Washington, D.C
My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was. She had come from a mandatory ‘active-shooter training session’ at her office. Of course, all shooters are ‘active’. Active shooter is what the TV stations call an armed psychopath during the brief period between the moment he starts gunning people down – say, in a cinema, church, school or office – and the moment he dies in a blaze of police- or self-inflicted gunfire. These episodes don’t happen often, of course, but they make quite an impression on CEOs when they do, and my neighbour is not the first person I know who’s been to a training session about how to deal with them. The firearms experts who ran the session, she said, were military veterans of some sort, and pretty homespun. They explained that an active-shooter incident usually lasts three to five minutes, during which time you would probably want to leave the area. Someone asked what would happen if you couldn’t. Well, you could barricade yourself in a room, one replied, or look for a makeshift weapon. That stapler or something. That wasn’t much of a choice, one of her co-workers said, although you don’t always get good choices in life. ‘Woampy purty,’ he agreed.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the transformation of Indian politics since the 1990s. A very useful introduction to right-wing Indian thought is the veteran journalist (and now BJP member of parliament) Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata. It begins: ‘Till the turn of the century, the counting of votes in an Indian general election was a prolonged three-day affair.
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