What is happening to my country?

I don't have the words to express this bizarre combination of numbness and convoluted emotion that's in my head.

I had a whole string of lighthearted life things I wanted i talk about, and suddenly I feel shallow for even thinking them worthy of note.

Who are these people angry with? I think sometimes that freemarket capitalism and the Protestant work ethic have so much to pay for.

My country, and yes I say my, because it IS mine and I love it fiercely with and for all its flaws, MY country was a place of tolerance. It was a the cradle of ahimsa. It was the place where your religion didn't matter in the larger scheme of things, everyone rubbed along. Not to say there was never any trouble, but there were no guns. There were no teenagers in t-shirts and AK47s shooting other teenagers in tshirts at a local hangout.

Some people say it started with Babri masjid. Some people say we should kill all the bastards, storm the madrassas and punish the fucking muslims. Will that ever help? Can anything help? What makes these people feel so alienated by the world that they think death is the only solution?

And what of our famously corrupt police force with 10,000 rupee compensations (picking a figure out of the air), terrible pay, no social security and forced to be the eternal scapegoat? At the twin towers so many FDNY workers died, but they had something in life, unlike these men who live in the chawls of mumbai and die in its terrorist attacks. Some of the top cops in Mumbai are dead, and many of those bottom ones as well. And there are the army jawans. Many people join up because its a steady job, many join up because they want to fight for their country. I don't think anyone joins up and expects to die in a shootout against their own fellow citizens, or kill them for that matter.

Hugo Chavez once said that a strong source of motivation for his forming the Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario was having to shoot the poor Venezuelans who were rioting because their daily wage was less than their daily bus fare after Carlos Andres Perez's reforms in February 1989. He said it made him realise that there was something wrong with the country if it turned its army on its citizens after pushing them to rioting by its policies.