Deep dull red

I hate getting into the Bombay conversations these days and dear God as long as I am alive and same I refuse to call this place Mumbai! It sounds alien and so not home. I have been thinking about what home means to me for some time now. The blasts and everything that happened made me realise the emptiness of so much around me. To me home means safety, love, warmth and inspiration. And after all that has happened I don't feel any of these. I feel a dull pain within... like a constant inside. Does not change, does not go away either. Just stays. Its fear and anger and the sense of loss all frozen solid.
I think we can't really make our children wear bullet proof jackets when they go to schools. The idea that I may live in constant fear for my loved ones is to not live at all really. I want to go back to my childhood. It was somewhere a more innocent and safer world to live in then. I don't want to bring my children up in a world where I don't know where we are headed as a race. I see destabilised economies, people losing jobs and livelihoods, rabid people killing each other, greed and power the motivation and no real feeling... whatever there is is somehow just not strong enough rt now.
I feel upset to look at our contry and how vulnerable we are. The so lil confidence we as a nation have in our decision making... how we will never be regarded as tough coz we are always the soft nation to the world. My friends went on a tour of south east asia and came back determined they will not go anywhere looking for a job. They felt the backlash was too strong against Indians. I feel rightly so. We have chosen the leaders who run this country. And our nation's true character is reflected when the true colors of these people are exposed as soon as they get the invincibility of temp power. The lengths people go to to keep it is a chronicle of our debacle as a nation of epic proportions. And so much for the values we stand for.
We are like a diploma technician from a lower middle class income group, trying to make it too soon too big coz his diploma happened to be in Computers and its a skill in demand. We have risen too high by our own complacent standards... behaving almost like we never expected to achieve this greatness or to be known around at all. And too happy for it... all bursting at the seams trying not to show it.
My worry is if somewhere we have accepted that we were never meant to do a proper engineering in computer science and that we may becapable of more... the cutting edge work has been left for others. That somewhere we behave like 'koopmanduks' (frog in the well) and are too happy to see things have improved 2% over 200 years (exaggerated example). We sing the song of our own 'oh so unexpected' success so much that we have missed out on the real standards of excellence. We have reached a stage where just being able to think about change and improvement is good enough and justifies the greatness we feel. Like an autistic child learning to write. We talk too much as a country. We are so 'new money'.
We don't have any standards we follow. Our benchmarks are stupid and shallow. We don't do worldclass coz we don't believe we can. So cricket is the only sport that reall matters to us as a country. We have been world champions in chess for forever now but will never put this guy on a pedestral like Dhoni.
You see we are so typically Indian! We just can't appreciate any good we do... we always focus on what we din't do... the lack of confidence eating in to us making us a country of short cuts, corruption and bribes. This very lack of faith in our own ability as a nation, contributed to greatly by our leaders, utterly despicable standards of higher education, makes us want too much too soon coz happiness is so scarce in life here.
I was speaking to a friend today and realised that I have never before felt such a sense of hopelessness. I have always been a prennial optimist and thought that things will all turn out ok in the end. This feeling has been very important coz it defines me as a person and comes from a deep safe place within from where inspiration springs for me.
I have lost this place somewhere. I am feling truly cynical about this world and its people and the future of our race... Its a very strong feeling within and is a dark place to be coz I can't find hope. I have not felt something like this before.
And so I feel that the only thing I can control is my own life and happiness. I want to be as close to my family as possible. I love them and I want to focus on them so I can build as many happy memories as possible. I want to get inspired and inspire them to achieve more in life before it all ends. On a day like today, when I come back home and miss them terribly... with a nagging thought somewhere saying...who knows? this may be the last week I'll live... does not let me rest in peace.