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Saturday, November 21, 2009

Vol. 3 No. 46

LOUNGE 26/11 ONE YEAR LATER THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

THE PSEUDO PEACE PROPHET >Page 16

THE MORNING AFTER

For a Mint journalist who endured the harrowing ordeal at the Taj, the past year has been one of healing >Page 4

THE UNITY OF ALL BEINGS The man who played interpreter for one of the terrorists on how he has been transformed spiritually >Page 5

Vir Sanghvi wants to know who really speaks for Mumbai, Aakar Patel asks who made Pakistan ungovernable, and Shoba Narayan tries to decipher why Mumbai is bigger than the sum of its parts

DISQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

The clues to decoding the anatomy of a spectacular, horrific act of terror often lie in the absurd >Page 17

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

Plus: We met people who narrowly escaped bullets and braved a year of doubt, introspection, rage and hope

After spending the night of 26 November at the Taj, Alok Vajpeyi, a veteran of the mutual fund industry, reassessed his life and career.

JAMSHYD ‘GREEN’ GODREJ

HOME PAGE L3

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.

THE YEAR AFTER 26/11

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

It has been one year since that regular, weekday night, but a lot remains unspoken and unexamined.

To mark the anniversary of 26/11/2008, ‘Lounge’ revisited people who were, in some crucial way, affected by the attack. We found that every story was gripping, shocking and heroic, all at once.

Mohammed Taufiq, the ‘chaiwallah’ who helped injured victims, says he is angry and tired of being asked why he helped people escape despite being a Muslim. We met the cleaning staff of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station, who performed the gruesome task of scrubbing the

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN VENKATESHA BABU SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT (MANAGING EDITOR, LIVEMINT)

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI ©2009 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

platforms clean of dried blood.

Our favourite columnist Vir Sanghvi feels strongly about Mumbai and he returns to ‘Lounge’ just for this week to analyse why there has been no significant change for the good; Sreenivasan Jain, managing editor of NDTV 24x7, deconstructs the process of interpreting an event of this magnitude; and Altaf Tyrewala, the Mumbai­based author of ‘No God in Sight’, wonders why all the initial rage the city showed dissipated so soon.

This issue is to remember heroes, and to remind ourselves of what that November will always stand for.

FIRST CUT

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

PRIYA RAMANI

WHICH CITY IS BETTER, DELHI OR MUMBAI? NEITHER PLEASE KUNAL PATIL/HINDUSTAN TIMES

LOUNGE WEB EXCLUSIVE: The column Stall Order by Nandini Ramnath appears only on the Web this week.

To read, visit www.livemint.com/stallorder

MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT

E

very time I meet someone for the first time in Delhi, where I have lived since August last year, they invariably ask me: “So Delhi must be tough after Bombay, no? Which do you prefer, Delhi or Bombay?”

For the first six months I said, Bombay of course! Or, when I was feeling non-communicative I snarled: “Surely you know the answer to that question!”

Then I got bored of my response. “If you have a good pedicurist and a good driver,” I began saying, “you can survive any city.”

Recently though, I can’t understand why anyone thinks either of these cities is worth living in. Just a couple of weeks before the anniversary of 26/11, ANTI­CITY Nationalist Congress Party politician R.R. Patil was reinstated as the state’s home minister. Everyone remembers what Patil said after 26/11: “Big cities face these kinds of small problems.” Those of us whose links with the city go back further in time also remember him as the man who was responsible for shutting down the city’s dance bars.

One year after, we have empirical proof that last November’s terror attacks didn’t impact the inertia dynamics of the city I call home. We continued in the same direction at the same speed, despite all that disturbance. Yes, I wasted my vote and failed the

TODAY’S BLOG

David Lynch to do Sexy Sadie

By Sidin Vadukut

This and more at blogs.livemint.com/livelounge ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT None of the above: The politicians and elite of both Mumbai (left) and Delhi are a huge let­down. good citizen test too.

And as we head for 26/11/2009, concerns about preparedness and attacks have been replaced by yet another Size Zero debate: The trials of the Marathi manoos. The Shiv Sena’s first senior citizen Bal Thackeray rejoined the shrill Maharashtrian chorus earlier this week and railed against Sachin Tendulkar’s comment that while he was proud of being a Maharashtrian, he is an Indian first. Thackeray better watch out before taking on this Mumbai Indian. The city may believe that casting ballots is unfashionable but we all know Breach Candy and Borivali would make an exception for Tendulkar.

And Delhi? The less said about it the better.

Last week Virender Sehwag’s mother was replaced in the popular imagination by Manu Sharma’s mother. The spoilt brat parole buster finally crawled back into jail after a teary letter to ma.

But nothing Sharma said in his letter reflected the city’s self-important psyche as beautifully as this quote from tycoon Samir Thapar after he was mistakenly arrested at Delhi’s newest posh nightclub, which is run by two boys from Bombay. “I walked out of LAP at around 3am. When I started my car, the cops caught hold of me and dragged me into

their Gypsy. At first I thought that maybe the sound of my Ferrari’s engine was too loud.” Delhi is the city where restaurants carry the “Firearms not allowed” sign; it’s a playground for young men who speed on our best highways and shoot truck tyres for sport.

So these days when people ask me if I prefer Delhi or Mumbai, I say: “It’s like asking whether I prefer Bal or Raj.” Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com Priya Ramani blogs at blogs.livemint.com/firstcut

LOUNGE LOVES | BOOKAROO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE FESTIVAL

Young readers’ fest A weekend of storytelling, author interactions and more B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

····························· f you caught Bookaroo in New Delhi last year, you would know that the festival was as much fun for adults as it was for children.

Book-reading sessions under a banyan tree, sketching on a doodle wall and getting to meet authors your children love—a great way to spend the weekend.

The festival is back this year with 64 events and 44 authors and performers as opposed to 44 events and 26 authors last year. Among those to watch out for are Andrew Cope, the author of the best-selling Spy Dog series and of self-help books for children; Muriel Bloch, one of France’s leading storytellers; Namita Gokhale and Alister Taylor, who will bring epics such as Mahabharat to life; Benita and

I

Moen Sen’s workshop on creating useful things out of waste paper; and Michael Panckridge, who will talk about cricket legends.

“This is a platform for children to see various aspects of art, and its association with books. That’s why, apart from book readings, we have included non-storytelling events to attract more children to books,” says M. Venkatesh, a founder member of Bookaroo and the children’s books columnist for Lounge.

Both the organizers and workshop conductors are clear that they don’t want rigidly tailored workshops. “I am not going to give the children any topics or tell them what to design on the doodle wall,” says Atanu Roy, an author and illustrator who will be conducting the “Mr Amazing” art workshop. A view that is echoed by Andrew Dodd of Campfire books: “We are organizing two cartoondrawing workshops—‘Doodle Dandy!’ by Bhupendra Ahluwalia and ‘Crazy Toons!’ by Sankha Banerjee. The brief we have given to

both our illustrators is to make these sessions interactive and let the children have fun without being told what to do.”

Campfire books is also organizing a show with puppeteer Varun Narain based on their latest book Alice in Puppetland.

Aside from enjoying a math workshop, sessions with illustrators and a talk with a Shapers: An art workshop at Bookaroo 2008. self-help guru, the festival organizers hope that chil- performances earlier for children dren will write the world’s longest but this is the first time we will be Friendship poem (“Friendship doing it for a large, mixed age-group Rap!”—a poem-writing workshop), crowd. We have two pieces schedlearn how to choose good books uled, one for older children based for themselves (“Mirror, Mirror on on what we already do and another the Wall, What is a Good Book story about children going to school.

After All?”—a panel discussion) It is an experiment for us too, one and learn more about human that we hope works,” says Farooqui. rights (“I Have a Right”—a workshop by Anushka Ravishankar) On 28 and 29 November, at SanAmong the highlights of the festi- skriti Anand Gram, Mehrauli-Gurval is a Dastangoi performance by gaon Road, New Delhi. Entry to the Mahmood Farooqui and Danish festival is free. A few events require Husain on 28 November which is prior registration. For details, log on open for all. “We have done a few to www.bookaroo.in

L4 FIRST PERSON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MANOJ PATIL/HINDUSTANTIMES

Ground zero: ATS officers outside the hotel on the night of the attacks.

I PARIZAAD KHAN

THE MORNING AFTER

A MINT JOURNALIST ENDURED THE HARROWING ORDEAL AT THE TAJ ON THE NIGHT OF 26/11 AND EMERGED PHYSICALLY UNSCATHED. STILL, THE YEAR THAT FOLLOWED HAS BEEN ONE OF HEALING MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT

Enduring icon: Tourists in front of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower’s heritage wing that was destroyed—parts of it will reopen later this month.

t’s been one year since I spent a night at the Taj. Not ensconced in a plush suite but with a roomful of people, lying on the floor of The Chambers with our heads under our hands, squashed together like the mismatched pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which have been forced to fit. After hours of listening to the grenade blasts and machine-gun fire that came from right outside the room, we were rescued in the morning by the National Security Guard (NSG).

The days that followed, however, were more traumatic, when the seriousness of what had happened that night set in.

When you’re running from bullets, you don’t understand how close you came to death, you’re just happy you escaped it.

People who have been through such situations will know that the fear doesn’t fade instantly. For weeks, some of the worst moments we spent there kept playing over and over in my head like a loop, along with every imaginable “what if” scenario. That’s when I learnt that “blood runs cold” is not just a writer’s cliché—it can actually happen.

When I went back to work four days later, I read every single newspaper I could find.

After days of a self-enforced news blackout, that information was overwhelming.

I had a panic attack on the way back home and realized I needed help. Going to a psychiatrist was the best thing I did, and it helped hearing the kind doctor assure me that my memories of the incident would not fade with time, but the emotions associated with it would. A few sessions with him made a big difference.

Soon I got tired of being afraid. When I went out to dinner or a club, I wanted to eat my dinner or enjoy my drink without constantly keeping an eye out for alternate exit routes. It’s when you realize that you don’t want to be scared any more that things begin to improve.

Far worse than what I went through that night was what my family had to endure, waiting for me to come home.

For a long time they were more frightened than I was. I also found it difficult to reconcile with how victims who were more unfortunate than me suffered. The least we could have done for them, in my opinion, was go vote during the general election earlier this year. Instead, people who made it a point to be there for candlelight vigils after the attacks forgot that they could actually make a difference instead of just lighting a candle.

In a year nothing much has changed—Mumbai’s legendary

chalta hai attitude means that we still don’t have life jackets for our cops and our firemen can only reach fires that break out on or lower than the 12th floor because we don’t have longer ladders. We still have insufficient security procedures at our local railway stations, three years after the 2006 blasts.

Despite the lack of any positive change, there are professionals who are still as dedicated to their job as they were. One example is M.M. Begani—one of the doctors who cared for the injured at Bombay Hospital (he has been profiled in this issue on page 9). Of the 54 patients admitted to the hospital in the first 24 hours, the doctor and his colleagues managed to save all but three.

Interviewing him was not easy. I was constantly aware that had that night turned out any different, I could have been one of his patients—but I knew it was something I needed to do for myself.

During this year I’ve had to deal with a few instances of insensitive dinner conversation and even more insensitive business opportunities. A week or so after the attacks, a public relations executive called to ask if we would like to do a story about their yacht-owning client who was willing to rent out his boat for business meetings since luxury hotels were no longer safe. When I told her off for being insensitive, it was assumed that my objection to the issue was because I was a victim of the attacks, not because exploiting a terrible incident of terrorism for commercial gain was a business plan that was morally flawed.

The maiming of my Taj was also hard to take. It’s never been just a building; the reason it was built makes it a symbol of freedom and Bombay pride.

Personally, too, it has always been special—the Sea Lounge was my grandfather’s daily morning haunt, where he sat drinking tea and reading the newspapers before his workday. My brother and I often accompanied him and got to eat ice cream adorned with a Pickwick-style wafer biscuit with long spoons from posh bowls, and got to wipe our sticky hands on fine linen.

After the attacks, I’ve gone back to the Taj thrice, and was most relieved to discover that it stills smells the same—an unidentifiable, indescribable scent that reminds me of pista ice cream. parizaad.k@livemint.com To read Parizaad Khan’s account a day after the attacks, go to www.livemint.com/ lifelesson.htm

FIRST PERSON L5 SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PTI

PV VISWANATH

THE UNITY OF ALL BEINGS THE PROFESSOR WHO MADE POSSIBLE NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN A MUMBAI TERRORIST AND A CHABAD EMISSARY IN THE US ON HOW THAT ROLE CHANGED HIM SPIRITUALLY AP

B Y B LESSY A UGUSTINE blessy.a@livemint.com

···························· .V. Viswanath, a professor of finance at the Lubin School of Business, Pace University, New York, grew up in Mumbai and migrated to the US in 1975. An orthodox Jew, he visits Mumbai every summer to catch up with friends and family. But last winter, even as he went about his routine in New York, he got involved with Mumbai’s terror attack.

Viswanath, or Meylekh as he is known among his Jewish friends, acted as an interpreter in the negotiations between Imran Babar, the terrorist who held five hostages at the Jewish centre of Nariman House, and Rabbi Levi Shemtov, a Chabad emissary in Washington.

Viswanath told Lounge about life after the 12-hour negotiations. Edited excerpts:

P

Long haul: National Security Guard commandos at Nariman House.

Did you know Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg personally?

I visit Bombay every year. When I come to Bombay, I try to go to Chabad House at least once. I met with him several summers in this way. Then, in 2007, I came in March with my daughter and spent a Sabbath in south Bombay. I ate Sabbath meals at Chabad House and got to know his family as well.

Can you narrate the sequence of events that night?

On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, I was in my office in New York, preparing notes for a finance class I was set to teach the next week. I got a call from my nephew, Naftali Ejdelman, who told me that Chabad was trying to find Indian language speakers to help them deal with the terrorist crisis under way in Bombay at that time.

I contacted them. It transpired that Levi Shemtov, a Chabad rabbi, had managed to contact Imran, one of the terrorists at Chabad House who was in possession of the

cellphone of Holtzberg, the Chabad emissary in Mumbai.

Over the next 12 hours or so, I acted as an interpreter while Shemtov spoke to Imran. The main demand Imran had was to be put in touch with somebody in the Indian government.

Unfortunately, we had difficulties finding such a person, and even when we did locate an Indian official willing to speak to the terrorists, technical reasons made actual conversation between him and Imran impossible.

Did Imran’s calm voice anger you?

I tried to be only an interpreter and, hence, as dispassionate as possible. There was no time to think of personal feelings.

How do you look back at that night now?

I didn’t feel hatred—just sorrow for the loss of the lives of Holtzberg and his wife, whose mission was compassion and helping others. At the same time, many other people died in the terrorist attack as well—not one of them deserved to die in that way. I felt, and still feel, a kinship with each one of them as a fellow Bombayite.

You visited the place in March.

It was strange standing outside the partially destroyed building, a building that was full of warmth and helpfulness and charity.

The title story of Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ is about a man who translates people’s ailments to a doctor who doesn’t speak their language. It’s a forced parallel, but what is it like understanding what someone is demanding of you and what is the role of language in all this?

The reason the protagonist in the Interpreter of Maladies is able to do a good job is that he not only speaks Gujarati, but he comes from a Gujarati-speaking background; he understands the culture of Gujaratis.

I think I was able to do a reasonably good job of

interpretation because I am familiar with the culture of India, Pakistan as well as that of the Ashkenazic Jews (I speak Yiddish as well, though this language was not used that night) and also with the culture of modern America. And, of course, I speak Urdu/Hindi and English. Still, some of the terms Imran used were not immediately accessible to me (though I don’t believe this at all affected my ability to understand him) and I perhaps used more circumlocutions in my translations from English to Urdu than a born Urdu speaker would have used.

Nevertheless, I was able to speak a language that Imran would have felt at home with; my framing of the sentences should not have seemed foreign to him. Of course, whether this made any impact on him or not is not possible to say. However, judging from the unsettled nature of some of the gunmen in their conversations with their handlers, it’s possible that they were more impressionable than hardened criminals might have been (brainwashed though they seemed to have been).

Perhaps, this is also why I did not feel hatred towards him then, or even now. Then, of course, I wasn’t even thinking consciously in terms of who he was; and now, it seems pointless.

In the Jewish daily ‘Forward’ you’ve written that you were spiritually recharged during the Thanksgiving dinner the next day. Why? The events were definitely tragic, but it is not often that one feels a connection to something larger in the universe. Each person performs a certain role in the world, and my role included interpreting from English to Urdu. It was extremely unfortunate and tragic that our efforts did not succeed in preventing the death of Holtzberg, but I was given the opportunity to play a part in a larger, spiritual context. Vedanta teaches that there is only Brahman and that our feelings of independent existence are misplaced. Jewish tradition teaches the oneness of God. My participation in these brought me closer to the understanding of the unity of all beings.

How else did it affect you?

Every event has to have an impact on a thinking person’s life. My feelings about the importance of doing good, contributing to the general well-being of people, helping people in need, have become stronger.

Have you used your skills as an interpreter since?

I am not an interpreter, by training or by profession.

However, as somebody who speaks several languages and as somebody who is familiar with several cultures, I am interpreting each one to the other. I interpret Hinduism to Jews, Judaism to Hindus, Indian languages to speakers of non-Indian languages, the economic world view to non-economists.

L6 PROFILE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Life goes on: Mohammed Taufiq, whose only source of income is the tea stall, says he earns around Rs200 a day.

mohammed taufiq TEA VENDOR

THE PAVEMENT

HE HELPED SAVE MANY LIVES, RECEIVED MANY THANKS AND WAS PROMISED A ‘REAL’ JOB. TODAY HE FEELS SHORT­CHANGED

HERO

TEXT BLESSY AUGUSTINE blessy.a@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR

I

t’s a tea stall without frills—a thick black sheet of tarpaulin acts as the roof under which Mohammed Taufiq and his only employee make endless cups of tea through the day.

When I visit his stall, a group of women in bright saris are waiting for their “cutting chai”.

Taufiq is one of the many unlikely heroes of the 26 November terrorist attacks. Thanks to his alertness, hundreds escaped the terrorists’ bullets at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) station.

His tea stall is across the street from the main gate of St George’s Government Hospital, which lies to the left of the station’s east wing. That night, he was at the CST’s east wing when he heard the first grenade explosion. He immediately raised the alarm, shouting and warning people.

Taufiq is initially hesitant to talk

about his experiences. The questions that have come his way in the past year have made him wary. “If you’re going to ask me why I helped people despite being a Muslim, I am not going to talk to you,” the 28-year-old says. The question had not crossed my mind, but I realize it’s a valid grouse.

Like many other survivors, Taufiq has had to answer all kinds of questions—from the media and from ordinary Mumbaikars.

A year on, Taufiq’s memory of the chronology of events isn’t very clear.

The first shot he remembers clearly: He was inside the ticket issuers’ office, which has a glass window, when Mohammed Ajmal Kasab shot at him.

The bullet left a deep scar on the granite slab of the office table. But the other two shots that Kasab fired in his direction and the events of the next couple of days are a blur.

Once the terrorists left, Taufiq

helped the police carry the injured and dead to hospital. Early next morning, he went back to his stall, wondering whether it was safe to be there, until the policemen on duty requested him to serve tea to the people stranded at the station.

Many of the people Taufiq helped came back to thank him. They brought him clothes and homecooked food. “When you help someone you do it because you don’t want to see people get hurt, but in the other person’s eye you become a hero.” Photographs of a then camerashy Taufiq were splashed in papers, citizen groups awarded him trophies, and the police and railway officials promised him jobs. Now, Taufiq is media-savvy, talking to journalists with ease—and some cynicism.

He says he has spent the past year filling up application forms for jobs in the police and railways. He had

assumed that since he had been promised a job, his lack of education would not be a stumbling block.

Today, he feels cheated: “I didn’t ask them for anything. They shouldn’t have made me (feel) hopeful.”

Taufiq also spent a few weeks training an actor who essays his role in a telefilm, Un Hazaaron ke Naam, based on the 26/11 attacks. It stars Vinod Khanna and Seema Biswas and is produced by Sanjay Wadhwa of Sphere Origins. “They paid the actor Rs2 or 3 lakh; I got nothing,” says Taufiq.

His journey as a seven-year-old from Dhomdi village in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district to Mumbai with Rs200 in his pocket is straight out of a Bollywood script. But that night at the CST was the only time he has felt like a hero. “At least I got noticed.

There were so many people who helped, but didn’t even get a thank you,” Taufiq says.

PROFILE L7

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

arun jadhav POLICE NAIK THE SOLE SURVIVOR OF THE ILL­FATED QUALIS THAT WAS CARRYING SIX FELLOW POLICEMEN DRAWS SOLACE FROM THE FACT THAT HE DID HIS BIT FOR THE COUNTRY

BIG ‘ASSIGNMENT’ P AFTER THE

TEXT HARSHADA KARNIK harshada.k@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR

Providential escape: Arun Dada Jadhav (centre) still gets sleepless nights thinking about his close brush with death.

olice naik Arun Dada Jadhav wants to know why I want to meet him a year after 26 November—since he has told the world what happened that day. A little over 5ft tall, of medium build and in his early 40s, the Mumbai Police head constable is dressed in a pair of dark trousers and a plain shirt. He doesn’t look like the stereotypical tough cop, but Jadhav is what is known as an “encounter specialist”. And he is the only survivor from the Mumbai Police Qualis van that was hijacked by Mohammed Ajmal Kasab and his accomplice—his co-passengers, who included anti-terrorism squad chief Hemant Karkare, additional commissioner Ashok Kamte and senior inspector Vijay Salaskar, died.

In his 22 years of service, Jadhav has dealt with all kinds of criminals, including members of the Chhota Rajan and Arun Gawli gangs and the D-Company, led by Dawood Ibrahim. But the 53 encounters he had been part of until then hadn’t prepared him for 26 November.

“We were pitted against the unknown.

All the previous encounters were in a controlled situation... Here, we knew neither our foe nor the amount of ammunition he had, nor his strengths

and weaknesses,” Jadhav explains in a matter-fact-tone.

That night, as news of the attack on Cama Hospital broke, Karkare, Kamte, Salaskar, Jadhav and three other policemen reached the hospital, where Kasab and another terrorist had opened fire after moving out of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The police had blocked the back gate of the hospital so the Qualis headed towards the front gate for a counter-attack. It was intercepted by the two terrorists hiding in the bushes near Corporation Bank, behind St Xavier’s College, who opened fire. Jadhav was the only one to survive—he draws a diagram on a piece of paper to show how he was buried under the bodies of his colleagues.

He was shot five times—thrice on his right elbow and twice on the left shoulder.

Blood-soaked, his right forearm nearly severed and the weight of his carbine and the bodies of fellow policemen on him, Jadhav survived.

Jadhav recalls how Salaskar had realized the magnitude of the attack and asked his team to stay on reserve, but they had insisted on going along—they were confident and self-assured. “Even when Sir asked me to come to the Colaba police station for an ‘assignment’, although I had not been briefed beforehand, I was quite sure the job

would be done. I called and told my family I had some work and that they should not call me.”

He recalls how he escaped death not once but twice that night. “After they had hijacked the Qualis, with four of us still lying in it, the wireless operator’s cellphone rang, so they turned back and fired a few more rounds. But this time, too, I escaped because I was under everyone.”

Life hasn’t returned to “normal” for Jadhav. “Even now, when I think of that day, I can’t fall asleep. The sound of the firing, the helplessness while I lay pretending to be dead and the pain due to the bullet wounds come back. I can’t get over the fact that I am alive,” he admits.

However, the knowledge that he was part of something of such enormous magnitude has helped Jadhav move on.

“This experience has only made me more confident. It has also given me immense satisfaction that I got a chance to serve not just people (of Mumbai) but also the nation,” he says.

The son of a schoolteacher and an army man, he grew up in Vaduj in Maharashtra’s Satara district. In school, he was a National Cadet Corps (NCC) squad leader. Duty, discipline and service were anthems drilled into him from

childhood, so enrolling for police training was a natural choice.

Jadhav worked under Salaskar for 14 years. In 1996, when both were posted at the Nagpada police station in Mumbai, Salaskar hand-picked a team of five to work in the anti-extortion bureau with him, and Jadhav was one of them.

“Since then, it’s been like working on a mission,” Jadhav recalls. “From then, I started getting more and more involved in my work. It started becoming important. There were times when I wouldn’t go home for two or three days.

We would persist till the task at hand was complete.”

Jadhav says he asked for his current posting at the motor vehicles theft department at the Yellow Gate police station, near the Masjid railway station.

It’s a congested neighbourhood, cut off from south Mumbai. “Now I am working from the same room Sir (Salaskar) was working from for a few months. This room is full of memories,” he says. “Even though I am not at the anti-extortion bureau, you can’t really detach me from the work I have been doing all these years. We still continue to act on information and tip-offs.”

He has preserved Salaskar’s photographs, and still has his telephone numbers stored in the cellphone.

L8 PROFILE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

I love Mumbai: Erica Di Giovancarlo stayed at The Trident when she arrived in India in 2007.

erica di giovancarlo ITALIAN TRADE COMMISSIONER

ANOTHER YEAR,

THIS DIPLOMAT WAS RELIEVED WHEN WE ENTERED 2009. NOW SHE WOULD RATHER NOT DWELL ON THE PAST OR PLAN FOR THE FUTURE

ANOTHER LIFE E

TEXT PRIYA RAMANI priya.r@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH SUDHANSHU MALHOTRA

rica Di Giovancarlo returned to the Taj as soon as she could. “I went back exactly to where I was at the Souk. I saw the fire exit from where we escaped. Not to live it again but just to reassure myself that everything was in order. That life goes on.”

Like most of us, 44-year-old Di Giovancarlo grew up thinking nothing bad would ever happen to her—2008 changed that. Most victims will tell you that 26/11 was the worst night of their lives. But 2008 was also the year Di Giovancarlo discovered she had cancer. She went back to Italy in April, believing she would not return to India. Miraculously, the treatment worked, and by the end of August, the Italian trade commissioner was back at work in Mumbai. “I was so happy to start again,” she says.

That night in November, she was out with a girlfriend. At 9.30pm they were in the Taj lobby debating which restaurant they should pick—Wasabi or Souk? Di Giovancarlo picked Souk, probably because it was quieter and the friends were in a mood to talk. Dinner was relaxed and uneventful aside from the

fact that the visiting South African cricket team had also opted for Souk. At 11pm, a friend who used to live in Mumbai called from Italy: “Where are you?”

“In Bombay, what’s the problem?”

“Where in Bombay?”

“At the Taj...”

After that, the hurly-burly began. The cricketers’ bodyguards took charge. They explained what was happening and swiftly moved the diners to another room. “Be quiet,” they said, “This is the safest part of the hotel.” Like all the other guests trapped in different parts of Mumbai’s most beautiful playground, they switched off the lights, crouched on the floor and listened quietly to the blast-tremble soundtrack of the attack on south Mumbai.

After a few hours, the bodyguards decided it was time to try and escape. So everyone slipped off their shoes, organized themselves in small groups, silently walked down 20 floors towards the mayhem, and finally ran out from the back entrance. “The city was a ghost town. I had never seen Bombay like this,” she says. She went straight to her Altamount Road home and took a

shower “immediately, as if I had to wash the experience off me”. She watched television. And at 6am, she tried to sleep. She spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday at home, confused and shocked, fielding phone calls. “On Sunday I realized what I had risked. I cried a lot. It felt good to release the emotions.” By Monday she was back at her Nariman Point office, barely holding herself together. It was a relief to go home to Rome for Christmas. There, a therapist aided the recovery process.

When she returned in January, she was happy to be back in Mumbai, and sad that she would be moving to Delhi in February. She lived it up that last month in the big city. “I went back to the Taj, went out a lot, attended lots of events,” says Di Giovancarlo whose favourite Mumbai haunts included Shiro, Salt Water Grill, Marine Drive, the Trident hotel, Breach Candy club and, of course, all the Italian restaurants in the city.

When we meet in Delhi, amid the sprawling green of the Italian embassy, she says that sometimes she still thinks about that day. That there are reminders everywhere—in the destination shows on the Travel &

Living channel; in the books about 26/11; and in the still work-in-progress Trident hotel just a few minutes from her Mumbai office.

Yet Di Giovancarlo says she no longer feels anxiety and fear. And she actually has that other-worldy glow of people who never get fazed by life’s multiple smalland medium-sized irritants. “I was happy when we entered 2009,” she says. Delhi has been a good change, a place that doesn’t remind her of 2008, but she would still trade the Capital’s whale-sized green lungs for a daily dose of the Arabian Sea. Mumbai, for Di Giovancarlo, is that rare big city where it’s possible to have small town relationships.

“I thought maybe this event would leave a bad memory, but every time I go back I think it was a mistake,” she says.

“It doesn’t suit the character of the city, it should not have happened.”

And because it did happen, her approach to life changed. “Twice I had to face a tremendously challenging situation in 2008 and so, when people ask me about my plans for the next 10 years I say I have no plans.”

“I’m not thinking long-term. Anything can happen,” she adds.

PROFILE L9

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

m m begani CONSULTANT SURGEON

THE SMOOTH

WORKING NON­STOP THAT NIGHT, THIS DOCTOR SAVED MANY LIVES. HE CREDITS GOD AND THE MUMBAIKAR’S SPIRIT AS HIS SOURCES OF STRENGTH

OPERATOR M

TEXT PARIZAAD KHAN parizaad.k@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR

anmal Manikchand Begani had just washed up after his 12-hour workday and was getting ready to start dinner at 9.45pm when he got a call from the chief medical officer of Bombay Hospital, the institution he has been with for nearly 32 years. Dr Begani, the hospital’s senior consultant surgeon, was told that eight people with bullet wounds had been brought to the hospital from The Oberoi and Trident hotels, where there had been a gang war-related shooting.

When Begani—a tall, distinguishedlooking man with a cloud of silvery hair—switched on his TV, he realized it was a terror attack. He rushed back to the hospital he had left only an hour ago, and started on a marathon session of examining patients, deciding who needed life-saving surgery and operating on them one after the other.

Begani and a team of specialists, residents, anaesthetists and nursing staff ministered to 54 patients and operated on 26 in the first 24 hours. “We had to keep courage, had to be alert and take a

decision as to which were the priority patients,” says the 60-year-old, when we meet in the hospital’s OT. Out of those 54 patients, four were brought dead (one of them was additional commissioner of police Ashok Kamte), while three (including karate master Farokh Dinshaw) died at the hospital.

The help of a variety of experts was needed to deal with the 22 patients who suffered from polytrauma, with more than one organ injured. “That was caused by the AK-56 bullets, which are longer than my finger. The damage is great because of the velocity at which they travel,” says Dr Begani.

Due to the travel restrictions that night, ambulances with police escorts were despatched to bring in some specialists, though many only made it to the hospital the next day. Dr Begani is thankful that the hospital’s various ICUs could accommodate all the wounded.

The son of a jeweller, Dr Begani obtained his doctorate from Bikaner’s Sardar Patel Medical College and moved to Mumbai from Rajasthan. He has been with the hospital since April 1978, and his first experience of dealing with a carnage was during the Mumbai

riots of 1992; then there were the bomb blasts in 1993. Despite calls from friends and relatives from “up country” cautioning him to stay home during the riots, Dr Begani says: “We kept on going. I never stayed at home. It is part of (my) nature, part of the training, part of the oath and commitment.”

Despite being a man of science, Dr Begani’s faith in a higher power is where he seems to get his strength from. After his morning swim, yoga session or walk, he goes to the temple on the mornings when he has no emergency cases. He remembers instances when there was not much hope for a patient, but he never gave up. “I feel, always keep hope and even if there’s a 1% chance, you keep on doing your job. God is great.”

And he recognizes the same faith and fighting spirit in many of his patients who survive against the odds. “Having strong willpower is very important— besides physical injury, the mental shock is equally traumatizing,” he says.

After the 26/11 attacks, Dr Begani has made presentations on how the team at Bombay Hospital handled the situation, including one at the Universitair Ziekenhuis Antwerpen in Belgium, an

institute he frequents for refresher courses in robotic and new surgery techniques. The government of Maharashtra has also approached Dr Begani and Dr Hariram Jhunjhunwala, the hospital’s senior orthopedic surgeon, to prepare a presentation for a meeting on disaster management.

Begani says he would like the Bombay Hospital to have sessions with doctors from Mumbai institutions such as Sion Hospital, which handles a large number of highway accident and emergency cases. “We can learn a lot from them. We can share our experience and they have the experience of running an everyday emergency ward with a multidisciplinary and multi-speciality approach,” he says.

Dr Begani also gives credit to Mumbaikars for their support and positivity. “Through all these catastrophes, public support has been great. It makes a big difference for us to work hard,” he says. The hospital had volunteers, including staff from the Taj, Oberoi and Trident, who came in at night during the attacks and told him: “‘Doctor, just tell us what to do and we’ll do it’. They helped with moral support, and that is very important.”

Critical care: (back row, from left) Bombay Hospital CMO Dr D. Agarwal, Dr Begani and Dr M. Nariani, with members of the hospital’s staff.

L10 OPINION

OPINION L11

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RAJANISH KAKADE/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Mumbai’s voice?

Thackeray addresses a rally at Shivaji Park in the city.

PURSUITS

VIR SANGHVI

WE THE PEOPLE OF

BOMBAY

A YEAR AFTER THE 26 NOVEMBER ATTACKS, RAJ THACKERAY IS MUCH STRONGER IN MAHARASHTRA THAN HE EVER WAS. BUT WHO REALLY SPEAKS FOR THIS CITY: IMMIGRANTS, POLITICIANS, RENT­A­QUOTE BUFFOONS ON TV OR A SILENT MAJORITY THAT NEVER GETS HEARD? SATISH BATE/HINDUSTAN TIMES

T

he shadow of Raj Thackeray hovered uneasily over Bombay (or Mumbai, as he would no doubt prefer) in the aftermath of the events of 26/11. Though the junior Thackeray was not a participant in these events, his name was to crop up again and again in the discussions that followed the incidents.

Hour after hour, commentator after commentator and guest after guest on TV discussions made the same point. Bombay/Mumbai had been saved by the commandos of the National Security Guard, the overwhelming majority of whom were non-Maharashtrians. The

head of the NSG, a quiet, thoughtful man called J.K. Dutt was a north Indian. An officer who died in the siege of the Taj, Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, was a Malayalee.

If Thackeray had his way, said the TV pundits, then none of these people would have been available to save the city from “the worst urban terrorism it had ever known”.

It was a point that set people’s heads nodding each time it was repeated and eventually, thousands of SMSes went back and forth, all asking how Thackeray now felt about his chauvinism.

As the Marathi manoos appeared ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

to have turned into a Marathi mouse for the duration of the crisis, there was no reply from Thackeray.

I thought the sentiment was well taken even if the specifics were dodgy. Thackeray had never advocated secession from India. He had never denied that Maharashtra needed access to India’s services (such as the NSG) or its resources.

All he had demanded was that people from the rest of India did not find employment in his Mumbai.

So, judged in purely logical terms, nothing that the younger Thackeray had said was contradicted by the actions of India’s paramilitary forces.

Thackeray had always been grateful for the protection offered by India’s soldiers. It was only when they retired and came to Bombay to drive taxis that he wanted to slap them and send them back.

But at the end of that terrifying November, who had time for logic?

The overwhelming mood was one of weary relief. Then, that relief turned into anger. Suddenly, the people who went on TV were no longer thanking the NSG. Instead, they were railing against the Centre.

Sound and fury: (clockwise from left) A protest march at the Gateway of India, soon after the terror attacks; a memorial service for victims of the attacks in New Delhi; a National Security Guard commando on a rescue mission at Nariman House, Mumbai.

Minute by minute, new grievances kept emerging from well-spoken mouths.

Why did Delhi take so long to save Bombay? Where was the Prime Minister? When he appeared on TV, one famous person complained, Manmohan Singh looked like a robot!

Did people have any idea how many thousands of crores in tax were paid by citizens of this city? How dare they take our money and do nothing for us? Who were these politicians anyway? What had the rest of India done for Bombay apart from treating it as a cash cow? Let’s stop paying income tax to the Centre!

Then, the mood turned even more hysterical. It was time for the citizens of Bombay to tell India’s politicians to get off. At the next election, people should refuse to vote. That would teach the politicians! Worse was to follow.

This is a corporate city, some studio guests said. Why didn’t we corporatize our police force? Why didn’t we allow private corporations to run our security? Private police were more reliable than government police. On TV shows, the hysteria mounted. An elderly lady, possibly between face-lifts, turned the battle inwards. People like her were okay, she suggested. But what about slum dwellers? She had seen Pakistani flags in the slums from “my suite at the Four Seasons”.

Bit by bit the situation degenerated so swiftly into farce that I felt that I was trapped in the kind of India that Arundhati Roy is always writing about: where the elite are morons, blind to the Indian reality and the poor live in bondage and slavery.

But even as this surreal drama played out on my TV screen, I thought of the shadow of ThackMOHAMMED ZAKIR/HINDUSTAN TIMES

eray. What had been Thackeray’s central theme?

That Mumbai belonged to a single group and that the rest of India had no claims on it. What were the protesters saying?

That Bombay belonged only to the citizens of Bombay (ideally, the citizens of south Bombay, excepting the slum dwellers of course) and the rest of India had no claims on it.

So, even at the moment when Thackeray had become a figure of ridicule, on TV, on the Internet and on SMS texts, his ideology had won.

Even those who sneered at Thackeray were now saying much the same sort of thing (in the case of the old lady who saw Pakistani flags, exactly the same thing) that they were attacking him for.

Bombay/Mumbai is a sovereign state. The rest of India can only engage with it after getting permission from its inhabitants.

The only difference between the two views was that Thackeray’s version of Mumbai’s inhabitants consisted of Maharashtrians and began at Parel and Shivaji Park. The upmarket TV guests on the other hand, believed that they were the rightful inhabitants of Bombay (south of Parel mainly, but Bandra was allowed because there were some nice buildings there now.)

You see what I mean about the shadow of Thackeray hovering over the events of 26/11?

What has changed, one year after Pakistani terrorists were able to hold south Bombay to ransom?

Well, from where I am sitting, the only significant change of note is that Thackeray has grown stronger. He now sets the agenda for the Opposition, the Shiv Sena meekly follows it.

It is now only a matter of time before he takes over the entire Opposition space. He may have looked like a Marathi mouse a year ago. But he’s now Maharashtra’s non-Congress future. Contrary to what we said then, the events of 26/11 did not convince Maharashtrians that they needed north Indians.

Nothing else has really changed.

R.R. Patil who became a hate object for the middle class is back in the saddle. Vilasrao Deshmukh who was driven from office by a media outcry is now comfortably ensconced at the Centre and very nearly became chief minister again.

Nor has the middle class changed too much. In the aftermath of 26/11, assorted self-proclaimed activists and publicity hounds went on TV to declare that they had awakened the political spirit of the citizens of south Bombay and that elections would now be dominated by large middleclass turnouts.

In fact, turnouts have remained pretty much where they were before the city was attacked. The middle-class candidates who tried to enter politics on the back of the 26/11 bandwagon were rebuffed by south Bombay voters; the best-publicized of them, Meera Sanyal, lost her deposit!

So why did the ostensible spirit of

post-26/11 Bombay dissipate so quickly? Was it all a sham?

The answers are complicated. But my sense is that the mood of south Bombay (let alone, Bombay) was never quite what the TV channels told us it was. I do not believe (and I didn’t believe it then, either) that the prevailing mood in Bombay was one of anger with Delhi or with India. Instead, I think the mood was one of shock and horror. Yes, there was resentment—entirely justified—that Bombay never gets the kind of attention it deserves from politicians (just look at the thousands of crores that keep being spent on Delhi if you want a contrast) but it did not translate into an unwillingness to pay taxes or to participate in the political process.

Nor was there the sense that this was the biggest ever attack on Bombay. I think the serial bomb blasts in the 1990s were far more shocking and horrific. (These rarely feature on TV because they are difficult to Google and young journos now think of the blasts only in terms of Sanjay Dutt and the trial). There have been other bomb blasts since then—on local trains, for instance—which have scared and terrified commuters in a city that depends on public transport.

Even more traumatic for many citizens were the riots that preceded the bomb blasts when Shiv Sena thugs carried out a pogrom against the city’s Muslims, burning homes, stealing property and murdering fathers in front of their children.

The riots led to the bomb blasts a n d t o a c o mmu n a l d iv id e t h a t has never quite healed. Significantly, they also led to the rise of the Shiv Sena.

To be sure, most people in Bombay (a n d n o t j u s t i n s o u t h B o m b a y ) responded to 26/11 with horror. This was the first terror strike to be played out on live TV; the first one that went on for three days; and because it hit the centre of the south Bombay establishment, it led people to ask: “Is nowhere safe?”

But the moderate, sensible people of Bombay were never heard. Instead TV paraded Page 3 bimbos, smalltime actors, fading actresses, pompous advertising men and midgets on the fringes of journalism. It was these jokers who said all the silly things about the sovereign state of Bombay that made the rest of India cringe.

A year after 26/11, perhaps it is time to reflect on a more serious question. Who speaks for Bombay? Is it the politicians we elect? Is it Thackeray? Is it the rent-a-quote buffoons on TV? Or is it a silent majority that never gets heard?

But of course, that question will never get answered. We’ll go through the motions of praising the heroes of 26/11. We’ll mourn our dead.

And we’ll react once again like headless chickens when the next attack comes.

Vir Sanghvi is the advisory editorial director of Hindustan Times.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L12 PROFILE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Ground realities: (from left) Hirabai Thuda, Parvati Babu Sonavane, Sushila Pyarelal Sharma and Annapurna Baburao Kedare.

sushila pyarelal sharma CLEANING STAFF OF CST

WHEN STAINS BECOME

THE WOMEN WHO CLEANED CST OF DRIED BLOOD AND BROKEN GLASS HAVE SPENT A YEAR GOING ABOUT THEIR WORK AS IF NOTHING HAPPENED

INDELIBLE

TEXT HARSHADA KARNIK harshada.k@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR

F

ifty-year-old Sushila Pyarelal Sharma grew up in the precincts of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), the Gothic giant that is a Mumbai landmark and, in many ways, epitomizes the bustle of the city. It’s not surprising that it was a target on 26/11; that day the terrorists killed 52 people there.

Sharma’s father was a railway havaldar and they lived in the railway quarters at Wadi Bunder. As a child, she often accompanied him to work and played with her siblings at the railway station. She knows CST more intimately than those who commute to and from it every day and has seen how it has changed over the years. “I have never seen the station so silent and deserted as on 26 November. The few people walking around were like ghosts. Any movement made me jump.”

Sharma’s brother is a clerk with Central Railways, and she is the the head of

the CST cleaning staff, better known as safaiwallas. A moment after she recollects a happy evening spent playing with her brother at the railway garden close to CST, she recalls with horror how the same gardens looked in the dark when she, along with other railway employees, hid in the administrative offices while the terrorists fired indiscriminately on the platforms.

Sharma and her team of six women cleaned and scrubbed the platforms that night so that early morning travellers would not have to walk on dried blood. The memories are no longer as fresh but the women have rarely spoken about the incident to anybody while on duty—and they find the media intimidating. “I was really scared and didn’t want to come back to work and stayed at home for two days,” Sharma says, “but I realized I can’t stay home all my life. Such things happen. It is unfortunate that I had to see it. I will never forget those few hours but I have to earn my living. The railways is my

home, and my bread and butter.”

Every day, the six women meet in the passengers’ waiting room, change into their blue saris, clean the locations assigned to them, and then gather in a narrow corridor near the station’s administrative offices for chai. They then go back to work and meet once again for dinner. The sight of blood is not new to them—they often have to clean the platform or tracks after a railway accident. But the bloodshed from the terrorist massacre is etched in their memory. “There was blood all over. It had dried and the stench was unbearable and there was a hole on the floor where the bomb had detonated. I felt sick, so I only cleaned the pieces of glass near the exits,” says Shevavati, one of the cleaners on duty that night.

Shevavati, who is in her early 40s, says she would like to stay away from the station at night, but she has young children and can’t afford to stay at home.

“We worked mechanically that day but later I could not sleep well for a very

long time,” says Sharma. “Even Hirabai, who is mentally very strong, could not eat anything for two days.”

Hirabai Thuda, one of the other cleaners on duty that day, remembers the steel benches that had fallen over, the shoes, pieces of glass, bullet shells, and shirts and bedsheets strewn all over. The carnage has left its scars. “I cleaned all that blood myself, probably that’s the reason I still get nightmares,” Parvati Babu Sonavane says. “Even today, if the coolies drop a parcel, and there is a thud, I feel scared,” adds Sharma.

At a time when reaching home safe was on everyone’s mind and those at home sat glued to the television, these women worked overtime to scrub CST clean—but none besides Sharma got even token appreciation. Central Railways gave Sharma a certificate and a cash price of Rs1,000. Her reasoning sounds both practical and philosophical.

“They probably gave me the prize because they can’t be appreciating every one of us,” she says.

PROFILE L13

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

anjali vijay kulthe NURSE

THE WOMAN

F TEXT HARSHADA KARNIK harshada.k@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR

HER UNIFORM AND A SENSE OF DUTY HELPED THIS NURSE AT CAMA HOSPITAL FACE AJMAL KASAB’S LAWYER AND BATTLE HER OWN FEARS

IN WHITE

orty-year-old Anjali Vijay Kulthe laughs when the matron at Cama Hospital she reports to every morning chides her for doing a “walk-through” of that fateful day once again. When we visit her at the hospital, she takes us first to the gate that two terrorists—one was Mohammed Ajmal Kasab—jumped over to enter the hospital. Next we visit the antenatal care unit, from where Kulthe saw the terrorists, and then the top floor, where the terrorists fired from. It was a long night for Kulthe and the other staff at Cama Hospital, one of the locations under siege.

A year later, Kulthe appears to be the same jovial nurse she always has been, greeting patients with smiles. But as we jog her memory, the signs of trauma become apparent. “I realized I had to live to look after my patients and keep them safe. I was in charge of them,” she says. The sense of duty towards her job and to humanity were magnified for Kulthe that night.

After the night-long ordeal, when she was returning home in the morning, the city surprised her. “I could not understand how everybody was so normal and how they could go about life as usual. I wanted to shout and tell everyone that something was wrong.”

In the days that followed, she was uncomfortable whenever out of uniform.

On duty: Anjali Kulthe (standing) has been with Cama Hospital for a decade.

The crisp white uniform had given her the strength to go on that night.

“When I was on duty, I didn’t for a moment panic, break down or feel scared. The patients were my responsibility and I had to care for them. So I behaved as the uniform demanded of me.”

The next morning, when she changed

into regular clothes and looked at herself in the mirror, she broke down.

“When I changed into my civil clothes I realized I was as ordinary and vulnerable as any other person on the road. I could not understand why I had taken all the risks and responsibility the pervious night. I also could have been killed or hurt like anyone else.”

The nightmare did not end there. For almost a month, even the slightest noise would disturb her, and she would wake up with a start at night. “Our matron had specialized in psychology during her nursing course, so she knew exactly how to handle me. For a long time, I was not assigned any serious cases or night duties.

She also encouraged me to talk and counselled me.”

A month later, Kulthe was summoned to the Arthur Road Jail to identify Kasab.

She initially refused to go but the police, she says, convinced her. Though nervous and reluctant, she went, against her family’s wishes, for the identification parade. There, contrary to her expectation, she had no anonymity. She had to point out the suspect in front of everyone, including the suspect himself.

When she recognized the man, he smiled and congratulated her on her accuracy. “I felt scared after this. His casual and frivolous manner infuriated me. But more than anything else, I worried about my safety and my family.

I got nightmares once again.”

When Kulthe was called to testify against Kasab in court, she agreed to go if they allowed her to come in uniform.

“Kasab’s lawyer questioned and cross-questioned me. But I answered him confidently and unflinchingly. When I walked out of the court, some policemen saluted me. I don’t think I could have answered so fearlessly and boldly if I had gone in normal clothes,” she says.

rishab nanda

SCHOOLBOY

A YEAR OF

THIS 12­YEAR­OLD HAS BEEN FOLLOWING TERRORISM NEWS AND IS CONSTANTLY ANXIOUS WHEN HIS PARENTS ARE AWAY

GROWING UP

F

TEXT VEENA VENUGOPAL veena.v@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR

or an 11-year-old, the future is a short span of time—the next hour, the following day at a stretch.

And that’s as it should be.

When Rishab Nanda first heard that some terrorists had entered the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, he felt happy. That meant school would be closed the next day. But as he sat with his parents and watched what was happening on TV, the effervescence of an unexpected holiday vanished, to be replaced by a weighty sense of fear.

A year on, he continues to carry that weight.

In the days after the attacks, stories of victims were everywhere. Rishab read these, he heard conversations, he discussed some of these with his friends.

Everyone knew somebody, closely or distantly, who was affected. So did Rishab, and that made the horror personal. Rishab soon began to believe that though they were safe for the moment, the possibility that he or his family would be affected in a future attack was very high.

These day, he is constantly worried and gets very nervous when his parents are not at home. “The terrorists have done their job. They have embedded the fear in me. Even today, when my parents go out, I get very, very worried,” he says.

When his mother, Manisha, went out for the first time after the attack, he started to panic. “He kept calling me to ask where I was and what was

happening. It was then that it hit him; that if other children could lose their parents to a bullet or a bomb, it could happen to his parents too,” she says.

About three months after November, Rishab told his parents that he wanted to go and see the places where the attacks happened. “I am getting scared, I want to tide over my fears,” he told his mother.

Instead of driving down, Manisha took him in a local train. When they reached the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Rishab looked around. He was stunned that everything seemed normal. And that helped him beat the fear of crowded places to a large extent. But when they went past The Oberoi and Trident, where some of the damage was still visible, he was quiet. When they returned home, all he said was, “Thank God, we’re safe.”

Worried: Rishab wants his parents to stay home so they don’t become victims of terrorism.

In the course of the year, Rishab has been following terrorism-related stories “important” days, when the possibility of because terrorism around the world is in newspapers and on television very a terrorist attack could be high, such as growing. Every day there are bomb closely. His parents allow him controlled Republic Day, Independence Day and blasts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. access to these. “It’s not possible to hide Dandiya evenings. “Even when he knows Nothing has ended there, how can we everything from him. He’s growing up I am visiting somebody in the same assume that what happened will not and nothing can be hidden for too long. building, he calls me 20 times,” Manisha happen again here?” Rishab asks. There I would rather he process little bits of says. But the most important request he have been three reports of infiltration, he information gradually than confront it makes is that his parents don’t go out says. The day we spoke, a television all at once at some time in the future. together. When they do have to go out channel reported that the bullet-proof There is no point in hiding it entirely,” together, he has an endless trail of vest anti-terrorism squad chief Hemant Manisha says. However, Rishab has questions: Will you call me as soon as Karkare was wearing when he was shot been forbidden from watching the 26/11 you reach? What time will you be back? dead was defective. “How can they do programmes airing on various channels How will you commute? And he stays this?” he asked. this month. up, no matter how late, until they reach In another year, Rishab will probably Rishab makes several demands of his home. He cannot go to sleep until he be enveloped in the angst and confusion parents. He is constantly warning them knows they are home, safe. of a regular teenager. But he will against going to crowded places. He “Even now I think a lot about the remember 26 November 2008 as the day would not let them leave the house on attack. I think it may happen again he grew up.

L14 PROFILE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Plan B: Vajpeyi now works with Ashoka’s Youth Venture, a programme for young social entrepreneurs.

alok vajpeyiENTREPRENEUR

COURSE CORRECTION

THE TERROR ATTACKS FORCED THIS FORMER EXECUTIVE TO PAUSE AND RETHINK HIS CAREER CHOICES

THERAPY

A

TEXT VEENA VENUGOPAL veena.v@livemint.com PHOTOGRAPH ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR

lok Vajpeyi, a veteran of the mutual fund industry and then the vice-chairman and managing director of Dawnay Day AV, was in the process of selling his stake and closing down his business.

On 26 November 2008, he had a dinner appointment. He was meeting his business associates and friends; they had a private table for eight at the Golden Dragon, the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor of the Taj. When the gunshots began, the hotel staff asked them to duck under the table and later led them to The Chambers, the hotel’s private club. There, huddled with some 200 other guests as the grenades and firearms thundered outside the door, they heard the horror of what was going on inside the building. After one aborted attempt at leaving the hotel, Vajpeyi did not want to go back to The Chambers and chose instead to wait and watch from a small landing in a fire exit.

At around 3 the next morning, shortly after some of his friends managed to escape, he put a calm end to his lonely vigil and simply walked out of the hotel.

He reached home, where his wife, two

children, mother and in-laws were waiting. He watched TV and then realized the full horror of what was happening.

“I had a couple of whiskies and went to sleep after that,” he recalls.

Vajpeyi says he realized that there were three kinds of people: people who were completely shattered, people who came undone and people who somehow still kept it together. He was in the third category. Despite the bravado of that statement, Vajpeyi concedes that the experiences of that night have altered the course of his life. “The point that 26 November made to me was that life is not in your control. People like us, we built our careers and lives wanting to make a lot of money and exercise influence. That game has changed for me. It wasn’t anger at the terrorists, it was just a realization that there are better things to do now,” he says.

He first thought of joining politics, but abandoned the idea when he realized that politics without a party is not a winning game. He then thought of using his experience of working in large, multinational companies to run a big, global NGO in India. Vajpeyi’s wife worked with the education NGO Akanksha, so he knew that world and he wasn’t sure that it would sustain

his interest. The third option was to simply write a cheque, but that was the easy way out.

Instead of jumping in straight after the sale and starting his next venture, Vajpeyi took time off to think about what he really wanted to do. He decided on two things. One, that he would start another venture eventually, and two, that he would spend a part of his time working for organizations that focused on youth and women. He discovered Ashoka foundation, a global organization that supports and recognizes social entrepreneurs. He works with Ashoka’s Youth Venture, a programme that inspires and invests in teams of young people to start and lead their own social ventures. Through a friend, he also connected with Dasra, an organization that provides support and various infrastructural services to NGOs. Despite the events of last November, Vajpeyi remains a staunch capitalist; but because of them he is today a passionate spokesperson of giving to causes. “Today I firmly believe that if you have Rs100, you can easily give Rs10. You can always take out half a day in a week to volunteer somewhere.

I know now that it’s possible to do this.

Earlier, I would not have focused on it.

I would have just given money and paid some lip service,” he says.

In the days after 26 November, there was a huge amount of angst and moral uproar. A year on, the question is what has really changed. “There is a lot of positive change in a minority of people post-26 November. But even today, I see a lot of people who simply refuse to part with their money or time for a cause. They always have some excuse or the other. I want to change people’s mindsets and that’s why I am focusing on youth. The future generation of our country needs to be educated on giving,” he says.

Extracting positive lessons from negative events is usually the preserve of the oversimplifying optimist or a book of children’s stories. And “November”, as Vajpeyi refers to it, is too horrific an event to be broken down into simple wisdom. Still, he feels that the event that cut through class strata and brought a realization that everybody could be touched by the tragedies of life might just have provided the muchneeded, much-delayed impetus for social change. Vajpeyi says that if we can forget enough to let the wounds heal, but remember the scars, we could emerge stronger and better.

COLUMNS L15 SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

CAN PAKISTAN OWN UP TO KASAB’S ROOTS?

A

nation was transformed by the events of 26 November but it wasn’t India.

What was unique about that day’s attack? Not its lethality, or its location—on the evening of 11 July 2006, bombs had killed 209 people on Mumbai’s local trains. That attack, like others before it, slipped from memory after arrests and confessions, first recorded and later recanted.

Two things made 26/11 different. One: The courage of Mumbai Mirror photographer Sebastian D’Souza. He shot marvellously clear pictures of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, demonstrating without doubt who murdered 52 people. Two: The courage of assistant sub-inspector Tukaram Omble, who stood on Marine Drive in the path of a silver Skoda he knew was carrying armed killers. He grappled with Kasab who shot him.

Omble died, but held on long enough for Kasab to be captured alive.

Kasab revealed his identity immediately; he was from Faridkot; now it was a question of proving it to the world.

In Pakistan, the idea that he could be Pakistani was dismissed. On 5 December, a BBC reporter found Kasab’s family in Depalpur village.

Pakistan’s press ignored this report (“Kasab is not a Pakistani name”). On 7 December, London’s Observer newspaper published the voter identity-card numbers of Kasab’s parents, Amir Kasab and Noor. This also was ignored, but now the world was convinced. On 11 December, Pakistani daily Dawn, founded by Jinnah, admitted that its reporters had met Kasab’s family the previous week but the newspaper had chosen not to report this.

Kasab’s father confessed: “I was in denial

aakar patel

REPLY TO ALL

SEBASTIAN D’SOUZA/MUMBAI MIRROR/AP

for the first couple of days.”

Pakistan’s denial continued, ending on 7 January, when national security adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani told CNN-IBN that he had confirmed Kasab’s identity.

This admission moved the UN Security Council to link Lashkar-e-Taiba with Al Qaeda. And it brought phone calls from America to act.

Ultimately, it gave Asif Zardari, head of an ungovernable state, the cause to lead his reluctant army to battle against extremism. Once on the battlefield, Pakistan’s soldiers did what the British Indian army was trained to do. They smashed the Taliban and “pacified” areas that had been in anarchy: Swat, Mingora, all of Malakand and now Waziristan. But they did this under fire from the Pakistani press and public.

Pakistan is now under attack and suicide bombers detonate themselves in its cities every week, but it is finally fighting back. Backed by America, Zardari has reversed a cycle of extremism that would have consumed Pakistan.

The question is: Who made Pakistan ungovernable? The answer is: its people.

The state has been encouraged to do mischief, because it governs a population whose chief complaint against its rulers has been that they’re not extreme enough.

Doing jihad in Kashmir, persecuting communities, selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, abolishing interest and causing the collapse of the banking system. The deranged generals, parliamentarians, scientists and judges who do these are heroes backed by a national consensus.

In that sense, Pakistan’s government is more representative than India’s.

Pakistan’s most beloved leaders have been unhinged. Bhutto wept on seeing

Caught: D’Souza’s photos of Kasab (above) established his guilt beyond doubt.

Pakistani labourers break stones with their hands but then promised he would starve his people to fund his atomic programme. His parliament apostatized the Ahmadis unanimously, and to public applause.

Zia understood Pakistanis and gave them what they wanted: more religion.

The safety announcement on all PIA flights begins with Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim...

The ingress of extremism in Pakistan is as universal as it is banal. Television anchors now say “Allah hafiz”, instead of Khuda hafiz. This is because Khuda is Persian and secular, and god may only be the Arabic Allah.

This instinct is coupled with a fondness for conspiracy theory—one of the most common words in Urdu newspapers is saazish—and a belief in the existence of a global anti-Islam movement led by a partnership of Jews and Hindus (Yahud O Hanood).

Balanced leaders such as Musharraf

and Zardari are reviled, though they are actually good for Pakistan.

The scholar Stephen Cohen said Pakistan negotiated with a gun pointed to its own head. This is no empty threat because its population wants the trigger pulled and the leaders know that.

Pakistan must now be bribed to do the right thing. In exchange for fighting the Taliban, America wants to give Pakistan $7.5 billion in aid, much of it going to health and education. The Kerry-Lugar Bill says this aid could be stopped if Pakistan does not tackle extremism or prevent attacks on India and Afghanistan. This sounds sensible. But Pakistanis don’t want the money because it infringes on their sovereignty, by which they mean the right to do mischief.

Zardari is a good man, with a trader’s instinct for self-preservation, but leading a nation of warriors who want martyrdom.

Because of this, Zardari had to surrender to the Taliban because that’s

BOMBAY’S CONFLICTS AND ITS ELECTRIC EMBRACE

M

y husband is a banker.

Every week, for the past several years, he has commuted to Bombay from Bangalore where we live.

He stays at the Taj Mahal hotel’s heritage wing, room 315 if possible. That Wednesday, 26 November, for the first time in three years, he debated coming back to Bangalore mid-week, something he had never done before. A book he loved, Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani, was being launched and he wanted to attend. The plan was to take the first flight back on Thursday morning.

Of course, he didn’t go. As the horrific events of that night unfolded, it occurred to us that a book had saved his life.

Bombay, more than any other Indian city, arouses loyalty and a dose of envy.

No other city in India encourages such empyreal ambitions in its people nor brings them down to earth so fast.

Bombayites are fiercely proud and loyal about their city, even as they complain about its daily frustrations. Few contemplate leaving. Au contraire, they keep coming: from Ranikhet and Rohtak; Erode and Idukki. The city absorbs them all: larger than any single soul; retaining its identity and arousing feelings of inadequacy. Is this why those brainwashed young men targeted Mumbai? And we might as well get this out of the way. I like the name Bombay even though I believe that the name change is a necessary step in India’s emergence from the chrysalis of colonialism. So Bombay it will be—in this article anyway.

Over the years, I have spent countless days in Bombay trying to figure out the city. Couldn’t do it. The city gave me vignettes; snapshots; Greta Garboesque mystique; chiaroscuro contrasts. I’ve ridden trains and hunted for vada pav;

ate chaat and lunched on sushi at Wasabi. Like you all, I too have my “only in Bombay” stories.

Lunch at Wasabi with socialite Chhaya Momaya. “I don’t know why people say that Bombay is like New York. It’s more like L.A., with all the botox people are into,” she says.

Executive chef Hemant Oberoi comes out. Air-kisses all around. “Get me a reservation in Per Se next week,” she asks. “I am in New York.”

If Wasabi is power lunches, then Dharavi is Bombay’s great send-up; its cosmic joke that a slum is now the geographical centre of this metropolis.

Giddy tourists take guided tours, chatting up potters and papad-makers. Last I checked, the Dharavi redevelopment plan was stuck in red tape. “In terms of urban strategy, it is a very defective plan,” says urbanologist Matias Echanove, who maintains a site called Dharavi.org and moved here from

Tokyo. “Bombay should develop incrementally, with infrastructure retrofitting—like Tokyo has for decades.

Dharavi is the solution not the problem.”

The real problem is the vegetarian housing societies that have sprung up on Malabar Hill, says Naresh Fernandes, editor of Time Out Mumbai. A sophisticated bachelor about town, he poses as a scold. “There were maidans (playgrounds), gardens and theatres that were open to all,” he says. “Now, it is all about elite homes and schools and how to keep the ‘others’ out. The city has lost a sense of itself as a single entity.”

We are sitting at Vetro (and yes, the irony doesn’t escape me), one of the many restaurants that makes this city such a romp for foodies. Bombay today, says Fernandes, is a “metaphor for India and all its vicious problems”.

I put up with it till the tiramisu. If he hates it so much, why the heck doesn’t he move out, I ask. Fernandes is taken MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT

Mystique or a muddle: Is Bombay a metaphor for India and all its vicious problems?

what his parliament demanded.

On 16 February, Pakistan said it would accept Shariah in its tribal areas. The population there wanted not health, education, infrastructure and employment, but more religion.

Zardari passed the Bill, but cleverly worded it in such a way that the Taliban would reject the implementation. This rejection gave him the chance to close the loop, show them as intractable, and go to war.

The Zardaris and the Bhuttos are Baloch feudals settled in Sindh. Zardari is Shia in a nation that’s 80% Sunni, 60% Punjabi, and vulnerable to sneers that he’s not really representative.

He is getting weaker because Pakistanis hate his rational instinct, but after the Mumbai attacks he has done enough things right to pull Pakistanis out of the hole they want to be in.

He has pacified the Pashtun, and now he must tackle a more dangerous opponent: the Punjabi, who is radicalized by the gigantic Markaz Dawa organization. Its head is Hafiz Saeed, founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which recruited Kasab.

This will be difficult, and the press will fight it, but Zardari has three more years of his term left to finish the job.

And every time he is opposed, he can point to the events of 26 November and say, “This is what happens when Pakistan does not act.”

Aakar Patel is a director at Hill Road Media.

Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

shoba narayan

aback. “This is my city,” he says finally. “I have a stake in it. I mean, Bombay used to represent a certain egalitarianism, you know. This was the place where you could come and make your fortune.”

Fortune, of course—or the prospect of it—defines Bombay. Half the Indians on the Forbes billionaires list live here.

And in spite of its contradictions, this city of 17 million, give or take, is India’s most cosmopolitan. “Bombay is incredibly accommodating towards immigrants,” says Abhay Sardesai, editor of Art India. “It allows individuals to drop anchor and flourish on their own terms.” Erudite and energetic, Sardesai looks like a friendly Indian techie but is anything but. We are walking in and out of the galleries of Colaba. At one, we run into artist Vivan Sundaram. They discuss his loft-sized installation, Trash. “It reminds me of Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” says Sardesai.

“Actually it is more like Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog,” the artist replies.

I hang back, feeling like a yokel. You see what I mean? Envy compounded by feelings of inadequacy.

Dentists Gauri and Anand Merchant invite me to an IPL match. Later, over dinner at the Thai Pavilion, I invite them to Bangalore. He demurs. Didn’t the bars in Bangalore close at 11.30pm or some such ridiculously early hour, he asks. “Your city is a bloody morgue, yaar. Here, I can drink all night and go to Zaffran’s at 4am if I am hungry. What would I do in Bangalore?”

Merchant lives on Malabar Hill in a joint family. His two daughters are state-level swimmers. “I am a devoted dad,” he says. “But after 9pm I have to get out of the house because my folks start watching serials.”

Which is how we find ourselves—Merchant, his wife and I—at

THE GOOD LIFE

2am at a gay party. It is the Queer Media Collective’s Awards night and my friend, Vikram Doctor, one of India’s few openly gay journalists, has invited me to attend. Wendell Rodricks is giving the awards. There are probably around 800 people spilling into two rooms. The strobe lights come on and I melt into the crowd. Be cool, I tell myself. Gauri and I dance. People stare at us. Maybe they think we are lesbian.

I stare right back. Most likely, they are wondering how the straitjacket crashed the party. There are a few young men with spiked hair and nose-rings, but for the most part, the black-attired crowd looks impossibly chic.

Doctor introduces me to Prince Manav, the “gay prince” from Rajasthan who looks like Jeremy Irons. “I appeared on Oprah,” he says. “The royals disowned me.” So what do you do now, I ask. “My duty,” he says with a faintly ironic smile. “I talk about gay issues and rule my kingdom.”

He didn’t actually say something that sound bite-worthy but after a few martinis, that’s what it sounded like.

Merchant stands in a corner, slightly sour that nobody has propositioned him while I dance the night away with his wife, a Malabar Hill Princess slumming it at a gay bar while her in-laws watch television serials at home. Only in Bombay, I think.

This is why we love Bombay.

Shoba Narayan thinks Bombay is like a walnut: large-hearted, smooth on the outside but complicated inside.

Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

L16 ESSAY

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ALTAF TYREWALA

THE PSEUDO

PEACE PROPHET H

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

ola, comrades. It’s been a year since our peace rally (that’s what we called it, although the mood there was anything but). Haven’t seen you or heard from you since. Are you all dead? Are you all in a coma? Or does there have to be another terrorist attack before we can flood the roads again with our fury, yelling ourselves hoarse demanding justice and the disrobing of inept politicians?

There’s something gruesome and unimaginative about that, isn’t there? The fact that we need the death of others to get the old anger going. Or maybe that’s not enough either. Our city and country have witnessed deadly bomb blasts for decades, and none of them have provoked spontaneous peace rallies like the attacks last year.

It seems Bollywood and television have made our need for narratives non-negotiable.

We must have a beginning, middle and end; identifiable villains, clear-cut heroes, dramatic tension, and a satisfying denouement. Not even terrorist attacks will move us unless the mayhem has been relayed live on our TVs, allowing us to keep track of the death count like the score of a Test match. In retrospect, the “peace rally” in December last year was more like the commemoration of a great show, a vociferous send-off for a fultu paisa vasool tamasha.

By then, the terrorists were dead and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower and Nariman House were under control. The city felt safe enough to don “I love Mumbai” T-shirts, step out of our air-conditioned abodes, and converge on the refined streets leading to the Gateway of India.

So what did we think we would achieve through that rally?

For the thousands of youngsters who participated, it was possibly the first public protest of their lives. Not even the most pickled cynic could remain unmoved by the sight of all those fledgling men and women with their shining faces and well-groomed hair screaming “Vande Mataram” and “Bharat mata ki jai”. As groups of banner-waving citizens arrived in endless waves, and as the streets remained packed well into the night, it felt as if a comatose city had finally awakened. Who in Mumbai had witnessed such civic rage in recent years, expressed in such deafening volume? Doctors, clerks, housewives and clergymen jostled with students,

NEXT TIME YOU SURVIVE A TERRORIST ATTACK, DON’T BE PART OF ANOTHER ‘PEACE RALLY’.

SHOUT AT YOUR SPOUSE, TALK TO YOUR SHRINK OR WATCH A HINDI MOVIE executives, businessmen and tourists. Hindi speakers and Marathi speakers, Hindus and Muslims, townies and suburbanites, rich and poor...the thousands who had bothered to venture out that cool evening had fused into a collective citizen entity that was enraged and hell-bent on showing it.

Now that a year has passed since that rally, it might be a good idea to take stock. Have all our demands been met? Have all our targets been vanquished?

We denounced our corrupt politicians. But the uncles are still as inept as ever—over-promising, under-delivering, and slapping each other around (in the legislative assembly, no less!).

We demanded justice. But the injustices being meted out to us haven’t abated in number or in potency: Power cuts, water cuts, a creaking justice system, failing infrastructure, and over-crowded suburban trains continue to remain the narratives of our city. There hasn’t been another terrorist attack since last November. But let’s not forget that prior to the Mumbai attacks, there had been bomb blasts in Jaipur, Bangalore, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Kanpur, which no government agency could prevent. Terrorists had a great run last year. And this year of peace might just be a gestation period for sleeper cells who are preparing to unleash a fresh instalment of destruction.

Meanwhile, our city continues to remain on high alert and we’ve all been turned into paranoid vigilantes by official circulars that exhort us to watch for suspicious objects and report the presence of strangers in our neighbourhood. Is this why we pay taxes, to be our own security guards?

We were fools to think that the removal of Maharashtra’s

chief minister after the attacks signalled a victory for our collective voice. The gentleman is back as the Union minister of heavy industries, back in the running for the highest post of our state. At least one of our wishes has come true: Pakistan is self-destructing. If only we could credit ourselves for it.

In the final reckoning it appears that last year’s peace rally was little more than the ineffectual outpouring of hysterics. It was not the start of a movement of socially engaged citizens; rather, that peace rally was an event unto itself, an act of mass masturbation meant to assuage our feelings of helplessness in the face of terror and administrative indifference. It was as if we were shouting at our own cowardice; voicing in cathartic screeches the tragedy of our own political apathy that has made us passive observers of the active degradation of our neighbourhoods, our cities and our nation. It helped that we were a mob, one among thousands. It allowed us to say and do things we wouldn’t have the gumption to do as individuals. Nubile girls, pumped up young men and middle-aged folks screamed “We want justice!” as they lined up in the parade that merely went around the block and back. How convenient that our protests were addressed to no one in particular, that we were screeching into the backs of those before us.

Albert Einstein described an insane person as someone who does the same thing over and over again and expects different results. If only we were insane as a society. It would mean we expected things to change. We are a clever, clever people. We do the same things over and over again—we vote, we pay taxes, and when it gets too much, we take to the streets and have a gala time waving our fists at imaginary windmills. We know nothing will change, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

Comrades, in case you survive the next terrorist attack and feel the need to expend some righteous rage, save yourself the embarrassment of another “peace rally”. Go jog in the park.

Go yell at your spouse or shrink.

If nothing works, go catch a movie or something. Three Idiots will be out soon. Enjoy.

Altaf Tyrewala is the Mumbai-based author of No God in Sight.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

ESSAY L17

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SREENIVASAN JAIN

DISQUIET ON THE

WESTERN FRONT L

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

istening once again to the audio recordings of the 26/11 gunmen talking to their handlers in Pakistan, I came across this surreal gem: a handler dictating a (rather corny) sher (poem) to Imran, one of the terrorists at Nariman House. This was on the afternoon of the 27th, by which time the cavalry was well and truly in place.

Nothing summarizes better the sheer inertia of the siege, the exasperating absence of our armed response than a terrorist, ringed by snipers, painstakingly taking dictation, making his handler repeat each line twice: Handler: Yeh sach hai ke andheron ka tassalut hai magar...

Terrorist: Yeh sach—kya, phir se batayein?

Handler: Yeh sach hai ke andheron ka tassalut hai magar, shamey bujhne na denge zulm ke aiwanon mein..., etc.

We know now, with the benefit of hindsight, that our malevolent visitors had time not just to memorize bad poetry, but also to wander the streets of Mumbai, linger at heritage landmarks, raid the minibar at the Taj and Oberoi, discuss the energy-giving merits of almonds on the phone, and even take the occasional power nap. Did the 72 hours I spent at the media stockade at Taj come anywhere near capturing the agonizingly slow, fumbling, halting nature of a seige? I am not so sure. For one, a seige—whether in Beslan or Bombay—is at odds with the exigencies of TV reportage, which demanded of us—me—sustenance of a seamless narrative for three days (a feat which, among other things, redefined endurance-test journalism. A friend from New York emailed saying she liked my reportage but that I was “brachiating” too often). As it turned out, much of what has come to constitute 26/11 “action”—the brutal killings, the rounding up of hostages, some tentative attempts at retaliation, the setting off of bombs and attendant pyromania—was all over by the dawn of the 27th.

From then on, visible activity—which forms the bulk of PoV (point of view) type of live reporting—was at a minimum: the occasional burst of gunfire, the crump of mortar, a group of hotel guests being bundled out under armed protection. For the most, a deathly silence hung like a pall over the Gateway, broken by the odd seagull. Colaba Causeway was

WE NEED TO FIND A GRAMMAR FOR REPORTING INERTIA. OFTEN, THE CLUES TO DECODING THE ANATOMY OF A SPECTACULAR, HORRIFIC ACT OF TERROR LIE IN THE ABSURD a morgue. A hush cloaked the elegant, colonnaded lanes behind the Taj, each pillar manned by a watchful, heavily armed security man. But the atmospherics of a siege make for complicated TV. How do you adequately convey a sense of jittery commandos squatting for hours in a hotel corridor as terrorists munched on almonds?

I worked the phone, abandoned the stockade to meet sources, interviewed police and navy commanders.

But soon it was clear—the official handling of information was turning out to be almost as colossal a catastrophe as the armed response to the attackers. Starved of action and regular, concise briefings, an escalating cycle of conspiracy theories and red herrings proliferated to explain the delay: the terrorists had back-up from “sleeper” cells among the hotel staff, they had booked rooms in advance and loaded them with weapons and explosives, they had taken hundreds of hostages to the roof of the Trident...and so on.

To a large extent, this general incoherence can be explained away as the discombobulating impact of terrorism, especially in the first few hours that follow an attack. And with the information lag that marks every such event.

The BBC’s Nik Gowing, who came by our Mumbai office the other day, dropped off a brochure he has authored on what he calls the “tyranny of real time”. He argues that in an age where news gathering has acquired an increasingly anarchic, freelance quality, government/security agencies are often way behind the information curve in moments of crisis—like a terrorist attack.

Except with Mumbai, the authorities were riding an unprecedented curve of information, much of it in real time. Our ignorance, to some

extent, could be forgiven: During the first 72 hours, we only had occasional glimpses of this enormous, Rashomon-like mass of information (it was three weeks before I first heard the terrorist-handler intercepts, on the laptop of a 26/11 investigator).

But what about our agencies?

In the first few hours, they had access to the CCTV room at the Taj. By midnight they were listening to the terrorists and their handlers. Around the same time, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab’s bedside confession was being recorded in a hospital ward. All of this, quite apart from still images, live images, eyewitness accounts, hostage phone calls, terrorists doing live phone-ins, etc. And yet, right until the end, the official versions (and there were many, too many) mirrored the general confusion. Sure, they withheld facts for reasons of security, backside-protection and just official cussedness. But it still begs the question why, with such a panoramic view of the attacks, with the advantage of so many perspectives, it took so teeth-gnashingly long to bring it to an end.

When Lounge asked me to write about the “lessons from reporting 26/11”, I racked my brains to distil some pearl of wisdom, some timeless journalistic nugget, and couldn’t come up with anything except this: that we too are victims of the tyranny of real time. That an excess of information can complicate the obvious. That we need to find a grammar for reporting inertia.

And that sometimes the clues to decoding the anatomy of a spectacular, horrific act of terror might lie in the absurd.

One of the most quoted lines from the intercepts is, again, Imran at Nariman House being coached by his handler in the event that he is interviewed by the Indian media. Tell them, says the handler, that this is a trailer. The rest of the film is yet to come. Heard in isolation, this is the ominous, apocalyptic line that finds its ways into documentaries and promos everywhere. “Hukumat ko keh do yeh trailer hai. Abhi picture baaki hai (Tell the government that this is just the trailer. The movie is yet to come).” But the next bit is somewhat more anticlimactic: A bewildered Imran asks his handler: Sir, yeh trailer kya hai... (What is a trailer)?

Sreenivasan Jain is managing editor, NDTV 24x7.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L18

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009

Travel SOUTH AFRICA TOURISM

TRIP PLANNER

THE LOUNGE CUT­OUT­AND­KEEP GUIDE TO

Rainbow city

JOHANNESBURG

Jozi, Jo’burg or Johannesburg.

Call it what you may but the largest city in southern Africa is a true gold spot

PARTY HERE ON 31 DECEMBER…

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP

BY F I R D O S E M O O N D A ································· lthough it’s known as the city of gold, I prefer to think of Johannesburg as the city of all colours. Blame it on pollution, but the sunrises (and sunsets) set the sky alight. Fiery oranges and reds, mixed with delicate pinks and lilacs, splash across the heavens to welcome and say goodbye to each day.

The perfect spot to take in a picturesque sunset is at Melville. The trendy suburb is located between two universities and is well known for its nightlife. Seventh Street is littered with pubs and restaurants. Six (www.sixcocktailbar.com), a cocktail lounge, is about as wide as the average passage. Space constraints mean you are likely to find yourself seated next to a complete stranger, but the manager is known to hand out free chocolate cake shooters at whim and, after a few of those, everyone is friends.

If that cramps your style, though, hop next door, to Unplugged. This bar (telephone 0027-11-4825133) moonlights as a club where Beyoncé tops the pop charts. When the party gets out of hand—as I’ve often seen it do—there’s Catz Pyjamas (www.catzpyjamas.co.za) a few streets away. It’s open 24 hours and makes the most delectable pizza.

When daylight approaches one can pop over to Braamfontein, for a more sombre experience at Constitution Hill (www.constitutionhill.org.za). It houses the notorious Old Fort Prison—also known as Number Four—where Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were jailed during the apartheid era. Now, it is home to the Constitutional Court, the guardian of human rights in the country’s new democracy.

The inner city isn’t all about troubled history, it is also a celebration of Africa. The Small Street Mall (Small Street, Braamfontein) is a great place

City lights: (above) The Johannesburg skyline; the Nelson Mandela Square.

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for traditional African clothing, beaded jewellery, wire ornaments and mixed-media paintings. The adventurous can have their hair braided by an African hairstylist.

Johannesburg, or Jozi, is frequently described as the world’s largest man-made forest. A park worth a visit is The Wilds, in Houghton (www.jhbcityparks.com/ find-a-park/the-wilds.html).

Although the terrain is quite hilly, a walk provides breathtaking views of the city. Gillooly’s Farm (Boeing Road West, Bedfordview; telephone: 0027-11-4538066), to the east of the city, is another great picnic spot and also has one of the finest Cape Dutch farmhouses. The jazz and blues café at the park often has a local guitarist and saxophonist entertaining the crowds.

Of course, nothing ends a day like a refreshing drink, and SOUTH AFRICA TOURISM

for that, certain historic pubs stand out. The Radium Beer Hall (www.theradium.co.za), the oldest pub in the city at 80, has a rich history, having doubled as a shebeen during the apartheid era, selling liquor to black customers when it was illegal.

For something a little more decadent, there’s Rose Boys (Corner Oxford and Corlett Drive, Illovo; telephone: 0027- 82-466 9162). I love the décor here—classic Renaissance mixed with Havana influences. Patrons are encouraged to dance on the tables to the sing-along music and, as the night wears on, even the waiters join in. Be warned, this is a popular venue and fills up quickly. Fittingly, in this city of colours, even the pavement outside Rose Boys is painted a beautiful blush pink.

Come to Jozi. Colour your life.

Firdose Moonda is a freelance writer based in Johannesburg.

YOU CAN’T GO TO JO’BURG AND SKIP…

u Cradle of Humankind: An hour’s drive away in the Sterkfontein area, this is where early man is sup-

posed to have taken his first upright steps. The rocky, hilly area is chock-ablock with dolomite caves containing hundreds of fossils of animals, plants and, yes, hominids. One of South Africa’s earliest World Heritage Sites, only two of the caves here—Sterkfontein and Wonder—are open to the public. Visit www.cradleofhumankind. co.za for details. u Pilanesberg Game Reserve: Just in case you can’t make it to Kruger (4 hours away by road), Pilanesberg, located in the crater of an extinct volcano about 2 hours from Jo’burg, is a good alternative destination for a taste of the wild. The fourth largest park in South Africa is home to almost every regional mammal, including the Big Five. Both self-drives and guided tours are available. Visit www.pilanesberg-game-reserve.co.za for details. u Premier Diamond Mines, Cullinan: East of Pretoria lies the “blue sky” region, whose mines yielded the biggest rough-gem quality diamond ever discovered. The Cullinan diamond or the First Star of Africa is part of the British Crown Jewels, but you can still do an underground tour of the mines and also witness the cutting and polishing of stones at the same complex. Bookings are mandatory. Visit www. cullinanmeander.co.za

u If that’s too déclassé for you, go for the grand buffet at La Belle Terrasse Restaurant at The Westcliff, an Orient Express group hotel, which has a Great Gatsby Tops and Tails dress code. Expect a live DJ and dancing after dinner, which will include glazed hams, suckling pig, lobster thermidor and all the frills. Entrance costs R750 per person. Bookings essential at restaurantreservations@ westcliffe.co.za or call 0027-11-4816009.

NEED MORE REASONS TO BE IN JOZI?

u SA Ballet theatre Pinocchio, the story we all loved as kids, comes alive in pantomime from November through 3 January. www.saballettheatre.co.za/ whatson.html u Gerard Sekoto Youth Festival Hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery, this is a festival dedicated to the late artist Gerard Sekoto. Events include an artists’ conference, film and theatre workshops, puppet shows and poetry reading sessions. On 16 December. Visit www.joburg.org.za/ u L’Afrique On display everyday till 24 December, this art exhibition hosted by Museum Africa celebrates the lives and works of Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel, who left behind an important legacy in African and South African art. Visit www.joburg.org.za/content/ view/3886/193/ u Meet Extreme Adventures If art galleries and museums is not your idea of an exciting Sunday morning, try this. Every Sunday till 31 December, the Meet Extreme Adventures club will allow you to try out bungee jumping, rock climbing and scuba-diving. Visit www. meetextremeadventures.co.za/ Write to lounge@livemint.com

Wild things: A cub at the Lion Park.

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uBecause 2010 has everyone all excited all ready: South Africa hosts the Fifa World Cup here in June, and Jo’burg, with two stadiums, will be one of the primary theatres of action.

To celebrate, join the grand street party hosted by the city at Mary Fitzgerald Square, now in its fifth year.

The concert begins at 6pm and continues till 2am. Entrance is free.