AAJE KETLA GAYA (how many today? whats the SCORE?)

Met a friend round the corner. Insisted we go to Naturals for an ice cream. While scooping out, he casually asked, “aaje ketla gaya”? (how many gone today?) WHAT, I asked gape eyed, sipping my Earl Grey outside Crossword.
"The lattha kand yaar. How many more deaths?"
His insensitivity is not out of place in aapnu Amdavad or Swarnim Gujarat. This insensitivity is a reality in general. And not an exception.
Lets accept it. We are like that only.
the East-West, the Old-New Ahmedabad divide is so great. Polarisation in Ahmedabad: sometimes between Hindus and Muslims, between the Haves and Have Nots, the walled city and Non Walled city…
Is the typical Gujju sensitivity a blunted dormant force?
Why is it that we don’t identify with our citizens? Is this the bane of urbanization or our capitalistic mentality?
One bureaucrat rightly but slightly despondently pointed out, that even if there are going to be 200 deaths due to lattha, it would nt matter to Gujaratis. Because all those who are dying or have died are the silent class. Their voice often don’t get out of their shanties too. Gujarat is not W Bengal or Bihar, he said.
Ofcourse for the Congress this has become THE issue. madam has also sent in her condolences. madam may have been moved(dalits matter a lot to the Congress these days, though that is another story), but she does not perhaps know that for most Amdavadis living in the western part of the city, pot holes and water logging are more serious issues than lattha kand or Hooch Smooch deaths.
Hey, madam has sent condolences but ironically the Congress in Gujarat has no senior woman leader who is being spotted with the victims of the hooch tragedy. Quite tragic for a party to suffer from such “woman bankruptcy” at a time when it is the Congress which has given the country the first woman president and the first woman speaker.
Ah!
(this ah! is meant both for the Hooch Tragedy socio dynamics and the Gujarat Congress)