Author Suketu Mehta in the New York Times on the Mumbai terrorist mayhem.
MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.
Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.
The rest of the article here. (Mehta is a bit over the top with his sentimentality, just as many New Yorkers were after 9/11. But what he says about the religious tolerance of big, diverse Indian megapolises used to be true only a decade or so ago – that’s the India in which I grew up.)
Accidental Blogger 
4 responses to “My Bleeding City”
I must say that I’ve seen a lot of gushing, purple prose in the last 2-3 days from Indian writers (worse than Mehta’s). It is probably bad manners to point this out right now but I particularly don’t understand the obsession with the lovely Taj, how it defines the spirit of the city, the iconic dome, symbol of my city, etc. It’s a bloody building, people, worry about other stuff! It’s a hotel of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy, into which 99.9% of Mumbai denizens cannot muster the courage to set foot; it’ll be repaired in a year. Further, too many Indians are getting carried away by calling this India’s 9/11, which it certainly isn’t, as Amitav Ghosh notes in his sensible article.
LikeLike
Namit:
Ghosh’s article is indeed level headed and very good.(Now will you start reading Sea of Poppies as I plan to do tonight?) That is my own take also – that India should not be provoked into launching a rash response but should methodically and calmly increase internal security as well as carry on an investigation to find the right culprits. India also has a huge coast line. This new pathway into the country with scant patrol at sea is worrisome.
As I heard from my sister, people are quite rattled. After all, even though this was the most spectacular attack, it is hardly the first. Naturally, nerves are frayed. One of my sister’s chilhood friends whom I also know well, lives right behind the Mumbai Oberoi and saw the hotel burning all night.
As news reports are now making it clear, the Mumbai police force was woefully unprepared for this kind of an attack. More lives were probably saved by the staff and guests at the two hotels than by the police. A small contingent of South African commandos who had accompanied their national cricket team to Mumbai was dining in one of the hotels at the time of the ambush. A half a dozen of them helped some 150 other guests to safety. The Indian rapid response team arrived too late into the seventy hour ordeal. No wonder the incompetent Home Minister has resigned.
While purple prose from Indian writers is a bit overblown, so is the denial from some Pakistanis who are suggesting that the Hindu right may have orchestrated this to win elections. That to me appears to be the same kind of B.S. that was floating around after 9/11 – that Israel blew up the twin towers in NYC and no Jews were working that day.
LikeLike
Here’s another sensible take from Juan Cole, although he does elaborate the 9/11 comparison. I really sympathize with Namit’s disdain for the cheap, discordant symbolism of a luxury hotel made to stand for some classless utopia.
LikeLike
Courtesy of Brian Leiter’s Philosophy Blog, this.
LikeLike