Bombay to Burgh

For once, in India, I am part of a majority: I don’t think there is any way to express my shock and sadness at what’s been happening to the city that I have come to consider my home away from home, where I can count so many of my dear friends.   An unfortunate side-effect of my move to New York City to intern at the United Nations was that B2B lost steam and petered to a halt shortly after I relocated to my little room in Astoria, Queens, and found myself immersed in the day-to-day exegencies and long extra hours of helping out a UN special programme.  My head might have been occupied with the UN, but my heart was and is tethered securely to the city of Bombay – so beautiful and entrancing despite its messes, crowds, and sometimes unkind weather.

A flurry of phone calls when I returned from work on Wednesday evening (I had not even known about the attack until I received a voicemail from my mom – none of us in the office had been checking the news online, nor were there many people left at the UN to inform us owing to early holiday dismissal) confirmed that all of my friends were safe.  Safe, but shaken.  Steshia, my supervisor at CRY America, told me that the whole group almost went to Leopold’s (where one of the shootings took place) to celebrate a colleague’s departure that night prior to the attack. They went to another uptown spot for the outing, but how close they were to harm’s way gave me a chill.

It is also chilling to see the images on the screen, familiar to me but tinged with a new horror: The besieged, bullet-riddled Oberoi, which I’d written about in a prior post; the blood caked and smeared across the green slate floor of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, probably just metres from where I sat in wait for my train to Kolkata.  And the smoke and flames belching from the Taj Hotel, a structure that I passed on a couple of occasions en route to the Gateway of India.

CNN places the current death tool at 160, with a massacre at the Chabad Jewish center further darkening the whole ugly incident. Now the news is that the Indian government has ended all international video transmissions.  This is not surprising.  Last night, Jeevan expressed her disgust to me that the networks were broadcasting sensitive strategic information that could be used by the terrorists.  I’m sure that sentiment was felt throughout the country, and government eventually decided to act.

Deepak Chopra was on CNN the other evening, laying out a suggested plan of action for the Indian authorities in getting to the bottom of this case, as well as preventing such things in the future.  He made a lot of sense, suggesting approaches that the U.S. should have taken following 9/11, rather than entering twin wars of attrition.  In India, a country that faces such a stark divide between the upper class and the vast, poverty-stricken, largely voiceless and hopeless underclass, this attack could represent a symptom of a greater ill.  Presuming that this was a homegrown terror group (which is looking to be up for debate as PM Manmohan Singh has now referred to outside actors) – these terrorists were young men in their 20s.  One report from an eyewitness at Leopold’s said that the gunmen looked ‘like boys.’  As a colleague of mine from CRY pointed out, they probably led absolutely dejected, hopeless lives, hence they would be easily cowed into violent action by some idealog looking for reliable hatchet men.  Now convinced that the lives of their families and communities will somehow be better if they drive out the corrupting western influence through extreme violence, they pose a serious threat.  And, they have the directive from whomever is manipulating them that it’s God’s will for them to do so, which only further galvanizes their resolve.  Despite that, it’s worth noting that Islamic extremism may be only part of a greater more obscured whole.  The aims of such actions have more to do with complex struggles for power and influence, with religious zeal being more a ‘carrier signal’ than a modus operandi.

But throughout India, there are many such ‘hopeless pockets’ that could be potential breeding grounds for anti-western, anti-government, anti-everything feelings. It’s my hope that human rights-based organizations like CRY can do their part to convince marginalized populations – and especially their children, who are as susceptible to all kinds of negative ideas about how the world works as they are the positive ones – that it is within their power to effect change.  I have hope for the power of public petition winning out over that of armed action, but there is a lot of persuasion to be done.  An India free of terrorism, with a strengthened, more attentive government, and with people who feel politically empowered and not locked permanently into a position on the social hierarchy, would make it well worth the effort.