my google reader has never collected so many unread articles in the past. its as if i read the first line of each in the left hand summary and dismiss them all because they seem to continue their lives as always. as if nothing has happened. the same kind of posts that i liked earlier, seem irrelevant and luxurious in some way. as if they are ranting about their personal lives when some others cant afford to think normally. when for some others their lives may have suddenly been torn apart.

my cousin talks about the england test getting canceled with a lot of regret as if that was the biggest tragedy to come out of it. im sure he is jumping now.

personally i still feel a strong dislike for the city bombay. when i think of living there. when i think of the day i was commuting by a local to college like so many other days, and our train suddenly halted and all of us started cribbing about how important our time was. the reason for the halt was apparently a man who had been crushed underneath us. i think each one of us gave a peak below when we heard that and then the crowd that is the life of the city swiftly raced in another direction to reach the next earliest train on the other platform to get comfortable sitting/standing space.

another day we were waiting for the clock to strike 12 as it was new year's eve. we were in jw marriott and malaika arora was supposed to dance in the first minutes of the new year. there was an entire room to bread and cheese, and another to streams of chocolate flowing over strawberries and cakes. i'm not kidding. i hadn't seen that kind of lavishness before. and there was a bar where barmen shook bottles with strange liquors over your open mouth while people drank and danced like mad. one man on the dance floor got a heart attack. he blacked out. people stopped for a few minutes to clear the way for him. he was taken away and the dancing resumed.

when the word resilience is mentioned after people having died these are the two scenes that i associate the word with. its not anyone's fault. its just the way the place is. it doesn't leave you with a choice of any kind. i've been there and i don't think i ever want to live there again.

there was once when i bought vada pav and frooti and left it next to a man who lay apparently sleeping or unconscious at the marine lines station with some blood near his head. i don't know if he was alive. people stared at me as if i was a lunatic. apparently because the man was in rags anyway.

but what happened this time is not about bombay to me. this is about what happened to people. those people could have been from anywhere. probably the fact that i have had good moments also around that city and that i have spent quite some of my years there, makes this as personal as it could get without losing someone. but for me this has got nothing to do with the symbol of the taj or of south bombay. i hate people talking about it like that. its purely the scale and the impact of the attack on people, on the perception of civilian life that has suddenly changed; that makes all the difference.