And so another year ends in the acrid smoke of a post-blast Liaquat Bagh election rally evening. Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East, was marked by destiny’s suicide bomber. Her assassination symbolised a year when prospects of democracy in Pakistan came under repeated assault, whether it was the dismissal and house arrest of a chief justice or the imposition of an emergency. General Pervez Musharraf became plain President Musharraf, but that did not really change anything in Pakistan.

Somehow, try as we might, we couldn’t insulate ourselves from the various sources of instability the world over. The post-assassination violence that destablised Pakistan, made us feel just that bit more uncomfortable in our skins, and who would have imagined that bad housing loans in the US could add the term sub-prime crisis to our daily vocabulary? It was that kind of year, when the world got even smaller and characters like Hill and Huck dominated our news space, even as Bush’s poodle scampered out of 10, Downing Street, to be replaced by Gordon. Meanwhile, Vlad got to be acknowledged in some quarters as the Man of the Year.

It was a year of the predator and the macabre. D-5, Sector 31, in a nondescript Noida neighbourhood, turned out to be a House of Horrors, with the bones of little children surfacing in a drain. It stained 2007 with the word Nithari, which came to signify the most debased form of human behaviour. At Virginia Tech, a student used his Glock 9MM semi-automatic to deadly effect by shooting down indiscriminately his fellow students one fine morning. But we no longer had the indulgence of imagining that such incidents didn’t happen in our country. The Gurgaon school shootout testified to the churning, changing times. But then it was that sort of year, when terror was just a news bulletin away, whether it was about Glasgow or Hyderabad; whether on the Samjhauta Express or before a Lucknow court, even as blasts from the past reminded us of a hellish March 1993 afternoon in Bombay. The Bombay blasts verdict may have sent Accused No 117 Sanjay Dutt back to jail, but Justice Srikrishna’s recommendations on the riots that preceded them continued to fall victim to political amnesia. Ironically, 2007 marked 60 years of international human rights. It was also a year to remember Mr Q. Quattrocchi managed to find his way back to primetime yet again, which says a great deal for the man’s indestructibility. We need him it seems, just as we need Narendra Modi, with his chhapan ni chhati and plastic mask, to remind us of our sins of omission and commission. If the US staged a surge in Iraq, so did the saffron forces, ending the year with the triumphs of Gujarat and Himachal.

... contd.