Mumbai
Thanks to everyone who emailed me in the last few days; sorry I couldn’t give an earlier update. I was actually in Bombay – I chose the worst three days to go in all the six months that I have been here, just four hours away – but I was not near the sites of attack, and am safe.
I went to Bombay to meet some friends, attend a workshop and finally visit the state archives for some work. The day of the attacks, a bunch of us briefly talked about visiting the Gateway of India, looking around some downtown sights, and maybe choosing a fancy place nearby for dinner – like the Taj coffee house nearby! But then we found something better to do and stayed in our northern suburb. An excellent idea, as it turned out! The scale and audacity of this attack, the high profile, upscale targets, Westerners among the dead, etc. has stunned everybody, I guess, including the global media*, even though it is hardly the first time the city has seen such senseless and sudden killing, and this is the seventh or eighth militant strike on an Indian city in the last six months. This is the second time I’ve been in the same city as a serial blast – I was in New Delhi in September, too, and this routine of texting friends to find out if they’re okay and thanking one’s stars that one was not too close to the scenes of carnage is becoming sickeningly familiar. This one rattled me a lot, and the atmosphere of fear, tension and utter exhaustion in Bombay was palpable.
There’s so much to rage about – the rotting, utterly bankrupt and corrupt political system, the bellowing TV anchors and their hysterical, irresponsible and speculative reporting (Note to media: adding a question mark to a rumour – “another bomb at CST Station?” on a moving ticker-tape, or inserting the caveat “Are these rumours true?” above a list of wild, front-page speculations is not ethical journalism!), the blame game among political parties that has already begun, the utter horror of 20-something, smiling youth spraying bullets into crowds, the bewildering cascade of global and local causes and chains that makes such mayhem possible, the knowledge that this will not be the last – but for now, my heart and condolences go out to a fellow Raveler, who lost her mother in the indiscriminate firing that day.
*Although someone told me that Deepak Chopra, of Yoga-lifestyle-living fame, was interviewed by CNN in the US as an expert on the matter – is that true? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that.
