Its has been a heartbreaking experience seeing the happenings in Mumbai for the past 3 days. As if the carnage is not sufficient, the news channels, especially Arnab Goswami of Times Now and Burkha Dutta of NDTV were pathetic. They were using 'adjectives' as if they witnessing the making of a hollywood action flick. Shame on them. Such senior journalists making a mockery of the situation is hard to digest. Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN and Arnab Goswami went to the length of interpreting the happenings in their own terms, as if they were experts - They went to the length of suggesting what NSG were supposed to do, what it means when gun fires are heard. Barkha Dutt was interviewing the husband of one of the captives Mrs. Saikia and it was painful to see him answering her questions at the hour of his grief, when he was just hoping against odds that his wife would come out alive.

The only saving grace was the news channels had virtually cut down on their ads. Atleast money was not made out of such a tragedy.

When coming to think of the freedom we enjoy, the very fact that we are all sitting at our homes watching matches, commuting in our bikes and cars, flying to various places and sleeping peacefully, we owe it to this men who have made the supreme sacrifice we can only imagine doing. The best tribute we can pay to them is to pay our taxes honestly. Our taxes pay our soldiers. Hope the personal and professional standards of our soldiers (hope the politicians at least do these things without any scandal) improve. Let us not demean the very freedom we enjoy by complaining about the bad roads, flooding rain waters, corruption etc. Men are sacrificing their lives everyday at the highest and the coldest battlefield in the world - Siachen. Recently we lost M.C Sharma of Dehli Police. Now we have lost great officers from Mumbai - Ashok Kamte, Salaskar, Hemant Karkare;Gajendra Singh and Major Unnikrishnan from the NSG.

They have given their lives to save ours. Lets not demean the very freedom we are enjoying for which they have paid the ultimate price, by complaining about so many things which are not right in our country at this point of time, for which none other than the political class is entirely responsible.

Its only appropriate that Hemant Karkare's widow had rejected the monetary assistance from Modi. Wonder how he would feel if he were in the same position mourning his family member's death in a situation like this and some one offered money hoping it would get rid of his grief!!!

We have lost so many of military and paramilitary men since the days of Kargil. I have very vivid memories of Burka Dutta (guess at that time as part of Star News) interviewing Captain Vikram Batra in Kargil inside a Bunker. A few days later the death of Captain Vikram Batra was shown on the very same channel. Some of the names I could still re-collect are Major Saravanan, Captain Ahuja of IAF. So many young men we lost - some were the only bread earners for their home, some joined the army because of sheer passion (its sad to see people sometimes commenting that several of them joined army since they had no other option. One should also understand that several soldiers who were killed in Kargil were sons of Ex-Army officers. So, these men joined army knowing exactly what the life in army would be). When young army men in their 20's are fighting for our freedom, most of the men this age are enjoy their lives earning and living peacefully under the freedom our military men are providing us.

The political class appears to be making the sacrifices of our soldiers who are guarding us day and night meaningless. Unless these men in white clothes show some sense of responsibility towards the men in uniform, brave men like Major Sandeep, Captain Vikram Batra, Halwadar Gajendra Singh, Ashok Kamte and others will be forced to lay their lives for us...