India, March 21 -- But we can be made to fear, encouraged to hate, provoked to hurt, and to panic. We need to be de-addicted from fear, which is why law-enforcers have a great and unenviable responsibility today

Are we a fear-free people with some of us who are frightened? Or a fearful people with some of us being unafraid? This is not about statistics. Fever can be read in a thermometer. Fear is not measurable.

This is about the way things are. As real as the bolt in our door, the lock in our cellphones, the double-blind password in our laptop. "Oh" the reader will rightly say, "those are universal fears". So they are. But we have our own variants of that universal phenomenon called fear, our own mutants of human dread.

We are not lik...