Yantrixa-3: Mita

When I walk up to her door here in Deonar, I always have to remind myself that Mita is what I call her - it is a short-form of her long name that I grew up with. We have known each other since school, our paths parted when she went on to do her doctorate, and I walked into a job.

Mita reads into the city's ways - she sees things I do not. Her views are unlike Hussain's, he is a poet - she is a scientist - more clinical - almost antiseptic.

Meeting her is fun, but this time it was all business. It felt like we were discussing a terminally ill patient.

Here is what caught my eye.

Me: so what do you ...

Mita: Feel? about this ? I don't feel anything. Hussain is going off the deep end. I am not a creative writer - I am bound to fact.

Me: So what _do_ you think - then..

Mita: One just has to accept it - challenging it will prove pointless. Scientifically - it is intriguing but one has to accept it.

Me: Scientifically?

Mita: Look it is not clear why the machines behaved the way they did. Everything we understand about human society does not apply to them - and yet they did something we did not expect - to a scientist that is interesting.

Me: Okay lets forget about the machines - what about the people?

Mita: The people are responsible for this state of affairs - that I am certain of. Any society or social order when put under extreme stress responds by releasing the stress in form of extreme views. The last few years have been very stressful, the number of people putting in for psychiatric treatment or reporting maladies of the mind has risen to astronomical levels. That is why we are susceptible to extreme thinking.

Me: But why are we here... how did we get here.

Mita: Oh you know the answer to that - we let our fears get the better of us. When that bomb went off in VT at rush hour and left a 200 foot crater. The edge of the bomb's kill zone became the social boundary. The sense of surety, of comfort that people placed in the disorder they saw around them - vanished. People became mentally hollow - fears and nightmares filled the vacuum that was created when rationality departed.

Mita: That bomb explosion changed the public mindset. The public no longer believed that they were protected or safe. Once that fence was breached - everyone did whatever they felt was necessary to protect themselves. The rioting was a higher level - a communal manifestation - of the personal fears. Hindus massacred Muslims because they believed that this bomb was the work of Pakistanis acting with local Muslim collaborators. Muslims massacred Hindus because they felt this bomb was the work of Brahminical Hindus intent on sparking a Muslim genocide. Action and reaction - two sides of the same coin.

Mita: People began to believe the worst about each other. People that had lived in harmony as next door neighbours began to suspect each other and launched progroms against each other. Each group went after its perceived adversary or peer competitor, because they percieved that the sense of security that accompanied their position in the social ladder was gone and they had nothing more to lose.

Mita: The bloodletting damaged everyone - we all heamorraged here. The bravado and tough sounding tone of the community leaders was evidence of this. No one won here and we all knew it. Fear turned people into ghouls. Half of those turning up for psychiatric care at municipal hospitals are people who participated in the riots - they all speak of nightmares where they are tormented by the screams of the people they murdered.

Me: So fear made us do it?

Mita: Fear triggered a social collapse. What happened afterwards was a consequence of a collapse of social order. It is not novel - we have seen this before in Afghanistan. The Taliban were born in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Najibullah regime.

Me: but this is India - Bombay no less - not Afghanistan. People here do not have tribal memories...

Mita: (laughs) tribal instincts have nothing to do with tribal identity or memory. This kind of small group dynamics appears to be hardwired into the human mind. It may be a distant echo of our past in more primitive societies. It appears even outside this grand backdrop - in companies, and bureaucracies, as factions. Just because we live in a city and ride a metro to work on a computer doesn't make our psyche any less susceptible. When something like this happens, people asked themselves a simple question - "who do I really trust" ... and the answer most often came back to a small group of people. That is why what we saw resembled tribal warfare in Afghanistan and that is why our reaction was to accept - no sorry - to welcome the Tetravaal into our midst.

Me: And what now?

Mita: Nothing - it is what it is - accept it.

Me: Accept it? - just like that? what about..

Mita: It means nothing. The world we are in is very different from the world we came from.

Me: But our norms, our traditions, our ways, evolved over thousands of years..

Mita: thousands? really? the city hasn't been here that long - things will have to change.

And that was it - Cyrus was blunt and asked me what the point of that was. Pawle didn't understand where Mita was coming from either.

I had to admit one thing - Mita - was never one to hold back.