My Dear Dear Dear Raji Mam
Sometimes it is better not to know certain things.
People hailing from Peninsular India [ The 4 Southern States ] have been spared [ Thank God for that ]
of a major war for the past about 250 years. We should consider ourselves lucky for this. Every other
part of the world has witnessed bloodshed and mass killings. This is not to say that peninsular India is
free of crime, but taking a certain "Minimum Criminal Denominator" as a National Standard i.e., to say murders,
rapes, thefts, female infanticide, bride burning, honor killings, hartals, strikes, bandhs, power outages, corruption etc being on par with the rest of India, we have escaped the horrors of a major war.
The battles of Wandasi, Tarangambadi, Mysore, Hyderabad etc appear like small-time gang fights, going by
scale and magnitude of the Wars of the 20th Century, spilling over into the 21st. It seems like the whole world
has been at war and somehow, peninsular India was spared. I specifically say ' peninsular ', because even in
the two Indo-Pak wars of 1965 & 1971 and the Indo-China war of 1962, the southern part of India was spared.
This extended peace-time that we have enjoyed, though has produced some of India's best known soldiers - Gen. Thimayya, Gen. Kariappa, Gen. Sundarji, Brig. Gen. Dalwi, Gen. Satish Nair, to name a few. Add to this India's
only Field Marshal - Manekshaw, the victorious C-in-C in the '71 war, came to retire and spend the evening
of his life in Ooty.
Such being the case, mass-scale violence and cruelty inflicted by people on other people is not something
that has happened in this part of the world. Even the refugee camps housing Lankan Tamils are more like
rehabilitation centres for a displaced people and not what one seen expects to see typically in war time refugee
camps - hunger, starvation, disease, disabilities caused by the effects of war.
Hailing from that part of the world that has probably had the longest period of continuous peace,
we are more-or-less at peace with ourselves and cannot be deliberately cunning/cruel/violent. We
generally tend to overlook the cruelty of others too. Caged naked humans used as 'exhibits' or
display of a person's attributes [ or the lack of it ] too tantamount to a form of cruelty.
People might not know about Sarah Baartman, but surely everybody will recall how a group of innocent tribals
were made to dance naked [ and video-graphed] in return for some food - recently in the Andamans.
That was the 19th century, Sarah Bartmaan was the black slave of the 'superior' white man, then.
But this is the 21st century, this is India and Andamans is a part of India !
No slave trade, no white man involved - yet the inhuman cruelty levels persist !
That was the point I was trying to make - not take a dig at you.
I hope I have clarified my stand.
Guruvethunai
Yay Yem
Sir!! 
eace: 
