Mumbai - some reflections

Mumbai, and the recent terrorist attack it had to withstand - yet again; as I asked a friend whose safety I was anxiously querying, 'how many times I have asked you this same question in the last two years'? - has taken over my thoughts, and much of my conversation, as it must have with every Indian over the last few days. The attack is over - for now - and now we wait for the repercussions, for the inevitable promises on the part of the government in words that mean as little as the actions accompanying them. I doubt that we'll ever know all that transpired, and why - and just how many unfortunate people lost their lives because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

A couple of thoughts are uppermost in my mind - the first concerns the media coverage. We tuned in to NDTV and, predictably, found the news channel concerned with sensationalising the issue - as if it wasn't sensational enough already. Hysterical anchors screamed into their microphones, telling us there's been an attack, here's where it happened, look you can see it right behind me, oh, there's smoke billowing, oh god, I can hear gunshots, and look, here are the NSG commandos; the execrable Barkha Dutt moaned on about how there was a distraught man looking for his sister, how she had received word that there was some foreign woman inside the Taj with her baby, 'with no idea how to get milk for the baby' (as it turned out, there was a baby, but with his father, and miraculously untouched by it all); in the studio, indignant newscasters asked us when it would end, how much more of this are we supposed to take; but in the melee, what was missing was what we had tuned in for - news. Calm reporting of facts, that could tell us what was going on, what we could expect, when we could expect it. We had to turn to the BBC for that.

The BBC gave me the facts I wanted; correspondents in Islamabad told us what was going on at that end and whether it boded well for future India-Pakistan relations; there was incisive analysis and all the while, viewers were kept abreast of events as they unfolded. They interviewed survivors too, but allowed them to tell their stories without butting in with questions about blood and dead bodies, and while NDTV was busy covering every funeral around and exhorting us to invade the privacy of the grieving families and stare at the dead men's wives and children, here's what the BBC did - followed the of a young Muslim man who had been killed, and who was being taken to his village to be buried. There were no intrusive questions, just the picture of yet another grieving family. The only difference - was not someone from the armed forces (and I couldn't be prouder of Karkare's family for refusing Modi's compensation, or Unnikrishnan's father for standing up to the Kerala CM), or someone with Bollywood connections, but an unknown person, and a Muslim. The message couldn't have been clearer. Terrorists, as everyone keeps saying, have no religion. This tragedy has affected people from all religions, from all rungs of the socio-economic hierarchy.

'The media made things worse,' one of friends told me while we were talking about the tragedy. When will the news channels learn that we need facts, not emotionalism or fear-mongering in times of crisis? People watching the news need to know what's going on, and why, and not be told how to feel - not being emotional cretins, we can feel devastated, stunned, worried, and unhappy on our own without being asked to do so by a bunch of so-called journalists yelling into the cameras. And the last thing that people who actually had friends and relatives in the thick of it needed was to be told that there was 'blood everywhere and bodies strewn all over' time and time again.

Here's something that did make me stop and think, though - a ticker on the NDTV channel ran a stream of what seemed like opinions, presumably sent in by viewers. One of them said, 'So far the blasts that have taken place have affected ordinary people. Now that the rich and powerful have been affected, maybe the government will make some stronger policies.' This is a truth that we know all too well - but at times like this, when we're called upon to come together as a nation, it has a greater impact - that we really are a nation where we cannot expect protection, or justice, unless we come from the upper echelons of society. Looking at the NDTV catchline, 'Enough is enough', I couldn't help thinking - have we had enough because this is one attack too many, or is this blast the last straw because it has invaded the sanctum sanctorum, the lives of the rich, the famous, and the powerful? My heart goes out to the people who have lost loved ones, to lives that were snuffed out becaues of motives that I certainly cannot comprehend, and I cannot begin to imagine the terror of those stuck inside the Taj and the Oberoi for three days - and I felt as deeply for those killed in Assam, in Bangalore, in Delhi. But why has there never been a process of identification such as the one that has been taking place with the Times of India journalist ('this one has hit hardest because she was one of us') with victims of the previous blasts? Perhaps because they, for the most part, came from the lower socio-economic rungs and therefore were most emphatically not 'one of us'. Every Indian life is precious - it's sad, then, that the government gets hauled up and the people responsible unceremoniously removed when it's the lives of certain 'important' Indians that have come into the line of fire.

And I do hope there will no retaliatory action taken against Muslim members of Indian society. The last thing we need is more violence, more innocent lives lost, more families shattered.

Postscript - And here's a quote from half-in-half-out-of-the-closet filmmaker Karan Johar, published in today's newspapers: 'We now feel unsafe in our cars with tinted windows and our buildings with multiple watchmen. We now feel what a section of the city's lower-middle class felt on July 11, 2006, when their security was threatened (in the commuter train blasts)'. Clearly, there are two kinds of Othering going on here - one Other is obviously the terrorists, who invariably subscribe to a distorted vision of Islam, and the other Other, much closer home happens to be the 'middle classes' regular, ordinary, unwashed masses, whose insecurity and vulnerability the upper classes have so far exploited in films, novels and art, but have never in the wildest dreams contemplated identifying with. Which, I can't help thinking, has hit them hardest - having the us/them divide breached, or having to contend with terrorist attacks right in their own seemingly secure, luxury backyards?