Candles for Guns

The lit candle is the new social weapon of the middle class.Candles for jessica shot down for refusing a drink,candles for mehar bhargava shot down for protesting against eve-teasers.Outrage against blatant and heinous crime.Outrage against bloated immunity.Housewives, college kids,page 3 types spilling onto the streets with placards and slogans. we want justice.clean the system.unprecedented in Delhi,everyone has been saying.unprecedednted in lucknow.




Mapped against the heroic sit-ins of medha patekar and the displaced narmada valley:the desperate padyatra of bhopal's gas victims stll fighting 22 years later:Irom Sharmila,forcibly kept alive by the state,tubes thrust down her throat,the lit candle might seem a bit of a dilettante affair.As protest weapons go.litlle more than a nail file.



but one cannot be too cynical about thsi gathering stir.fashionabale as it might seem,or vulnerably flickering,this is surely the awakening of conscience,the slow self recognition of a civil society.the middle class is turning on its own lumpen,demanding accountability.And one's backyard is always a good place to start.
This is a class that has habitually dismissed the warriors.

Brinda Karat? Oh,She's a headline monger,always breaking barricades and her bones to catch the camera(Willingly breaking one's own bones???)

Medha patekar?just a chronic,media hungry petrel.

arundhati roy?ha,just shrill and pretty mobile republic.

Kiran bedi?megalomaniac

irom sharmila?who?

Ck Jaanu?Yaar,where are the feel good stories?




Now,in a curious kickback,the middle class is being recast in the mould it had scorned.it has not yet grown the stomach to sit in bleaching heat and rain,break barricades and bones,embrace jail or sustain a fight over 23 years.Not yet the stomach to withstand brutal police fire with mere bows and arrows.Or even to continue the candle vigil after the cameras are switched off.but it has tasted power f its own voice.amidst the flood of filmfare awards and miss indias and malls and ekta kpoor serials,it finds itself washed slightly off course on the tip of a different wave.And is surprised by its impact.



The riptide will surely set in .the flood will come back to claim its own.the middle class will return to its malls.there will be the inevitable murmurs:nothing ever happens.



Still,the events of the last couple of months is a bit like mobile telephony.They have left an indelible stamp.watching tis attack of conscience beamed across myriad TV channels,the middle class has been critically altered.The candles have sown their wind.