Saket Vora

This morning as I prepared for a full of work, I saw reports on TV that the city of Mumbai was under attack by terrorists. Two prominent hotels had been attacked by militants and several bombings were reported around the city.

I was reminded of the Mumbai train bombings last year where 250 people were killed. Mumbai is where a significant number of my Mom’s family lives, including her two brothers and mother. They live in the northern suburbs of Anderi West and Kandivali, and it is where we spend most of our time in our visits to India.

Today’s attacks (technically late yesterday evening) were centered in the financial district in southern Mumbai, most prominently in the Taj Hotel – a symbol of the city which stands across from the famous Gateway to India. And these attacks were different than unattended bombings — militants stormed into hotels, shot indiscriminately, sought out foreigners and took them hostage, and did this at another prominent hotel (the Oberoi), Victoria Station (the central railway station in Mumbai) and the Cama charitable hospital. Explosions and fires rocked the top floor of the Taj Hotel. The top 3 police and security  officials (including head of the Anti-Terror-Force) were killed in action.

Rumors of shots fired up in Borivali had me worried — Kandivali is just south of Borivali and my uncle lives closer to Borivali, but no further info was reported. So far, no one I know was harmed.

Another comment about this story: the role of new media. I chose to follow this on my computer, so a Tokbox room was setup to interact with family back home, my IM client was active with four or five conversations. My main source of news actually came from a Twitter search. I went to search.twitter.com and typed in ‘Mumbai’ and could see all the tweets people were sending from Mumbai and India and around the world. What struck me is that news was being broken at least 15 minutes before the cable news picked it up, and the people on twitter were constantly posting links to other forms of media – the first pictures of a terrorist, live TV streams from India (I ended up keeping the CNN IBN live feed open for most of the afternoon, this was a network that would interrupt coverage to report live explosions and gunfire occurring), photos on Flickr uploaded by a Mumbaikar who went and shot photos of a bombing scene, and even a Google Maps mashup that showed the location of confirmed attacks. Was there a lot of noise? Absolutely. But did I feel better informed and had my desire for urgent information satisfied? Yes, more so than I would have gotten by simply flipping between CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News cable news.