Riot #2

My second experience of a riot was right after I graduated from college. Still in Bangalore.

Why were the people mad again? Let's try to keep this simple. There was this bigshot called Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. He was one of the guys that done wrote the Indian Constitution. Like a Ben Franklin, but with a healthier tan. 

He had this big statue in the middle of the city and somebody had vandalized it. Broke it real good. So what, you ask? 

Well...recall how Muslims get all sensitive when someone mucks around with their holy books and prophets. Mr. B here, too, had his followers from a particular caste (a mini-religion, if you will) and they were not going to take this lying down. Burn down the city, they will.

The funny thing is that this riot was a great deal smaller than the Kaveri riots. But I happened to get caught in the wrong place in this one.

It was my first year working after college. I worked for a Japanese Company, Yokogawa Corp. And the office was minutes away from where the statue was vandalized.

I wasn't in the habit staying on top of local events then. So when I headed to work that morning on my motorcycle, I had only heard vague bits of news of this Ambedkar business. 

That was about to change.

Do you know when I do my best thinking? When I'm driving. Even in India, where defensive driving takes on a whole new meaning, I generally find it easy to think when I'm on a set of wheels. So I was thinking deep and hard, when I turned the corner near my office. And ran headlong into a mob.

Pundits will point out that I should have turned my motorcycle around and run like hell in the opposite direction. Maybe this is what I should have done. It would have been the smart thing to do. But my legs, which suddenly felt like they were filled with crushed ice-cubes, didn't know this. I froze. And my motorcycle very helpfully stalled and I just stood there like a dork till the mob was on top of me.

I was maybe a few hundred yards from my office. I could see the gates from where I stood.

There are some small insights that I took away from the incident and one of them is this. Even though your motor functions seize up in moments of danger, a certain part of your brain never stops working. The faithful data-cruncher that it is, it assiduously takes note of all stimuli and happily proceeds to tabulate, collate and correlate them, even as the rest of you takes a holiday.

So as the mob approached me, three possibilities on how this would play out flashed through this hard-working part of my brain.

(1) My motorcycle would be trashed and burnt.
(2) I would get manhandled and beaten up.
(3) Both of the above.

There was a fourth possibility that my brain didn't quite appreciate at the time and it came to me only in retrospect. It didn't occur to me till later that I might have been killed on that lovely, sunny morning in Bangalore.

Philosophical Aside: Do you know why that fourth possibility didn't occur to me at that immediate moment? This is why. It may sound a little bizarre to say this, but we all, each of us man jack, to a lesser or greater degree, believe that we really will live forever.

Let me explain that. Each organism, from almost the moment of its birth, is instinctively aware of its own mortality. It is not acquired wisdom, it is instinct. You don't have to read about it in a book to know it. That is why even an infant's senses are attuned to physical danger, that is why even an animal, following an atavistic hunch, runs away from the first predator that it sees. But we humans, maybe because we are more sentient and complex than other creatures, exhibit a strange duality towards our own mortality. We are fully aware of it, but we don't fully accept it.

Death comes to us all, sadly. It'll come to me one day, and it'll come to you. But do you know the very first feeling we'll feel when that moment of inevitability becomes apparent? It won't be terror, it won't be sadness. It'll be disbelief.

Sorry for the morbid tangent. I'll move right along.

A few people, who looked like they were leading the mob, peeled themselves from the crowd and came over to where I was standing. It looked like they wanted to talk.

Problem was that I didn't know Kannada, the local language. Have you ever mentally kicked yourself? It's not pretty.

Here's a piece of advice to all for what it's worth. If you are planning to live someplace foreign for a period of time, do yourself a favor and pick up the local language, no matter how grotesque it may sound to your cultured ears. Kindly ditch the Ugly American act, or Ugly Bengali act, or Ugly North Indian act (South Indians will know exactly what I'm talking about) or whatever your preferred act is and learn the local tongue. Every community happens to think that their own language is beautiful and you will be doing yourself scant harm by humoring them.

So these guys came up to me. And they spoke to me in Kannada. And when it became clear to them that I didn't understand the local language (remember that had they been in a slightly worse mood, my not knowing the language could easily have been enough grounds for me getting badly beaten up), one of them started speaking to me in broken Hindi.

Did I know who Ambedkar was? Yes sir, I did, he was a great man. Did I know that his statue had been vandalized? Yes I did, and it was a shame, a crying shame. What did I do for a living? I was an engineer. Where was I going? To work, my office was right there, look. Did I know that I should not have been going to work on such a sad, shameful day? Yes I did but my office didn't declare a holiday and I might lose my job, my first job, if I didn't go (You sometimes get creative in moments of crisis).

He looked me over for a little while, a little while that seemed very long to me, and then nodded his head. I was to go. I swung my leg over the seat of my motorbike, preparing to kick-start it. He shook his head. I was to walk my bike the rest of the way to the office. As a mark of honor to Mr. Ambedkar, of course.

Which I did. It was a small bargain to make.