragedy air in high-pitched and well-intended but a little useless and definitely insensitive reports from the location. Wailing relatives, bloodied sidewalks, shredded body parts, overfilled ambulances and stretchers, harrowed police and gallant samaritans - the images repeat over and over until you're so sick of it you change the channel. Only to find the next one relaying the same content.

You feel terrible - saddened and angry and helpless, thinking about how unacceptable it is that we should be so vulnerable to being attacked by a few crazed fanatics who probably have a twisted notion of fairness and justice and the way to get it. If you’re like me, and you hear that some Muslim group had something to do with it, it makes you go raging mad all over again, and despite your secular upbringing, despite your education, despite songs of bhaichara, despite the commonsense, despite reproachful reactions from more politically correct friends, you feel murderously venomous about all of "them". You want to kill, to slap them hard, poke needles in their nails and eyes and teach them a bloody lesson. But of course none of that is possible, because you know that even if it were true that all terrorists are muslims, it wouldn't be true that all muslims are terrorists. Also, you’re just an ordinary person – an aam aadmi. And ordinary people do not – cannot – indulge their fantasies of exterminating all the world’s terrorists.
And besides, there are things to do and places to go. Office reports to prepare, birthday gifts to buy, and relationships of all kinds – some to nurture, some to snap. There isn't time to brood about the serial blasts in a city at least ten thousand miles away or to do something drastic a la Naseeruddin Shah in ‘A Wednesday’.
And so you go back to working on the presentation due the next day or buying the veggies or reading the book or making dinner or going to the gym or whatever it is that you do. And like one news channel commented, slowly you become numb, you start ‘adjusting’ and getting comfortable with the sinister new neighbour - Fear. Slowly, you feel as much (or as little) as you feel when you hear about a road accident. Very sad... terrible...tsk tsk... the poor family... so young...etc etc. And then it’s back to the newspaper or the computer screen.
So i do the opposite of what i really want to do. I pray. That someday we will have common sense prevail. That we will live without fear. That the killing in the name of religion will stop. That there will be a day when i'm no longer convinced that there isn't one place in my own country where i'd feel safe and content enough to have and bring up my kids.

That's what i can do, I pray.