I received the news about the brutal attack on an Indian Scientist at the Indian Institute of Sciences(IISc), Bangalore through an offline message on Yahoo. My eyes couldn’t believe it when I read that message and searched for it on google news..I raced through the headlines for the keywords…

Killing Mr. M C Puri, ……retired Professor of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi…
four others injured………………attack during an international conference………..outside
JRD tata conference hall…… Bangalore and Hyderabad on a high alert…………………….
……Intelligence agencies suggested sometime ago IT hubs under terrorist threat……

Once I got out of the shock, I started wondering …

Why would one want to attack on Educational Institutes, our temples of learning? what could be the reason?

Is it the ever problematic medley of secularity, religion and state?
Is it a waning cry from radical socialism?
Is it the tigers calling for liberation?
Is it a strong political message from an apparently assuaged but inherently jealous neighbor that loves to loathe every product of India but still uses it?
or is it a random act of desparation from a bunch of angry kids who fared poorly in the last exam and wanted to re-take a test?

Whatever the answer, may be, the execution of the plot definitely suggests an act of deliberation and planning that is more than months old!

Then the real struck question struck me!

If the months of planning is, infact, true, what happened to the alerts from our intelligence that have been forecasting a significant threat to this campus and other IT hubs for sometime now ? How did we act on them?

It may sound too ludicrous a question at a time when, not long ago, we all witnessed the world’s most economically & militarily powerful country face a horrendous act of terror due its own intelligence failure (to some extent out of ignorance).

However, in the aftermath of that failure, I remember the amount of ’soul searching’ that the nation went through to find out what went so endemically wrong with its security system. While that happened, I heard a couple of behind-the-curtain bureaucratic pats as to how well the Indian airport screening system worked and would have avoided such an attack in the first place.

At a point when every Indian is watching his country race to jump into the ‘coterie of the elite’, I would say it is time for us to answer the same, just question. What did we do with our intelligence? what went endemically wrong with our security system that these random attacks happen almost every other trimester or semester?

… and I feel it is highly important to for every citizen of the country to understand the answers to these questions before some of its parents start worrying about the security of their kids attending such internationally reputed institutions, instead of being proud of it!