I’m sad. Last day, the Kerala state government offered Blast Relief Funds to the fate-stricken Mumbaikaars- but only to the Malayalees among them. What rubbish?

How can a government act so insensitively?

Dear Mumbaikar…Please don’t feel bad against your fellow Keralites, as this is not their blunder. As you know well, Commonsense is not common; even among Governments. You can understand that.

In fact, we are not Malayalees, nor Parsies, nor Muslims, nor Black & White… we are the MUMBAIKAARS, ‘ a raceless-colourless-creedless-race’.

Anyway, the Maharashtra Government rebuffed the offer. Just like slapping the face of those Murky Marxist counterparts.

And the funniest part of this melodrama is that the one, who denied this offer is also a Malayalee, but an optional one.

When you see blood everywhere around you, mangled bodies and limbs, clothes turned a muddy, murky brown which can distinctly be identified as dried blood, debris scattered all over like rocks on a sea floor, what will be your state of mind??
People crying on the drop of a hat, people calmly, stonily doing what has to be done. People reaching out and trying to grab whatever comes to them. Angry people, sobbing journalist, scared cops, lost politicians, busy laymen, and a shocked mass.

Commuters dead, people covering dead bodies and rushing the rest to a hospital, any hospital near-by or anywhere at all. Nerves. anger, fear, surprise, choas, havoc and blood. Among all this the only constant thing, BLOOD.
People’s blood, dying men, dead men, injured?? no much more. Beyond that. Even if you see it, its difficult to believe. Difficult to digest, and difficult to live with. Difficult to move on with.
And Mumbai moves on. Difficult or not, possible or not, Mumbai moves on.

Mad traffic on the road, random people offering lifts, men and women out to taxi people stranded on the roads, blood donations, water and food offered to anyone trying to get home and money being handed out to get people home.
People will not take the 6:00 train, they will not stay too long at Borivali, Jogeshwari, Mahim or Matunga stations, but they will get back to normal, in full force, to convince others just as much as to convince themselves.

Teenagers will return to school, and collegians will resume their work and project and make their way towards colleges. Ladies will reoccupy their government job chairs, uncles will restart tracking the sensex and children will question again. The fear will live on.
And the pride and unity of Mumbaikars has been underlined again, in a fat bld stroke.

No matter what, we will stand together, and stand tall.

In our continuing effort to bring you a citizen’s ( and not the media’s) view of the bomb blasts of July 11, here in Bombay, this is an essay penned by my sister Mehernaaz. She is a non-blogger, and hence I am posting it here to give her a platform.

Who made my Bombay cry? Why?

[By Mehernaaz Sam Wadia for Metblogs Mumbai]

This was the 1st time I was out and about when forces, natural and man-made attempted to bring my home to its knees. But not for long. The day after every ‘event’, thousands wake up and make their way to work, each one hoping that there were better ways and reasons to break the monotony of their routine lives.

The rains lashed at our city. Well not really lashed. I personally remember having excitedly waded through worse. These days, the smallest of downpours puts people in flash back mode and they get paranoid. “Stay home. I don’t want to risk u facing danger, or worse… never seeing you again” is the funda Bombay lives by through the monsoons. Is anyone listening when people cry out because their homes are getting swept away? When children fall ill due to the polluted waters? Or when the city suffers humongous losses financially? Don’t the people responsible have families of their own that have suffered? If every one of these complacent culprits pledges to work diligently, I’m sure that would alleviate some of the chaos. Does nature have to keep slamming the problems in our face to make us learn from our mistakes? Nature doesn’t understand that at such times, the people concerned turn their faces away.

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A panipuriwaala carrying a wicker basket disembarked at Mahim Junction on platform 2 moments before the 5:54 Borivali fast hurtled by a few feet away on platform 3. He worked between the two platforms, under a metal pillar that held up the roof. He made his way through the crowd and sat at his designated place. The Borivali-bound train came through. People on the edge of the platform took a step back, out of reach of travellers leaning out of the stuffed train. The force of the wind accompanying it pushed some back, and pulled some closer. A few cars behind the engine, near the center, was a compartment packed with people better dressed than those in most others, but as sweaty. Their next stop was Bandra, and before it came the Mithi Creek, which would bring a foul smell and a cool breeze. The inhabitants of compartment 528A could not have known of the incident at Bandra, and beyond it at Khar, as their car passed by little more than half the platform’s length and would have, within a couple of seconds, traversed the rest too. They would have barely noticed faces on the platform at that speed, and among them the panipuriwaala, when there was a white flash.
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The gala of blood is over. The players and the spectators are gone. Life has sprouted again. But do you think this is the end of all?

No. I know you don’t think so because each of us has no surety as to what would be the next moment in our lives. But now we know one thing; the bloody dell of terrorism, pushing us through the knotty thread of fearful tomorrows, gets our lives fairly balanced between life and death.

Here is what we can do or rather we must do. These are very simple to write down but never easy to practice. But still… We can have a try…. Can’t we… ??
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What has just happened is abhorable. There are no words to describe the events.

Do you have something to say. Want to pass on advice ?

Did you witness events that will leave a permanent mark on your life?

Any stories of stories of heroism from the common citizenry ?

Or do you want to vent out your feelings and thoughts?

If so please do so on this open thread. Anything and everything related to the bomb blasts is up for discussion.

Farah Baria, writes a great piece in the Indian Express.

Even at the best of times, there’s one scene that never changes: battered railway coaches packed with the human flotsam of a brutal city. Men, women, and children, travelling like concentration-camp refugees to do the only thing they know: survive.

In hospital, a happy ending’I saw 25 bodies being piled up’They’ll just sit it out, wait for the trains Sonia, Lalu leave for Mumbai They were just trying to get home

This is Mumbai’s Western Railway Line, the fragile umbilical cord that links our metropolis to the Motherland, across the amniotic swell of the Arabian Sea. It is also Mumbai’s lifeline, ferrying four million citizens from hydra-headed suburbs to the congested heart of the city in relentless pursuit of a livelihood.

On Tuesday, that lifeline was cut, savagely severed by a hand that obviously knows Mumbai’s anatomy well. Seven serial bombs at seven stations–all key nerve centres–in peak-hour traffic. When in doubt, aim for the jugular. Hannibal Lecter couldn’t have done better.

It isn’t the first time Mumbai has been mortally wounded. Exactly 13 years ago, 13 bombs brought India’s feisty financial capital to its knees. Back then, the prime target was the Stock Exchange, that impudent icon of progress and prosperity. The aim: to symbolically cripple a newborn economy, taking its first baby steps towards globalisation.

Check out the entire article here

[Hat tip: Taj ]

Adil Jussawala is one of India’s foremost poets. I once had an opportunity to hear him recite some of his poems at a poets evening which had the likes of Dom Moraes and H. Masud Taj sharing the stage.

In a response to the Partition of India in 1947, Jussawala penned this poem.

Sea Breeze, Bombay

by Adil Jussawalla

Partition’s people stitched

Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.

An opened people, fraying across the cut

country reknotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,

Brokering and bays, refugees’ harbour and port,

Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work

Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,

Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,

come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,

Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,

Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,

Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,

Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland’s histories.

I came across this poem on Amardeep’s post on Sepia Mutiny. Continue there to read Amardeep’s analysis and commentary.

Dilip D’Souza, one of the foremost freelance journalist of the city, has a very interesting and telling piece in the aftermath of the bomb blasts. Dilip writes regularly at DCUBED, and is a good friend personally and of Metroblogging Mumbai.

In the city of bomb attacks on sardine-packed trains, it’s the morning after. The palms sway in the sea breeze, the sun is breaking through the gray clouds, and I am writing this in a car as we drive across town, remembering Tuesday night. For the first time in a while, there’s no rain and I don’t hear any sirens. For hours Tuesday, that’s all I heard, all I felt. Rain, sirens.

Continue reading the entire piece at Salon

Manish Vij, a New Yorker; currently in Bombay has written a great piece on his experience of riding the trains in Mumbai. Manish is a powerhouse blogger, formerly of Sepia Mutiny, and currently at Ultrabrown. He is also a good friend of mine and of Metroblogging Mumbai.

This is what he had to say on Salon.com

As a New Yorker in Bombay, or Mumbai, as it’s officially known, one of my greatest thrills has been taking the fast train downtown.

I clamber into a wide, sturdy train carriage without doors, sealed windows or comfort of any kind. The carriage, done up in stamped steel, has the Spartan appeal of a military jeep..

Continue reading entire article here