Mumbai hostage drama: The aftermath in my mind

<< The pic on the left shows a Black Cat commando feeding pegions outside the Taj Hotel after flushing out the terrorists on Satruday. At last count 195 people were killed in the attacks

Like most of the people I know, I was fixed to the telly and the phone most of Thursday. Actually, since around 11.30 pm on Wednesday I was hooked to all sources of information. At 11 am on Thursday, I took my two-year-old daughter to the playschool that is on the fifth floor of a building in Baodhan -- a routine affair since the last six days. The kids there were happy, unaffected and perfect. That’s when it became real to me. The feeling in my system seemed so acute, so foreign and so intense that I understood it was, probably, worse than the nausea existential philosopher Sartre described when he encountered reality for the first time. I could feel my veins drain as Mumbai lost blood. I realised, while watching the kids play, that we are all in it. The hostage crisis, the street-shooting, cop car-jacking and the grenade-dropping did not just happen in Mumbai, 146 kilometres from me and around 3,000 km from my parents’ home in the Northeast. It was happening right inside of me and I could feel the aftershocks.
I have a confession to make. The Mumbai suburban train attack and the deadly serial blasts in Guwahati (in which some people and many stray animals were burnt beyond recognition, resulting in those heads not figuring in the casualties list), were somehow not in the my realm of consciousness. They were to me tragic events -- meaning I could look at them with a certain objectivity. But the hostage drama in south Mumbai, for the first time, made me aware what it means to live in a world where there are fidayeens, fanatics, persecution, politicians, stocks and everything else that is not essential for life.
The part of me which imagines negative stuff, wondered how easy it would be to take over the building that houses my daughter’s playschool. The sad part is, such a thought would have never crossed my mind if the Mumbai attack didn’t happen and all of us were not taken through it live on television. This was the first time we saw the terrible face of terror. The thought, that my kid’s school is an easy target, will now stay with me forever.
Probably, Iraqis felt the same way when they saw American planes bomb their country, when Saddam Hussein was still a proud state-head and CNN beamed the war live. Probably, a young Iraqi father taking his two-year-old daughter to playschool might be thinking today how easily an American plane could bomb his kid’s school to rubble again. What I am trying to say is, options of what reality can be are first created in the mind. And then some of these options turn into actual events. Five-star living in India will never be same again, because a horrific option has now been added. Somewhere in the back of our heads we’ll always feel that all posh hotels are also targets of those that believe killing is a legitimate religious option.
When I was growing up, the meaning of freedom and fresh air was different. Freedom meant being free to live the way I pleased and fresh air meant air that we could breath without being grateful. Now, freedom means being allowed to die a natural death and fresh air means an environment that is not in the crossfire. Carbon monoxide content is just an acceptable element. As long as a stray bullet does not strike you in the chest, the air is good enough to breathe.
Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, which I read last year, gave me a few insights about religion in general. He writes that the safest country to live in today in South East Asia is, probably, Bangaladesh because it does not have a nuclear bomb. His reasoning is that a country that has a nuclear bomb is also a bigger potential victim of a nuclear attack. That is why religious fanatics are the greatest danger to their religion. If these fidayeens use religion to justify their act, the day is not far when they will end up being the reasons why their religion was destroyed.
What makes me truly angry is that the blood on the hands of the 10 fidayeens from Faridkot or wherever, will now be put on the hands of innocent Muslims by those that look at terrorism simplistically. The perception that extremism is Islamic will be fortified now.
Much has been said and shown about the Mumbai hostage drama, so I would like to end by paying my tributes to those that lost their lives. I would also like to tip my hat to the brave policemen who proved they are not just a bunch of incredulous losers, but real men who get a bad name because of the dirty cowards in their ranks.