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 déjà 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.