The Future is Beautiful. The Future is Bleak
This past weekend I was in Poona to enjoy a quiet couple of days, catch up with old friends and just spend some time lazing around. But the responsible people of the city had other ideas. Saturday night a rumour spread of some guy posting some objectionable content on some social media platform and s*** hit the fan. Members of the offended political party correctly exercised their right to free speech and all its addendums of destruction of property, vandalism, potential threat to human life etc. The event didn’t get a lot of media coverage and so I only came to know of it later on Sunday afternoon. By that time buses plying out of the city and many private vehicles had been pelted with stones, many were abandoned on the road, trucks were stopped on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and a near-curfew like situation had descended over many parts of Poona and New Bombay. View images here. The impact could be gauged by the fact that on the Sunday night - the night of an IPL final mind you- Phoenix Market City mall in Poona was closed. There was an air of tension and fear in the city with many other shops closed or operating cautiously with half their shutters down. I don’t know exactly what the objectionable content was and its seriousness because the page had been taken down by the police with instructions that anybody ‘Liking’ that page would be arrested. Read the news report here.
