I was in Kasauli, sitting on an unhacked hillside bristling with pines, washed in the fluorescent glow of a Buddha Purnima moon, when I heard the White House had collapsed. I confess even in that first moment of information, I felt no sense of triumph or achievement, just an intense disquiet. My friends, famous artists in their separate fields, soaking in the whisky and moonlight, however, hooped with delight. We'd done it! We'd show the world now!
It was my first intimation that I was going to be in a woeful minority. I did not rush back to Delhi, as most journalists would have been inclined to: Delhi's strategic concerns somehow tend to lose their import as you travel away from the city's manufactured neuroses. But of course when I returned, it was all that Delhi could talk about; and yes, very many people seemed to feel empowered and happy. Now we had Sachin Tendulkar, and the bomb. Perhaps what we need to do now, after Agni and Prithvi, is to christen our next missile Tendua; that would marry our two reigning passions, and strike fear in the cricketing and military heart of the Pakis. (But what is the BJP's position on cricket? I'm not too sure. It is after all a game of foreign origin.) In a flawed world, bombs are perhaps unavoidable, but there can be no relativism about nuclear weapons. Nothing, no deterrence, no dictatorships, no totalitarian governments, justifies the use of nukes, and consequently their existence. Nothing justifies weaponry that can annihilate the species.
But there has been so much testosterone pumping around in the old men who are running the country that you'd think you were in a school backyard watching an inter-house football match. Pakistan always had a machismo problem: now our leadership has fallen prey to the oldest schoolboy fantasy. We have a big one, we're being told.
What's amazing is the sheer speed with which it's all been done. In a swift two months the entire region has been destabilised. In no time at all, the statesman-like finesse that characterised Indian leaders, the Nehru-Gandhi discourse that emphasised a benign nationalism, all of that has been lost. And no one should buy the realpolitik pap. It's the smokescreen the political establishment uses to conceal illogic. Good politics brings in power, water and prosperity, all of which have now cunningly been sent flying off the agenda. We suddenly sound like a brash, frisky people, not an ancient civilisation; we suddenly sound very tinpotty, like those third world countries which are full of loud posturings, very malevolent, very unwise.