The horror continues

After my post of midnight, I was up till 1.30 AM last night, watching with increasing horror at the situation in Mumbai. For the first time since I left college I think, i was up before 6.30 AM, to see the latest updates, only to realise that, far from being better, things were the same, if not worse. I did absolutely nothing productive at work today, spending most of my time tracking things on Twitter. This is by far the most horrifying thing to happen to India in my living memory, although the parents may counter that.

I am also feeling extremely guilty about the way I spoke of the Taj and the incident in my last post; considering the gravity and the widespread nature of incidents across our "commercial capital", it was completely unjustifiable.

There are people who have been inside their hotel rooms, unable to leave, for more than 20 hours now. Luckily, in this modern age of technology, almost all of them have mobile phones and are in touch with their near and dear ones. But does that lessen their trauma in any way?

Amidst all the reactions in the blogosphere, the most evocative first-hand accounts come from two of my favourite bloggers, who happened to be together at the time - Amit Varma and Sonia Faleiro. Another first-hand account which I heard on the news this morning was from a guy named Deepak, who was/is a guest in the Taj. He talked of how the hotel staff had kept him and his neighbour updated through the night, how he could see the terrorists from his room window, and how he was staying calm by reading the Hanuman Chalisa. Does it ever strike you as strange, how religion can calm and destroy at the very same moment?

I'm so very scared for the future of my country.