Beautiful Poem on Pune Blast

Eleven young souls in some place better
Words flow down as eyes get wetter
Details of bombs, numbers or some other
The residue always has a clueless mother

Clueless, for it’s unfair in times of opportunity
Some gone, some left with strange immunity
Immunity to what does not affect us
Someone else’s bakery, someone else’s bus.

On the bus, we did talk about the bombs
Solar systems and political storms
The good leaders condemned the ghastly act
The sum of a mother’s tears a small fact

The police will catch the cowards one day
The courts will ask “What do you have to say”
They will rant on and on for a year or two
As networks flash stills from Pune and Kathmandu

Then one day the judge will have enough
Hang him high, the coward claims to be tough
But the application will stay somewhere in a file
A mother waits all this while.

A plane will get hijacked ten years from now
As cowards fly away, we will shout and not bow
We do not give into cowards
We just don’t give a damn, actually

God, let me turn this around a bit
Not that anyone should be hurt or hit
But what if in that bakery there had been a Minister’s Son
This country would act, things would be done

Forget the Minister, what if my child was there
Then I may know what is fair and unfair
What if the media had lost one of their own?
Images of blood and flesh would not be shown

For every viewer who is fascinated with mayhem
India TV, there is a anxious mother waiting in pain
She prays her daughter is not in that café
She prays she is busy learning ballet

An Army waits for marching orders
Some inside us, some on the borders
We have had enough, we always had enough
Let us be tough, and not act tough

Every Indian life is more than your compensation
Let us break those caves, before they break this nation
We are ready to go back in our economy along the way
The price of war is less than this price we pay

A German bakery today, a Swedish bus tomorrow
Eleven today, a hundred tomorrow
Let’s kill the immunity we all have inside
Not eleven, but that day another billion died.

(This beautiful and heart-touching poem came to me in a forward, and is composed by Gaurav Parab.)

1411 - where the hell this figure came from?

1411 - It's a catchy number, but is not my ATM PIN. As per the widely advertised #SaveOurTigers campaign, this is the number of tigers left in India. I'm sure we all must have initially wondered, how did we arrive at this number but later convinced ourselves that the government must have done a proper counting and published the figure somewhere. Our Discovery - Wild and NatGeo fed minds led us believe that Aircel or Indian Govt. might have put radio tracking devices and hence counted the striped beauty.

Wonder of wonders, it's not true. The number is actually nothing more than a pure guesstimate. Here is formula used to arrive at this figure:

2007 Tiger Census Report: Number of tigers - Max=1650; Min=1150. Take an average, yes a simple statistical average; result=1400; Adding an optimistic growth of around 4 tigers per year they put forward the figure of 1411, conveniently ignoring more than 100 deaths reported since that report.

1411 is just an inflated figure and an exaggeration. The actual number is much lower. We should either act now saving them OR start looking for our next National Animal. May be a goat, to show solidarity to the national animal of our neighbors.