Mumbai happened and woke everyone from their slumber. It has shaken every sense of normalcy, of sanity, of . Uunderlying the overpowering feeling of anger is the deep sense of helplessness in the inability to take any action to assauge the gnawing loss. The loss not only of the innocents who were going about their daily life, but the notion of daily life has taken yet another blow.
There is a need to look for answers - why did it happen? Could it have been stopped? Why didn't the intelligence get to know that something so big was being planned? Why didn't they act on what they knew? What are they going to do now? Who can we catch and punish? Who can we blame? This can happen again- what are they doing to make sure that it doesn't?
Can they - whoever the 'they' might be, make sure that something like this doen't happen again? The sad fact of the matter is that these strikes look for what you forget to guard. So, as Ratan Tata said... they had information, they put up barricades out in the front, they checked all the tourists and business travellers coming into Taj - the terrorists used a different entrance - they came through the back.
Can we follow the American model of protecting their homeland? All said and done, Bush, in one of his TV appearences spoke about some of the good done by his administration, and one of the things he said, which cannot be discounted, is that there was 'zero' terror in America after 9/11. No further strikes, no pockets of militancy, nothing. If left unchecked, the sheer magnitude of the initial attack could have created chaos.
SOmetimes the Indian philosophies that rule our mental attitude and the kismat stance may be good for the soul but keeps us crying for physical action!
