Mumbai Heartbreak Hotel

"The way in which the world is imagined determines at any moment what people will do." ~ Walter Lippman

The story broke on Twitter. Evidently someone in the middle of the Mumbai massacre was tweeting. Long before CNN could get a correspondent on the scene, the chatter was spreading 'cross the Internet. http://tinyurl.com/5g2a3n Terrorists went on a spree with assault rifles in Mumbai's financial district killing more than a hundred, leaving hundreds more wounded and bleeding.

One blog entry I came across stated this was a night life hot spot, with the upscale Oberoi and Taj Mahal Hotels being where the action was. American and British citizens were being sought as potential hostages. Other stories described the chaos and fear. There were photos accompanying some stories that showed blood stained sidewalks and streets.

It must have been a horrible thing to go through. But one of the stories I came across had a statement that especially surprised me:

"THE US State Department has consistently listed India as the country with the second-highest number of terrorism casualties after Iraq. However Western media has given scant regard to the problem and this is sometimes resented in India." ~ Sydney Morning Herald

Second highest number of terrorism casualties after Iraq. Wow. Something shifted in my thinking about India the fall. My image of India was painted by Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat when he describes a golf fairway there with large corporate logos on the left and right of a long scenic fairway. 400 million Indians are moving into the Middle Class. These are people with money, brains, talent. This is a country on the move. The picture in my head was modern times.

This image ruled my mental pictures till recently when I read of the harsh and brutal assaults on Christians by Hindus in Orissa. The Orissa horror has gone relatively unreported. And despite the State Department warnings cited in the Sydney Herald, Americans are not reading about all these things in the news. More than a thousand churches have been burned. Missionaries and pastors hide in the jungles to avoid being slaughtered by very dangerous people.

Then we have this week's highly visible event, which did make world headlines... But how much can we understand what it all means if we have no context? It would be bad public relations for India tourism and commerce if Americans saw India as "dangerous." But if our State Department is calling it dangerous, how come no one knows this? How can we make decisions where we'll be vacationing if we are not told of the dangers in those places we're enticed to see? How can we feel safe on business trips if we're not told that Americans are being kidnapped there?

When the story broke, many people probably wondered where in the world is Mumbai. Well, it's old Bombay, with a new name. Externally, the city glitters, but at its heart there is grief.