Wednesday, July 12, 2006

How much is life worth

Remember 21 grams? Yes the Sean Penn movie with the tagline - how much does life weigh? And then it claimed that 'we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death... everyone. The weight of a stack of nickels. The weight of a chocolate bar. The weight of a hummingbird...'

After yet another series of blasts in Bombay, I cant help wondering - how much is life worth in our country? It appears that the authorities had prior info on the blasts, but were not sure where they would occur and hence took no action. In a country of a billion, life is cheap. But how cheap?

In the west, they would condemn this as an act of terrorism and immediately go and bomb some country. That is one extreme. In India, we forget about it in 10 minutes, because death is an integral part of our lives. That's another extreme.

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