Damned if You Do...

I had never spared much thought for death penalty till Afzal Guru's hanging. I had always believed it was necessary and had wrongly understood that as such we found it very difficult to hang someone anyway. In fact, I didn't even care to know anything about Afzal either, though he was supposed to have been involved in our Parliament attack. The attack had looked more like our failure than someone else's audacity to me. But after his death, suddenly I've realized that killing someone like that does not call for celebration; it is sad and sad only. And there is reasonable doubt in my mind as to whether he is the culprit at all and that is making me feel guilty everytime I see his eyes on the TV, in the newspaper. Of course, a pseudo-secular person like me can't do anything else about it. Tomorrow I will feel like asking Aslam, my lone Muslim teammate, how he feels about the whole thing and if any worse thoughts cross his mind. But no, I guess I will end up talking to someone else about it, not Aslam. And just to compensate for my guilty feeling, I will end up being a little extra nice to every other Muslim I come across, who I have no complaints against anyway. But today I'm unable to shake off that feeling of having done something wrong and I hope the guys who have been coming on TV saying it was better late than never also feel like me when they go to bed.