Indomitably indomitable
Yikes. What a week.
I was safely tucked away here in Goa, but the serial blasts on July 11 (which have at the last count killed 185 people) had me scrambling to get through to friends in Bombay, relying on SMS cos the phone lines were jammed. Thankfully, all were safe and sound, with one only by a whisker - my Time Out co-worker Pravin, who was on one of the trains but fortunately in the wrong carriage. Or the right carriage, if you want to quibble. Or one of the right carriages, anyway. Dammit, you know what I'm trying to say. He's alive, that's the main thing.
Anyway, now the usual media mania unfolds, and as always I find mind myself wondering how useful it all really is. A conscientious blogger would scour the web for links to highlight various recurring themes of the coverage and to give those living overseas an insight into how the Indian media has reacted to the blasts. I don't need to bother with all that, thanks to my patented In-Depth™Instant News Analyzer:
1) The spirit of Mumbai is indomitable.
2) Witnesses helped the victims, instead of running away, or stealing their wallets.
3) The disaster will be known as 7/11, even though it means November 7th in Indian usage and sounds like a convenience store chain.
4) Pakistan did it.
5) The government, police and intelligence services are crap.
7) The spirit of Mumbai is, in fact, indomitable.
One thing that occurred to me, as I pulled out my mobile to check everyone was okay, was that I already knew that several of my friends and acquaintances were perfectly fine, because they never, ever take the trains, for reasons I have outlined in a previous post, i.e. they are rich. The bombs were all on 1st class carriages - which makes this attack pinpointed at Mumbai's middle class. The city's real power brokers are never going to be harmed by these kinds of attacks, and I suspect that makes a major difference to how the authorities react to them, which is largely to do nothing and carry on like before. We are still waiting for convictions for the 1993 blasts for example, an astonishing 13 years later.
Hmmm.
My reaction to the blasts was more or less what I had felt after the London blasts of July 7 last year - shock, outrage, anger - except I had less of a sense that it had been a long time coming because of Tony Blair's decision to 'defend Britain' by invading a nation that had nothing to do with a terrorist attack that had happened in another nation.
I recall that a main feature of the media coverage of the London attacks was that the word 'stoic' suddenly got thrust back into the limelight after a lengthy period of relative obscurity. My friend Jason Read, the cynical old bastard, suggested to me that the much-vaunted 'stoicism' of Londoners at the time was actually just the long-suffering fatalism that they usually employ to cope with life in the Big Smoke, as in: "Terrorism? Oh, great. Fucking typical."
If you ask me, the indomitability of Mumbaikars is actually a cousin of the same trait - except that in addition to floods and sky-high rents they also have to put up with shitty infrastructure, the world's fifth-worst urban air pollution, lousy public services, and incompetent, corrupt and apathetic government. As appalling as the July 11 attacks have been in terms of loss of life, it has still not been as bad as the totally avoidable devastation of the July 26 floods last year, when 447 Mumbaikars died from collapsing walls, electrocution, drowning and disease. So Londoners really should try and cheer up a bit.
Still, if the media calls Mumbaikars 'indomitable' enough times maybe they'll feel better about all the bullshit they have to put up with.
Time Out Mumbai editor Naresh Fernandes also gets a bit annoyed with the 'indomitable' thing in a New York Times op-ed from July 12 that you can read here, but then decides it's probably appropriate after all, especially the day after the attacks.
By next week, though, I expect he will be sick to the back teeth of it.
I was safely tucked away here in Goa, but the serial blasts on July 11 (which have at the last count killed 185 people) had me scrambling to get through to friends in Bombay, relying on SMS cos the phone lines were jammed. Thankfully, all were safe and sound, with one only by a whisker - my Time Out co-worker Pravin, who was on one of the trains but fortunately in the wrong carriage. Or the right carriage, if you want to quibble. Or one of the right carriages, anyway. Dammit, you know what I'm trying to say. He's alive, that's the main thing.
Anyway, now the usual media mania unfolds, and as always I find mind myself wondering how useful it all really is. A conscientious blogger would scour the web for links to highlight various recurring themes of the coverage and to give those living overseas an insight into how the Indian media has reacted to the blasts. I don't need to bother with all that, thanks to my patented In-Depth™Instant News Analyzer:
1) The spirit of Mumbai is indomitable.
2) Witnesses helped the victims, instead of running away, or stealing their wallets.
3) The disaster will be known as 7/11, even though it means November 7th in Indian usage and sounds like a convenience store chain.
4) Pakistan did it.
5) The government, police and intelligence services are crap.
7) The spirit of Mumbai is, in fact, indomitable.
One thing that occurred to me, as I pulled out my mobile to check everyone was okay, was that I already knew that several of my friends and acquaintances were perfectly fine, because they never, ever take the trains, for reasons I have outlined in a previous post, i.e. they are rich. The bombs were all on 1st class carriages - which makes this attack pinpointed at Mumbai's middle class. The city's real power brokers are never going to be harmed by these kinds of attacks, and I suspect that makes a major difference to how the authorities react to them, which is largely to do nothing and carry on like before. We are still waiting for convictions for the 1993 blasts for example, an astonishing 13 years later.
Hmmm.
My reaction to the blasts was more or less what I had felt after the London blasts of July 7 last year - shock, outrage, anger - except I had less of a sense that it had been a long time coming because of Tony Blair's decision to 'defend Britain' by invading a nation that had nothing to do with a terrorist attack that had happened in another nation.
I recall that a main feature of the media coverage of the London attacks was that the word 'stoic' suddenly got thrust back into the limelight after a lengthy period of relative obscurity. My friend Jason Read, the cynical old bastard, suggested to me that the much-vaunted 'stoicism' of Londoners at the time was actually just the long-suffering fatalism that they usually employ to cope with life in the Big Smoke, as in: "Terrorism? Oh, great. Fucking typical."
If you ask me, the indomitability of Mumbaikars is actually a cousin of the same trait - except that in addition to floods and sky-high rents they also have to put up with shitty infrastructure, the world's fifth-worst urban air pollution, lousy public services, and incompetent, corrupt and apathetic government. As appalling as the July 11 attacks have been in terms of loss of life, it has still not been as bad as the totally avoidable devastation of the July 26 floods last year, when 447 Mumbaikars died from collapsing walls, electrocution, drowning and disease. So Londoners really should try and cheer up a bit.
Still, if the media calls Mumbaikars 'indomitable' enough times maybe they'll feel better about all the bullshit they have to put up with.
Time Out Mumbai editor Naresh Fernandes also gets a bit annoyed with the 'indomitable' thing in a New York Times op-ed from July 12 that you can read here, but then decides it's probably appropriate after all, especially the day after the attacks.
By next week, though, I expect he will be sick to the back teeth of it.
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