Javed Akhtar speaks at Mumbai peace rally..

.........lyricist and scriptwriter Javed Akthar took the stage. "See those TV cameras," Akthar pointed. "Those people who did this to us last Wednesday are watching today. They are watching us, and they know now that do what they will, we can never be beaten, not in a hundred years." An enormous roar goes up. Akthar seamlessly shifts into a fighting speech in which determination and dedication, revenge and retribution, are the main tropes. The speech is punctuated with applause, roars. The crowd is in that kind of mood: Anger sizzles in the gathering dusk, a palpable rage that is almost an audible sizzle in the background of Akthar's outburst. Anything that feeds that anger will be applauded; incongruously, at one point, a voice in the crowd yells out: 'Once more!' Akthar concludes: 'We will now sing the national anthem, and then we will go home.' Jana gana mana adhinayaka... the familiar words begin in his baritone, and are picked up and amplified by a thousand throats. You've heard this sung in a few hundred assemblies and public meetings and in darkened cinema halls - but this day, this anthem from this crowd in front of the Gateway of India, sounds like nothing you have heard before. Passion throbs in every word -- you realise, with a start, that this is the real meaning of the word 'anthem.'

A young college girl next to us raises her lit candle aloft. It shines light on her face -- and on the tears that stream from her eyes, unnoticed, unheeded. She is not the only one crying......