General

Salaam Mumbai: Blogging the Blasts

The final counts are in. Just under 200 dead, 500 injured. Mumbai’s bomb blasts yesterday have taken a heavy toll.

I could talk of the blasts themselves, but they have been amply reported. So I’ll talk instead of what struck me about the response of Indians.

News came to me primarily from three sources. The standard channels – BBC, CNN, NYTimes – were sparsely informed. Then there was my alumni network, from which came news and opinions. And finally, in search of more, I searched for blogs to find a veritable beehive of activity. Here’s some that will take you much further:

• Global Voices Online
• India Uncut
• Gateway Pundit (with photos)

Among all this chaos, good news. Mumbai Help emerged as one response for people stranded, in search, or stressed. Inspiring stories of four men looking to donate blood, and of good samaritains helping the stranded.

So, what did I note?

The response was largely cautious, even when opinionated. B. Raman’s assertions on Rediff (India’s Yahoo!), were scoffed at. An understandable suggestion on my DIT alumni group that India follow the example of Israel in conducting a ‘Munich’, got the following response (among others), from the person sending in the story of Four Men in a Rickshaw:

But has Israel found peace after the “Munichs” and “Grapes or wraths”?

After bombing almost every city and neighbourhood in Lebanon, after erecting huge walls to segregate themselves and after literally starving the Palestinians, aren’t they as distant from peace and security as ever before?

Whereas India during the same time has seen severe insurgencies and other crisis come and go with places returning to normalcy as if nothing ever happened.

Thank God, or someone, that reason prevails.

The response was secular. No nonsense about grouping Muslims as a community. A statement that ‘majority-Muslim areas don’t seem to have been attacked’, received this response from Death Ends Fun:

Where did that come from, Manish? I mean, these were bombs on trains. Trains packed with people, humans, of every description. Is it possible to imagine that these bombs were timed so that they went off when the trains were away from “majority-Muslim areas”? What sense does it make to say something like this? At a time like this?

Something to chew on for simpletons such as Huntington that see India as a ‘Hindu nation’, and consider liberalism a Western gift to mankind (more on that separately). An epitome to Indian diversity, freedom, and liberty, this reply and the one before.

And finally, the news was so detached from life here. Yes, there was a leader on the BBC website, but that was it. It came to me just as I left to watch a movie at an outdoor cinema. Sober news easily forgotten with sunset by the lake and a dark british comedy to soothe the mind. Geneva, Switzerland, Europe, the West – islands of tranquility existing in an alternate reality. No wonder India has ‘militants’, while the UK, Spain, and the USA have terrorists.

What can I end on? Some mind-numbing statistics? 14 million people live in Mumbai. Between 5-6 million people travel on these trains every day. Now, a few hundred are dead. None that I knew. None that any of the bloggers and emailers knew. Yet, the response was personal. As it should be. This is personal.