A Reason for a riot

As I opened a regional newspaper here in Dubai this morning. On the front page, bold and blaring it read “Actors death sparks violence in India”. Yes that was the news about Rajkumar, the Kannada actor passing away. I had just finished reading this news when a colleague of mine, an English man asked me innocently “But, he died naturally right? Or was it a murder or something?”. As an Indian I felt insulted by this innocent remark made by my colleague.

I fail to understand why on earth would anyone who is in no way related to the man who passed away peacefully due to old age, pelt stones, burn vehicles and vandalize shops. What do these people who indulge in such kind of violence gain breaking and damaging public property?

Would Rajkumar wake up human from corpse because the vandals managed to burn 10 vehicles and injure 40 others?

Would god lord almighty come down straight to Bangalore and revive Rajkumar or at least apologize to these people for committing the grave sin of having to take the life of a man 77 years old?

I fail to understand why people do such kinds of drama, sullying the name of the nation – India, making the complete IT & ITES setup to come to a grinding halt for a couple of days and there by ensuring crores of Rupees worth losses. Yes, I saw in a television news channel that the call centers and IT organizations are not working and the government has declared two days of mourning for the guy who passed away – An actor.

Even accepting the greatness of the actor he was, would these organizations have declared a holiday for that merit? I doubt, they have declared this holiday because they feared for their infrastructure, the danger to the lives of their employees and their properties.

So the net result, the vandals have managed to spoil the name of a great country, the country's business interests and by doing so they also have managed to damage and erase the respect a person from these industries and the general public would have had for the great actor who passed away, Dr. Rajkumar.

Very similar was the pictures beamed from outside a Jodhpur jail where the great, Salman Khan was imprisoned till this morning. I saw people demonstrating outside the jail asking Salman to be released and all charges against him dropped.

Think about these scenarios and you would have 20 coming up. Agitation because Amar Singh’s phone was tapped, because Sonia Gandhi resigned again, because Saurav Ganguly was dropped from the Indian cricket team and so on…

God knows when some stupid people from our great nation India stop doing these kinds of cheap drama for publicity and sully the entire nations name around the world, thanks to the cameras of BBC, CNN and various other news media from around the world. And also effectively derailing the business machinery in the country and thereby loosing crores of Rupees.