Writing from India

I have the same feeling as on 9/11, when I was in Washington, D.C. One hundred eighty dead civilians and more than 300 wounded from an indiscriminate attack on a highly visible set of targets. Except this time, I am in country I don't know, where I don't speak the language of most — only the colonial language. Today, on a train I talked with five men who wanted to discuss terrorism. For them, it was about Muslim terrorism. One man said that Gandhi was the black spot of India, because he encouraged Muslims not to leave at the time of partition, and so India now has 20-25% Muslim population. According to these men, Muslims and Hindus cannot live together. I questioned — are you talking about 200 million Muslims, or just the 20 who carried out the terror operation in Mumbai on Wednesday night, with perhaps the support of another 100 people?

Pakistan and India work from different principles, one man said. Well, maybe that's true — but India and the United States work from different principles as well, as I've experienced in the last few weeks. In traffic, for example, there is an ordered chaos in which all kinds of vehicles — cars, bicycles, auto-rickshaws, and bike-rickshaws and pedestrians — come quite close to each other without hitting. Instead of a competition, it's more like a noisy dance. "HORNS OK PLEASE" say many bumpers. Quite different from the U.S., but the U.S. and India are not at war. These men seemed fascinated by questioning from a foreigner. Across the aisle, a Sikh man travelling with his son listened quietly. And I thought how the nuclear high-end politics is merely spinning off from this ongoing conviction that people of different religions cannot live together.

There is a media gorging on this story, and the lives of the victims and their families and information about the perpetrators and responses from around the world will continue to teletype out. And practically speaking, I won't be staying in the neighborhood of southern Mumbai as we had planned on Sunday night — places where as a tourist I had coffee and beer just 10 days before the attacks. But the deja vu I feel is the hyped-up patriotism ("This is an attack on all of India, and on the world economy," TV reporters said), the sense that the Indian state will react with the shallow militarism that sells. What I thirst for most in these situations is understanding — How did this occur? Who are the people who spawned this, and what do they want? The media and state disclose very little about this. It is up to us to pursue our curiosity, and keep that curiosity alive.