Mainak Dhar - Heroes R Us

Like the Mumbai terror attacks of a couple of years ago, there was evidence galore, including confessions from the three terrorists who had been captured alive, that the attack had originated in Pakistan. There was the usual hue and cry for a few days, as the government issued repeated statements about how it would give a 'fitting reply' to the nation's enemies. However, the government never really did much, leaving cynics commenting that perhaps it would indeed take the nuclear obliteration of an Indian city to shake the government into any sort of action. One of the reasons for the government's inaction was the fact that the recent elections had produced a shaky coalition government, and as the year went by, another election seemed likely. Balwant Singh was last seen at his party's annual convention being projected as the Prime Ministerial candidate in the coming election. Balwant Singh indicated that while he had no hunger for power, he would humbly accept the nomination if his party believed that he could serve the nation in this capacity.

Upadhyay was projected as one of the heroes of the evening, and he had a broken leg and arm to show for his efforts. Obviously nobody would know that the broken leg had come courtesy of the hero whom he had shot in the back. He was awarded the Police Medal for Gallantry and enjoyed his moment in the spotlight. That newly acquired sheen was soon tarnished a bit when reports surfaced about how the terrorists had acquired real police uniforms and identification cards by buying them from a corrupt Inspector who was known to be very close to Upadhyay. The case was hushed up, but to be safe, Balwant had Upadhyay transferred to the remote North East border, where he could continue his ways without being under so much media scrutiny. A few months later, he was in the news when the Home Ministry began reporting how his bold initiatives against insurgents were yielding dramatic results, with more than 50 insurgents having been killed in police encounters. The Ministry also announced that it was forming a special task force to investigate the recent spate of killings of poor villagers by a suspected psychopath in the North-East. Upadhyay continues in his ways, comfortable in the fact that Balwant's continued patronage would ensure he does not get into any serious trouble, but he does regret the fact that his damaged arm and leg mean that he will never play Golf again.

Mishti did get married later that year, and is now pregnant with her first child. If it's a boy, she plans to name him Arnab. Jayantada did hire a new Assistant Librarian, but would never tire of speaking about the fine young man who had worked for him, and who had been one of the heroes who had jumped into the Cricket field that fateful evening to help the Guardian Angel. On his repeated pleading, the Principal agreed to rename the library as the Arnab Bannerjee Memorial Library.

Chintu never tires of telling his mother about the super powers Arnab had possessed. Mrs Duggal gently discourages this hero worship, and hopes her son grows out of this phase.

As for Khan, he cried his heart out for a long time after seeing what had happened to Arnab, but that grief was tempered by a fierce sense of pride, much like a father would feel towards a son. A couple of days after the attack, he finally opened the suitcase Arnab had left for him. The contents shocked him, but then an idea came to him, and the old man began plotting.

***

A year after the attack, something peculiar started happening. Young men, operating in groups of two or three, began materializing in Delhi's streets by night. They were all dressed in hooded sweatshirts, and initially people thought they were just fans of the Guardian Angel, trying to imitate their fallen hero. That changed when these men began to intervene in law and order situations. It began on a small scale, with these men chasing away robbers or petty thieves. But soon, larger groups of these men began to appear in the city's streets, patrolling neighbourhoods, and not shying away from open confrontation with criminals. A gang of carjackers was set upon by them and left beaten to a pulp. A sexual assault on a group of women was thwarted and the five would be rapists were thrashed by the four young men in hooded sweatshirts to the point where they spent more than a week in hospital before they were sent to jail.

The men were unarmed but seemed to demonstrate high levels of expertise in martial arts and wild rumours began spreading about how invincible they were, especially when one of them walked away after being shot by a bank robber. After the first few incidents, the word was out on the street-it was foolish for any criminal to try and take them on. The government publicly denounced them for taking the law into their own hands, but when Delhi experienced its lowest ever crime rates that year, the new Prime Minister, Balwant Singh, announced that the young men were well-intentioned but could do with some guidance from the government. As the months went by, the numbers of these young vigilantes seemed to multiply, and soon they were a regular, and welcome sight on Delhi streets at night, a visible symbol that someone was finally doing something to fight back against the lawlessness that had once threatened to engulf the capital. They were well organized and disciplined, and seemed to operate with some clear central direction.

Despite intense media interest, not much was really known about the identity of these hooded vigilantes or who was training and funding them. It was rumoured that they were being trained at a secret training center outside Delhi and were outfitted with state of the art equipment including bulletproof vests and night-vision equipment. Nobody could explain how anyone could afford that kind of money, but there were persistent rumours that the driving force behind this was an old retired soldier who was funding this with his own money.

By the time the year was over, ordinary civilians-men and women alike-in other cities had begun forming their own neighbourhood watch groups in emulation of the Delhi vigilantes. What they lacked in the martial skills of these hooded vigilantes, they made up in numbers and enthusiasm. The first to feel the brunt were criminals but then corrupt officials, policemen and bureaucrats started to find themselves at the receiving end. Shocked that ordinary citizens were no longer willing to meekly accept their demands for bribes and favours, many were thrashed black and blue by groups of irate citizens. The Government really didn't know how to react. On the one hand, Balwant Singh and his ministers would keep saying that people should not take the law unto their own hands, but soon they realized that they were up against a tidal wave of public anger that they should best leave alone.

Crime rates began to plummet across cities, and the media began reporting about how the greatest legacy of the Guardian Angel may have been to shake people out of their apathy, to prove that an ordinary man could sometimes make a big difference, even in a society as messed up and corrupt as ours.

A leading weekly carried the following piece as its editorial.

'Nobody knows how long this will last. How many days before these men and women go back to their ordinary lives? How many days before we one again succumb to a mute acceptance of what happens around us? How many days before we go back to the apathy we had learnt to take for granted, where we were content to watch the rot around us, and unwilling to do anything until that rot began to bring our own walls down? How many days before we return to a system where unquestioning tolerance of the status quo is encouraged and any attempt to stand up against it dismissed as unnecessary bravado? While one hopes that doesn't happen, one fears that this wave of popular consciousness and action will subside, and become little more than a short-lived ripple in the sea of selfishness and cynicism that we had come to take for granted in our society. But while it lasts, it is a glorious thing to be applauded and celebrated. It serves to remind us, that no matter how dark things sometimes seem in today's India, there is still hope. That hope for a better tomorrow springs not from the actions, no matter how heroic, of one superhero, but from the awakening his deeds have created in the hearts of millions of ordinary people, spurring them to perform their own small, individual acts of heroism, which when taken together, promise to change things much more than one man could ever have hoped to have done by himself. The events of the last few weeks and months serve to remind us true change requires not one superhero, but for every one of us to discover a little bit of a hero in ourselves. The Guardian Angel's greatest legacy will not be his incredible saga of heroism and sacrifice alone, but the fact that he has awakened millions to the notion that we need not look for heroes, super or otherwise, to materialize and solve our problems for us, or indeed believe that true heroes exist only in the make-believe world of comic books. We need only look within-for those heroes are us.'