Two Constants in Life: Death and Terror

This was published on 16 Dec 2008 in my blog but I can't find it anywhere. The next piece "What I Write About When I Write About Running" then became the launch piece for the Mumbai Mirror column.

1.4 - What I Write About, When I Write About Running (with Due Respect to Mr. Murakami)

Background: This was the piece that convinced Meenal to give me my own column. After Writer’s Bloc died a natural death, essentially due to lack of interest and contributors, I didn’t have an outlet for my writing. People who knew me would keep coming up to me all

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

There was an earlier piece I had written - Living with Terror, after the bomb blasts in July 2006.

Living with Terror

Background: This came out on 19 Jul 2006 The original link is here. Man From Matunga: Living with Terror I then wrote about the terror attacks of 26/11. Two Constants in Life: Death and Terror20 days after 26/11Bhavin’s WritingsBhavin Jankharia Like a lot of people, I always remember

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

I also wrote about staying sane in the face of terror in 2025 after the Pahalgam attacks

Counting Down to 90 - Week 1552 - Staying Sane When the World Goes to Pieces

Each time we make a difference to someone’s lives, because we have the power and ability to do so, we add a strong string to the fabric of this world that holds people together in the face of the disruption cause by terrorists and other similar people the world over.

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

I was buying a book at my Annual Conference in Chicago, 3 days after and the bookseller, a native, white Chicagoan, after looking at my tag, which said I was from Mumbai, apologized “It must have been tough?”, his voice modulating clear sympathy. I am normally very polite and careful, especially in a foreign country, but here without thinking, I told him that I would rather not talk about it and could we just discuss the price of the book. 

The next day, I was strolling through the technical exhibition, when a colleague from Hyderabad, who has now settled in the mid-West somewhere, started berating the uselessness of our local police forces and law enforcement. I lost it and said "Yeah, and your adopted country was able to stop two airplanes crashing into the World Trade Centre?" That shut him up. 

I am finally able to write about it, 20 days later.

It is said that people tend to remember what they were doing during earth-shaking events. For e.g., most Americans can easily recall what they were doing when they first heard of 9/11 or John F Kennedy's assassination. I can still clearly remember what I was doing when the 92 riots started or when I first heard about the 93 blasts. The same goes for this time.

It all started with an SMS, that I received at around 12 midnight in Barcelona. "I hope you are fine". I replied, "Why, is there a problem?". The reply came "There have been some terrorist attacks in Mumbai, don’t you know." I immediately switched on the TV and there it was...full coverage on CNN, the smoking Taj forming the backdrop for all the newscasters. I called home and actually managed to get through quite easily...everyone in our immediately family was fine. I called one of my close friends in New York and his family was fine, but he knew of a friend's brother, who had been injured and shot at by the terrorists in the Taj, but was now safe in Bombay Hospital.

By the time it was 4.00AM in Spain and 8.30AM in Mumbai, we managed to get a concerted effort going to keep all our offices and clinics across the city open for the day. Around 50% of the staff turned up. The idea was to "not give in".  Maybe it was foolhardy, but that was an instantaneous gut reaction and I'd like to thank all those who came to work.

We decided that we would not let this affect our Barcelona sightseeing, but there was a difficult-to-explain difference in the way we were looking at the various monuments and museums. Thankfully, we didn't run into any fellow Indians during the day, but the moment we reached the hotel, we bumped into a colleague and there was nothing else we could talk about.

The flight was half empty when we returned 10 days ago and the Jet Airways staff commented on the significant reduction in the number of travelers into Mumbai. When we set foot on the tarmac (the aerobridge was not working), it felt the same as before. The terminal, the immigration officers, the car, our chauffeur, the roads, the signals, the bad drivers, our building and our home; all looked the same and yet...it wasn't the same. Something in the city's air and probably inside us had changed... forever.

So much has changed. My first piece that I had submitted two months ago, for my new column, which hopefully this piece might kick-off, was about the Rs. 90 that Four Seasons Hotel charges for valet parking!  Today, I can't even think of that piece seeing the light of day. Perhaps frivolity in times like these, is the first casualty....I don't know. I am not a sociologist or a crowd-behavior psychologist. Television has no attraction at all; not a single show today seems worth the effort, not one! Once, we used to be die-hard Nach Baliye fans. Today, we can't stand to watch these stupid reality programs. Normally, I can't stand Indian author fiction; during my travel, I finished Adiga's "The White Tiger" in record time, without recoiling at the obvious foreign-focused "Indian" passages, like in Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City. I still get a little unsettled at times wondering if the underclass from the "Darkness" is plotting to takeover the country....if it already hasn't. Having said that...Suketu Mehta's op-ed piece in the N Y Times was particularly cloying with its nostalgia-dripping laments about the tearing of the city’s fabric...again geared to get the average N Y Times, white American reader's sympathy!

Tomorrow I am going to try and catch-up on existential issues with another disturbed friend. Sometimes its just a good idea to live on Syrah Merlot or Laphroaig and then try and make sense in floating ether of something that can't be made sense of in reality; hoping to grasp onto something solid that explains, but which in reality probably just doesn't exist, except in our fragmented, wired minds. And hoping to find ways of coping to live for the rest of our lives with the only other constant in our lives now, apart from death...."terror".