India Burning?

It was 2:30 pm on the afternoon before the Thanksgiving break. Both my room mates were gone for the vacations. I was watching a movie on my computer, when all of a sudden my friend online sends me the message "did you hear...it is awful..." I had no idea whatsoever she was talking about and then "Mumbai is attacked". At the back of the mind, I immediately formed a picture about a medieval battle field (or at least the modern day representation of the medieval battlefield). I saw the news online and I was shocked to see the images and videos of the attack. Mumbai was literally attacked. The actual situation looked like a medieval battlefield with a group of militants firing openly on the civilians on the streets and in railway station. The images of the injured, bleeding hand of a youth as he is falling down dead is still fresh in my mind. The official death toll on cnn.com was 70 people. Slowly as the time passed the numbers rose, they rose as the count of minutes.

Mumbai is the financial capital of India, a major city with a huge population. Mumbai is the land of Bollywood, is the land of dreams and aspirations. 'He is in Mumbai now', so many parents across the country said with pride, as if that is the only thing they strived for throughout their lives. And now it is attacked...So many frantic phone calls to see if they were safe. I was one of those frantic callers, trying to find out if my father was there. Mixed feelings of joy and fear, when I heard he stayed the night before in the Taj but was now safe in Surat; joy that he had left and fearful at the thought of what could have happened.


Mumbai attack is the proof that in the past 60 years of independence we haven't moved anywhere. The British divided us so many years ago, the people responsible for the act are only in the history books but even today we stand at the same place, with no real progress towards harmony. Last ten years of effort to make peace with Pakistan after Kargil had been proved worthless, specially with the media blasting news against Pakistan. I don't know who is right or who is wrong. India is as big of a threat to the Pakistanis as they are to us, it was never a one sided war... but in this game of power between the two countries, it is the innocent people that get crushed in the deal. As a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I have the great pleasure to know many foreign nationals and as a matter of fact if our culture resembles with any country, then it is Pakistan. We share the similar food habits, speak similar languages, wear similar clothes, you can't really look at a person and pick on whether she is Indian or Pakistani...then why are we half the way across the world from our home lands being split in this deal?

The number of terrorist attacks and bombings in the past few months has made 'bomb' a common word for the Indians. They are no longer scared (or perhaps, they are perpetually scared, not that it matters either ways). Every major city has been bombed. Personally, almost all my close family members have been very close to at least one attack. I was in Surat when the Maruti car filled with bomb was found. My family was near Ahmedabad close to the time of attack there. My maternal uncle and grandparents live in Guwahati. And at this point I am not sure if I am scared of that or adjusted to and accepted that. There is no affirmative action that I am taking or I will take, because I am too scared...I will chicken out...but remember if we chicken out now, then it will be our children, our future generations, that will pay for this with more blood...