The Bombay Attacks

I woke up to the horrifying news of the Bombay (Mumbai) attacks this morning. At 6:30 in the morning, my husband, a journalist, was preparing to go to India to help with the media coverage.
I turned on the TV. By 8 a.m. (5:30 a.m. in India), BBC had told us about 16 attacks, 78 people killed, 200 wounded and hundreds held hostage.

Good morning world.

This is the world we live in now. The news could be coming out of Bombay, or London, or Karachi, or anywhere else in the world. It is always bad, each attack adding some new horror, some new “efficiency” to the killing. In the 7 years since 9/11, we have seen attacks in Britain, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey… More that I can’t even remember at the moment.… One would think the world is now firmly divided between those who terrorise and those who are under threat.

Yet, in Bombay this morning, a young woman interviewed on BBC spoke of another threat to peace: political exploitation of the attacks to narrow party political ends, which could very possibly end in communal rioting. All this while the fire still raged at the Taj hotel, an old Bombay landmark, and while hundreds of Indians and foreigners were still being held hostage at 3 locations in Bombay.

I don’t know which is the biggest tragedy. The deadly terrorist attacks that are so much a part of our lives now, the feeling that our politicians will stop at nothing to grab power – or the lack of faith in ourselves as a society, the feeling that we can be easily manipulated to kill more innnocent people rather than fighting the terrorists.