Accidental Blogger

It is human nature to want to find a personal connection to triumph and tragedy. Cries of solidarity, "Today we are all Americans," (here, here and here) were heard from all over the world after 9/11/2001. John McCain declared, "Today we are all Georgians," during the recent Russian-Georgian conflict (although there is reason to believe that Georgia attacked first). Being an Indian by birth, the Mumbai tragedy is of course somewhat more personal to me than it is to the average American, Japanese or Argentinian. But I can hardly claim, "Today I am … or we are all Mumbaikars."  [Mumbaikar= Bombayite] I cannot in all honesty, quite imagine what the death and injury of the victims mean to them and to their families. But we try to empathize by imagining ourselves facing the same terrifying ordeals that the victims must have encountered.  Several of my friends, all of whom know that I come from Delhi, have called in the last few days to inquire if everyone in my family was alright. The first thing that I myself asked my sister and my journalist brother-in-law was if every one they know in Mumbai was safe. Not everyone was. A former colleague of my BIL is presumed dead. She was in a room in the Taj Hotel that was adjacent to the one where the terrorists had initially gathered on the 6th floor. Text messages from her cell phone went out for nearly two hours following the first conflagration, after which there was no further communication. Does the death of this journalist whom I had never met and which made me quite sad, turn the Mumbai incident into a personal experience for me? I don’t think so, unless you compute "personal" in a very loose six degrees of separation kind of way.

We are NOT all Mumbaikars today but it is a polite way to show solidarity by saying that we are. But of course, there are several genuine Mumbaikars within the Indian American community and anxiety was understandably widespread among them when the news of the carnage first broke. Houston Indians gathered at the city’s India House to offer prayers and express support for India. Among them were many from Mumbai whose "personal" stories are reported in today’s Houston Chronicle.   

Namit spoke of the purple prose of Indian writers in the aftermath of the attack in Mumbai. How about some pale yellow journalism? While reading the Chronicle’s general human interest story, I came across a ridiculously irrelevant piece of trivia:

Despite a decade or more of bombings and suicide attacks in their native city, former Mumbai residents said the carnage that began Wednesday and ended Saturday with nearly 200 deaths outdid their worst imaginings. They joined with religious and civic leaders at Houston’s India House cultural center on Sunday.

"This attack wasn’t an attack on India. It wasn’t an attack on Westerners. It was an attack on humanity," said Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, who wore a gray suit tailored for him during a visit to Mumbai. [emphasis mine]

Now, Judge Emmett, a very active public official who was responsible for the evacuation plan during Hurricane Ike, is I am sure, sincerely outraged by the terrorist incident in Mumbai. But what in the whole wide world, does his gray suit tailored in Mumbai have to do with anything? I don’t blame Judge Emmett for wearing his desi suit during the visit to India House and I don’t even mind that he may have mentioned it to his Indian audience and to the reporter. However, why did the reporter choose to report it? How many degrees of separation are there between the judge, his tailor in Mumbai and a terrorist act?