Sunday, November 30, 2008

A Watch ....

The city of Mumbai was gripped in terror this week. As it was going on and on for 2 days, I was increasingly getting gripped in a numb feeling. A strange feeling making me stoned. I was no longer able to dance to my favorite music tunes. I assume it was because of over exposure to pain and suffering.

The whole country was discussing how to combat terror and I was looking at everyone through the eyes of media what is going on. Blogs of superstars, politician's statements, information bureau and investigation agency findings made the spice for most people. Its just that, this time the spice is just too chilly. My nights showing me visions of attacks in railway station and I, fighting single handedly killing the anti social elements and dying with them, but never dying before each and every one of them is dead in front of my eyes. My days going in working on my day to day duties with less vigor and grasp.

Being far away from the homeland, I thought I should do something for my country. My people need my help. I scanned for every minute detail I could find on internet for 2 days. Carefully trashing the news that can be misleading and tracking hints from other sources about the hidden crucial points, when such a tragedy occurs. I came up with few ideas on my own.

After all this, I am sure modernization of security forces will take place. What bothers me is the intelligence. We, in India, have one of the best brains of the world yet we are the worst when it comes to intelligence. A fact, I thought, might be going unnoticed was the use of GPS from all the terror attacks in the country these days. This is one thing that the terrorists cannot avoid to have (easily). US provides the service of GPS to everyone in the world. I emailed the US coastal guard to know if the data about the country in which the GPS device is being used, is made available to that country for better security and tracking. It has to be a paid service anyways and I am almost 99% sure, US govt. would be having that data. They are not stupid enough to provide a service without thinking about its after effects. Well, till now I am awaiting their answer, but I am sure this can be a very important tool in tracking people. It is like a mobile phone SIM card. When you lose it, you have to file an FIR because it may be used for bad purposes by some other people.

Another intelligence fact that might be going unnoticed is the role of civilians behind an attack. This is something which is much easier to track than tracking the guys who are in different country planning an attack. India's IT industry is one of the largest in the world and it has the largest pool of software engineers. A lot of potential is there as far softwares to find and track sensitive emails going out of the country or coming into the country's domain. This is something, people often miss and they become busy in catching those civilians. Again this might not be easy to develop but not impossible for a country with super-brains like India.

After intelligence, comes the administration and setup. I always believed and still believe that the setup is nice but the reaction time is slow and the administration is hollow. Failing to get an immediate solution in 2-days time, I thought maybe its best to watch more.