The Mumbai attack.

Day before yesterday I went to the Taj, one of the sites of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

My office used to be (It shifted this Monday to Andheri) just outside the Churchgate Station, which is at the max 15 minutes walk both from Colaba (the location of Taj and Leopold) and Marine Drive (the location of Oberoi-Trident). On the day of the attack, I had left the office quite early, walked all the way down to the CST Station and had taken a bus to my hostel around 7:45 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., completely unaware of what was going to happen at that very place (CST) an hour or two down the line.

When Brajesh called to give me the news and ask about my well being, I was in the hostel in the room of Vincent with Santosh. He told that some terrorists were on a shooting rampage down there and suggested me to stay where I was and not to move. I could not understand and argued that it must be gang war between the rival gangs and not the terrorists. Terrorists, after all, do not act this way. Their modus operandi, I argued, is to plant bombs in places and melt back into the larger society from which they emerge. Little did I know that this time, they intended not only to kill a few people, but to attack directly at the very financial hub of India and take the whole nation of 1 billion people hostage.

This was Wednesday, 26th of November.

For the next two days all the offices, including mine, in and around Colaba were closed. Till Saturday night, I was in the hostel more or less completely glued to the television in the hostel canteen, watching the battle going on between the Indian Security Forces (NSG, Army and Mumbai Police) and the handful of terrorists, who had taken a good number of people (mainly foreigners) hostage.

By Sunday morning, the forces had killed all the terrorists (and captured one alive) and taken in control all the three buildings.

On Monday, the offices opened as usual.

Although the life has started to return to normal, there is a rage in the common man through out the country about the repeated failure of the Intelligence and lackluster attitude of the government. Protest marches have been going on through out the country against the failure of the government machinery in protecting its people. So, when I got an SMS from a friend about the protest march going to be held at Gateway of India, I decided to go. Moreover, since my office has shifted to Andheri, I did not have the chance to visit these places after the attack.

So, day before yesterday, just a week after the attack started, I was at the Gateway – to participate in the protest marches and pay my respect to the persons who had died. I had come directly from the office.

What I had expected was a peaceful long candle march of people full of silence. Instead, to my disappointment, what I found was a large number of people divided into a large number of groups walking all over the place in no order and discipline at all. They were all shouting slogans against the government and politicians, calling them names and urging people to use their right of not to vote and show the politicians that enough is enough, that the country is frustrated of them and that it needs a positive and decisive change.

Then there were people who were shouting slogans against Pakistan and were urging India to go to a direct war with the troublesome neighbour. Little do they understand that the government in Pakistan itself is very weak. There, it is the ISI and the Army who are stronger than the government. And although there are evidences about the role of Pakistan based elements in these terrorist attacks against India, I genuinely doubt that war is any solution to the problem. After all, is Pakistan not itself one of the worst victims of terrorism?

The anger that is there in the masses right now must be channeled in the positive direction and a healthy debate must be started as to how the government of this country can be made more accountable and the country more secure and livable. One thing that this attack has definitely shown, apart from giving us the opportunity to discus and debate, that whatever come, India, at the end of the day, is one single country, united both in pain and pleasure. This was a highly needed reminder to the politicians of the ilk of Raj Thackeray. What is sad is that it was an incident of such a high negative magnitude that had to happen to make it amply clear.

P.S. – On a personal front, I have dropped reading the Times of India and Hindustan Times and have graduated instead to The Indian Express. Shifting from the multi-colour pages of ToI and HT to a serious newspaper is no doubt an uphill task. However, I hope I will be able to manage the same. Let’s see.

Bihar - Changing for the better?

Things seem to be changing for the better in one of the states of India where they probably need to change the most. Bihar.

Fifteen years of long rule of Rashtriya Janata Dal is often accused of pushing the state into a state of continuous downward motion. While the state no doubt lost crucial, long years during that period, probably the most unfortunate thing that happened to it was that it came to be looked upon and perceived through the one and only window of Lalu Prasad Yadav; incapable, corrupt and criminal. I remember when I came for my higher educations to Pune in Maharashtra five years back, to my utter surprise, there was this batch mate of mine from Kerala who genuinely wondered if I had seen murders taking place and whether families in my home state kept locally made firearms in their houses.

Fortunately, with the coming in power of the Nitish Kumar government, things have started to change for the better. Not only has Bihar become the first state in the country to accept Right to Information applications over telephone, the state government has also started investing in road, educational and other infrastructures with an state of urgency, apart from organizing meetings with industrialists and Non Resident Biharis in order to convince them to invest in the still unexplored potential of the state. With all this, relatively positive news has started coming out from the state.

A case in point is the issue of India Today dated 7th of July, 2008. The cover story in this issue is titled Pioneers of Change, and talks about fifty entities/individuals picked from all over the country that have not succumbed to the day to day mundane life, but have chosen to do something positive and socially more relevant things for the communities that they live in. And guess what? Out of these fifty stories, three come from the state of Bihar. So while Abhayanand, an Additional DGP, runs a coaching institute and prepares children from poor families for IIT entrance examination completely free of cost in Patna; Prabhat Shandilya has revives more than a dozen abandoned water resources with the help of local youth, in and around the town of Gaya. Three stories out of fifty converts into a healthy 6% for a state with an 8% population share of the whole country. Excellent, I would say, especially considering the fact that there was little, if at all any good news coming out of the state till the very recent past.

Apart from this, it seems, the state has also started to experience the highly needed reverse brain drain. There was this news a week back or two in the national media about one Kaushlendra Prasad, an IIM Ahmedabad graduate choosing not to opt for the placements of the esteemed institute, but instead sell vegetables on modified carts in the streets of Patna to start with, and then take the business nation wide in the years to come. He in fact, has already launched himself in the business and already has a fleet of a hundred or so carts up and running in Patna, the capital city of Bihar. He apparently nurtures a dream of building Brand Bihar and to promote the state as the vegetable basket of the country, and is ready to dedicate the crucial years of his life towards realizing the same. Then again, there is this Dr. Ravi Chandra, a dentist by education and an MBA from the well known Institute of Rural Management Anand, Gujarat, who has also left his well paying job, choosing instead to work with the poor of Bihar in the field of Microfinance through his NGO named Bihar Development Trust. While still struggling to raise more funds, he claims to have been relatively successful and has apparently already disbursed a loan of Rs.10 lakh or so among the poor of Bihar.

While stories like these might not be that important for others, for Bihar they definitely are. After all, it is not very often that people who have gone out of this state return. Can the return of these people be an indication of the things to come in the future? Do they indicate that Bihar is an idea whose time has come and that it will not be too far in the future that the state will rise from its ashes and demand its rightful place in the ranks of the Indian states? Hopefully yes. But then it is a question which probably is answered best when answered by time.