The involvement of the religious leaders and armymen in the Malegaon blasts is not just disturbing – it’s sickening! Weren’t these sadhus and sadhwis supposed to renounce the world? Why are they then meddling in the affairs that are no business of theirs? How can someone from Army be involved in this and what’s worse, go undetected for so long?

I can understand that the staunchest seculars amongst us can occasionally fall prey to the thoughts of “an eye for an eye”. At the risk of shocking friends who might be reading this post I confess that after one of the blasts I had remarked to a friend that we should give Pakistan a taste of its own medicine. But then the moment passed and sanity returned. After all, there are those like us on the other side of the border who want nothing else but normal lives. The road for revenge will lead to total destruction and nothing else.

What’s more, here we are talking about harming our very own citizens – most of them having nothing to do whatsoever with earlier blasts. There simply cannot be any justification for such acts and there is no doubt that the guilty should be severely punished – no matter what their station in life and in society. If we stoop to the level of the terrorists, what’s the difference between us and them?

And at the same time there should be an active dialogue between people of both communities to foster an environment of trust. I am not talking about the leaders here. Time and again, they have proved themselves incapable of doing anything that doesn’t further their agenda. I am talking about ordinary people – people like you and me. We have to start doing something about this because we are in the direct line of fire of these bombs – not the traffic-stopping politicians who travel in bulletproof cars escorted by the police.

It’s time we did something about this, people. We owe it to our future generations.