Mumbai Update
My friend and colleague Lisa Brawley, Professor of Urban Studies, writes in a note to me this morning:
The New York Times reports today that the Mumbai bombings targeted “habitual first-class passengers.” The Independent (UK) elaborates: “All along the tracks, it was the poorest of Mumbai’s citizens, Hindu and Muslim, who were first to rush to the aid of the injured on the trains, the migrant slum-dwellers whose shanty towns lie alongside the tracks. On the trains, India’s rich and successful are brought face to face with the Dickensian squalor in which the poor live, sometimes in tenements that hang over the tracks, more often in corrugated aluminium shacks nailed against the railings at the side of the line.”
Here is Vikram Doctor’s piece “The Myth of Water Bottles” in today’s Economic Times. (Thanks, NF.)
Our first halt was at a large hospital where a barrage of broadcasting vans was encamped, with little pools of bright light highlighting the young anchors each filing ‘live and exclusive’ reports back to the studio.
Evading our chance to become another sound bite on the spirit of Mumbai, we moved on to encounter a group of young men who moved towards us menacingly.
Rioters? Vigilantes? No, they wanted to give us water. We said no (we’d just finished a long coffee fuelled evening at work so the last thing we needed was water) and moved on, only to meet another water bearing crowd, and then another.
(Photo: Adeel Halim, Reuters)
