So this morning this guy, strolling through just another of the urban centers of the city for some grocery shopping, noticed a disproportional gathering of men in khakis at the entrance to a building. They had gathered around something in a circle. They seemed curious. Their curiosity, in turn, acted a magnet to the 'common man' on the streets, who craned their necks even from afar, as if they had just chewed on a Boomer gum and could reach out 20ft with an elastic neck. Soon, common sense of the common man dominated, when they apparently realised that they hadn't chewed on a Boomer gum; so they came closer in a concentric formation, a couple of feet behind the policemen, around that same object.
From my distance, I could make out a bag on the sandstone-tiled floor. There was also a security guard pointing to a frail dark man in a shoddy cream-colored shirt and shoddy pants, like a repairman, and the police were casually reviewing him. The man seemed a nervous fool, but cooperative. I heard words like "bag mein kya hai", "woh kya cheez hai", "kidhar" as I broke the last of my attentive strands away from the situation and made my way back. It obviously was an alert raised by the guard over something suspicious in the bag - to which, in the context of Indian security, any device more complicated than a mobile phone satisfies the condition (yes, I've even had Sony PSP creating suspicion at cinema theatres; and once a radio with separate connector cables was detained at the airport, though I hope it was to protect our citizens from shitty FM music).
It was ridiculous to see the Police with no visible protocol for tackling such a common situation. Or maybe because such situations of suspicion for the Police only involve cornering innocent people with large bags, then bullying them for fun, then letting them free, that they could imagine no harm here. So, effectively, the situation created by the curiosity of 10 policeman crowding around a suspicious object, was having 15 more people crowding behind the policeman. That is 25 people; 25 easy victims for a terrorist group crowding around their yet-unidentified bomb. And I bet that with such a convenient radius, they'll not need much explosives too.
In India, seemingly, the common wisdom goes: You spot a bomb, flock around it!
Reminded me of the Men-In-Black opening sequence, where Tommy Lee Jones brings out that neuralizer and gets others to focus on that, and then * ------------------------------------. Coincidentally, he too used it on the police!
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