Monday Morning Blues

Some verse I wrote some years ago. It could be verse, and it could be better.

they said Monday,
and I agreed
they said lunchtime
I agreed
when they said the suburbs

I lost it

give me town, any day
the vibrancy
the people
the architecture
the roads
the sheer energy

who cares for the burbs
who notices what happens there
the burbs or town
the effort’s the same
But,
town gets remembered

sure, there’s more traffic
more distance to travel
and a long way home

but it’s all worth it

I got my way

and boy
what a party it was

the bombs went off like clockwork
cars were smashed
windows were shattered at the Taj
bodies everywhere
and the tv cameras lapped it all up

beautiful photographs
of the dead and the injured
interviews, vox pops

advani and sonia came running
and the cameras rolled once more
they lost count of the dead
and kept changing the figure
and replayed the blood
and the gore
again and again

I told you
town’s better

I wrote this whenever the blasts at the Taj happened, and I tried to blank it out of my mind. And every day I read about the trial of the blast accused, and what I wrote some years ago keeps coming back to haunt me. The perspective then was that terrorists think, they plan, they strategise, not only on the weapons area, but also on the marketing and publicity area.
This was a success. If the same incident took place at Wadala or Antop Hill, it would have been forgetten in a jiffy.
And there's no greater testament that targets are chosen from a PR perspective than the (successful) attack on the World Trade Center and the (failed) attack on the Indian Parliament. There are zillions of softer targets.
But would media cover an attack on them?