I am trying to remember the day when Mumbai was attacked by the terrorists, my friend Deepak called me on the phone and told me watch the news something is going on in Bombay (Mumbai) at first it looked like some small scale terrorist attack but as the day went by I began to get some idea of what was going on.Seventy hours later when the last commando walked out of the Taj and the world stood stunned , people of Mumbai walked out on the streets and waved to the brave soldiers .India media had never covered a crisis event like this before and all I could hear all day long was breaking news , exclusive coverage , live coverage . I could see reporters shouting on the microphones trying to show what is happening on the ground and they were jumping on one another to interview every foreigner in town, the question: how do you feel now? And then the endless debates on what went wrong why the NSG came late .
But during this whole time I was wondering did Mumbai stop , was it like New York on 9/11 but I was stunned to see people who were watching commands in action just like they would watch a cricket match from the terrace of high raise building near a stadium . At Nariman House when the NSG commandos where being dropped by the helicopter I can see people in roof tops all over the place and something in direct line of fire. I am not sure if people were being brave or just seeing a high voltage packed drama unfold in front of them
Mumbai did not stop the life went on as usual, people were going on with there work as If nothing happed but it happened we need to hang our heads in shame. Do it because a dozen-odd terrorists traveled 500 nautical miles of the Arabian sea from Karachi to Mumbai’s Gateway of India, just opposite the grandiose Taj Mahal Hotel and proceeded to humble the city of 16.4 million into utter helplessness for over 70 hours even as over 280 civilians and some distinguished professional security men lost their lives to the hand grenades and rifle bullets of a fanatical mindset. It was a humiliation worse than the drubbing the Chinese army gave us in 1961.
