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Terror strikes in India: 11/7, 26/11, 13/7, 7/9...Numb & Number


NEW DELHI: Terror strikes snuffing out dozens of innocent lives are meant to provoke anger, trigger outrage. But psychiatrists and sociologists say over the years there's been an emotional numbing of society, especially in cities like Delhi and Mumbai, which have witnessed a series of lethal bomb blasts over the past two decades.
"The frequency of such attacks has led to a process of habituation. The mind registers the event but the corresponding emotions that accompany such events don't happen among many of us. A brutal carnage gets reduced to a mere piece of information. And death just becomes a number. At a sub-conscious level, we begin to equate the event with a scene in a movie," says consultant psychiatrist Avdesh Sharma.
Sociologist Yogendra Singh offers a similar view. "There is a brutalization of consciousness, an attitude of non-feeling," he says.
The Wednesday blast reactions aptly sum up this mood of resignation. Statements by top political leaders - "We strongly condemn the cowardly act" - evoked a sense of deja vu, a feeling of watching reruns of old tapes.
The television coverage too had a hysterical sameness. And it's unlikely going to be different in the newspapers either. "There's a 'routinization' of response," says Singh.
Perhaps the identicalness of statements emerges from the truth that little or nothing has changed in India's efforts to combat and minimize terrorism - more so, because after an initial flurry of reports of "breakthroughs", the probes invariably hit a dead-end.
Writer Ira Trivedi typified the public feeling in her Thursday tweet. "The saddest part of the Delhi blast is that we are all a bit blase. We have seen too many of these in the recent past to care. Sad," she said.
Why? Psychiatrists say the mind wants to maintain as much normalcy as it can in any situation. It wants to wish away anything adversely affecting it.
Burdened by information and emotional overload, the mind automatically starts filtering things out. After every terror strike, our first response is to check if family and friends are okay. Once everyone's been accounted for, it's back to business as usual.
Says Sharma, "Nowadays there are so many negative things happening around you that if anything doesn't affect you directly, you feel it isn't worth bothering. Which is why people can eat, laugh and joke even while watching mutilated bodies on television."
The sense of alienation or indifference, especially in cities, also emerges from the fact that one generally doesn't know the victim. But the feelings change if one witnesses a terror strike in real life. Sharma says a shopkeeper who saw the Sarojini Nagar pre-Diwali 2005 blast that claimed 68 lives needed psychological help. "He had seen bodies with limbs missing and he had heard people screaming and crying. The images haunted him for months."
Terror-related strikes have been wounding India for long. But as clinical psychologist Rajat Mitra points out, the nation is yet to develop a problem-solving attitude in countering the menace. "As a society, we have been displaying a far greater degree of passivity and fatalism than mature societies when confronted with an overwhelming event," he says.
Mitra points out that unlike India, Israel regularly conducts workshops among the public that train them to react better to a terror situation. "In India too, people need training and orientation to break the pattern of fatalism and passivity. The government must work on this. Because passivity leads to disintegration," he says.

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