India Uncut
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Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Moving on...
... is hard to do, but it's gotta be done. I won't be updating my post on the Mumbai blasts any more, please look to Mumbai Help for further updates, and to some of the bloggers whose links I've provided in that post.
I haven't quite been in a frame of mind to maintain my regular pace of blogging today, but will resume tomorrow. It shakes one up a bit: we think of terrorist attacks as something that happens to other people, outside of our immediate universe, but these were different. Everyone I know in Mumbai travels in trains regularly, and it could so easily have been me in that train, or any of the Mumbaikars I love and care for.
A friend called me up at five in the morning after a night spent in hospitals and morgues and stations, and the scenes he described were stunning. Mangled bodies, some headless, some with half the head still there and some brain spilling out; the pools of blood at station platforms, the rows of bloody stretchers outside hospitals; the screaming of people whose face was pulp; the crying of people looking for their loved ones, and not knowing what to look for. He'll write about it soon, but no matter how vivid it is, it won't be just a good piece, an interesting article. It'll be a portrait of me and everybody I know, because those, but for the grace of sheer luck, could have been us.
Anyway, we've got to move on. We'll go back to travelling on trains despite knowing that no police on earth can stop such terrorism. We'll go to malls on weekends, despite knowing that they're such logical soft targets, that any moment, boom. Some of us will blog, and will point to funny posts and make wisecracks, or will pontificate self-importantly about the world.
So see you tomorrow.
I haven't quite been in a frame of mind to maintain my regular pace of blogging today, but will resume tomorrow. It shakes one up a bit: we think of terrorist attacks as something that happens to other people, outside of our immediate universe, but these were different. Everyone I know in Mumbai travels in trains regularly, and it could so easily have been me in that train, or any of the Mumbaikars I love and care for.
A friend called me up at five in the morning after a night spent in hospitals and morgues and stations, and the scenes he described were stunning. Mangled bodies, some headless, some with half the head still there and some brain spilling out; the pools of blood at station platforms, the rows of bloody stretchers outside hospitals; the screaming of people whose face was pulp; the crying of people looking for their loved ones, and not knowing what to look for. He'll write about it soon, but no matter how vivid it is, it won't be just a good piece, an interesting article. It'll be a portrait of me and everybody I know, because those, but for the grace of sheer luck, could have been us.
Anyway, we've got to move on. We'll go back to travelling on trains despite knowing that no police on earth can stop such terrorism. We'll go to malls on weekends, despite knowing that they're such logical soft targets, that any moment, boom. Some of us will blog, and will point to funny posts and make wisecracks, or will pontificate self-importantly about the world.
So see you tomorrow.
