MUMBAI UNDER SIEGE!!! Mujaheedin strike the commercial capital of India!

Over 100 dead, over 300 injured!

Pictures:the CSRT railway terminus, an UNESCO heritage site-several commuters were indiscriminately sprayed with bullets and injured/killed-(?) inside;
the magnificent Taj Palace Hotel and Taj Towers with the Gateway of India in good times; an old picture of the Taj rear side-(IT IS NOT A SQUARE/BLOCK STRUCTURE AS PROJECTED BY THE MEDIA); the Taj today, victim of terrorism.
Update: Saturday, 29/11/2008
160 dead .............Indian authorities are probably upto their old game, they are known to submit official figures like dead and injured numbers close to the real numbers much later.

And this is proving closer to home to so many of us..........my son's yoga teacher in Pune has lost her son, killed by these aweful terrorists; he was a manager at the Taj Palace Hotel. A very close friend of mine here in NZ reports his nephew with family and friends have holed up in a hotel close to the Trident Oberoi, they were having dinner there when this happened.
But I like what that great doctor and philosopher, Dr Deepak Chopra, said on CNN yesterday: this is ultimately a message to Washington; this is two sided, the same petro dollars go through Saudi to Pakistan and then to these terror groups; the muslims make up 25% of the world's population and the fastest growing group..........don't do things that would make a moderate become radical..............make sure they are won over, that would lead to an end to terrorism.


Below:Wednesday and Thursday, the 26th. and the 27th. of November 2008.


This is, this far, the worst terrorist attack on India; notwithstanding the large number of previous terrorist attacks, some very recent, in New Delhi and Assam, this one takes a new turn; several large very well known iconic places targetted, with the terrorists implanting themselves for a prolonged siege, providing a shield for themselves by taking hostages, AK rifles and grenades, not rudimentary or text book bombs, and probably confusing intelligence services and the world at large by "presenting" themselves as a little known outfit, the Deccan Mujaheedin." THIS IS NOT A GUERRILLA OPERATION BUT A FRONTLINE WAR!


India's premier railway station, built in 1888, and now placed on the UNESCO list of heritage structures, two of the best hotels, one a heritage hotel that had opened for business in 1903, cinemas, suburban locations........this is a very well planned and coordinated attack, and worst, has also target ted foreigners............as I write this, rather rewrite/rephrase this, a hostage crisis still remains unresolved at the two hotels and some other places.


I am stunned and grieved; nothing absolutely nothing compares to this.........I would rate it the worst attack since 9/11, and certain ways of looking at it, its worst.

To people familiar with Mumbai/Bombay, and I am "born and bred Bombayite," the extent and scale of operation can be modestly described as awesome, my guess, some hundred terrorists involved.

The scale of the attack, in terms of the area covered, some of the busiest locations in Mumbai, 24 by 7, is unprecedented; I should know, I have lived 57 years there and in Pune. And this made far worse by the taking of hostages, including foreigners, from several locations...........this is new, terrorism taking a new turn in the way it intends to operate in this region.

Two hotels, the Taj Palace Hotel and the Oberoi Trident, two of the best in India, India's busiest railway terminus, the CSRT, which is officially an UNESCO World Heritage site, the classical Metro Cinema, at one time the pride project, in Asia, of MGM studios; and horror of horrors, a medium sized hospital, the Cama hospital which, as far as I know, from the time I lived in Mumbai, specialised in maternity care!!!

At a very personal level, I am particularly shocked at seeing the well loved Taj Mahal Palace Hotel(see here its history) on fire...............this heritage hotel built, in 1903, by a great son of India, recognised there as the "father of Indian Industry," Jamsetji Tata, and a great icon for myself, as Jamsetji was a great Parsi and a visionary who did not live to see his dream of an economically independent India, (steel, textiles, electric power generation, scientific research initiated during his lifetime..........the present Tata group covers a huge range of economic interests rivalled only by a huge amount of scholarships and charities by them .................his descendents, JRD Tata, founded Air India, and now Ratan Tata, equally a visionary of sorts, has conceptualised, and put on the production line, the world's cheapest car, the Nano, priced at somewhere around US$ 3500.00!!!)

The Taj Hotel is to hotels, what the Buckingham Palace or Versailles is, compared to some of those new glitzy palaces of the oil rich Sheikhs!!! .........it "houses" some, now rare wood work, intricate stone work and marble lattice work, rare furniture and rare paintings, and a feel of heritage in its architecture...............and as I could guess, from pictures on CNN and BBC, its right wing, the Radio Club end, is on fire.

Memories of great times at the Taj, dining at the pricey Rendevouz restaurant (I think I have done that just twice, very unaffordable,) or coffee at the Coffee Shop on the first floor, with a superb view of the harbour, or munching on some of the best cakes and savouries from La Pattisserie; and a more "emotional" connection, my father was posted there at the CitiBank branch for a few years from his 35 year career at the Citi.

The Leopold Cafe, on the main Colaba Causeway road, behind the Taj, a family run restaurant by Zoroastrian Iranian emigres, renovated and styled to attract dinners from the Taj and other hotels, also came under attack...........this single piece of evidence points to the fact that these terrorists did their homework.........my guess Leopold is, even to the present day, a 100 table affair, but has attracted foreigners who frequent here for modestly priced food and beer........not otherwise a target deserving the attention of terrorists, but the knowledge that foreigners dine here the deciding factor to target this joint.

I live in NZ, and would not be right to use my blog to cover live these horrible events taking place in Mumbai; that coverage should rightly be left to bloggers and others living in Mumbai.......

The Indian authorities will now have to come up with more dynamic and effective intelligence gathering, with more active liaison and cooperation with and support from international intelligence agencies, more alert to terrorist warnings and messages, and a more efficient security check up at all sensitive locations....................breast beating, loud protests and promises to do better in the future, these wont work.

What if there was no Big Bang, no meteor that destroyed the dinosaur, no hominid that walked upright, no flint that sparked the first fire, no.......

When, and if, you chance upon this essay, and you decide its worth a read, the first impression, rather two impressions, and the right ones, bang on, you are sure to gather, are: this guy has idle time on his hands and, he is no original................I (that's you) have read this piece somewhere.

Of course, you have! But its my way of putting ideas important to me!!

Most odd ball inspirations come sitting on our throne..........wastage out from down there, and fresh ideas flow in up there..........now, that is original!

I began thinking, how many probabilities and improbabilities, and these are infinite, make up for our existence on this rock? There are so many "if this had not to happen" and "what if this had happened" that we are left wondering how the hell are we here at all!!

Lets try and list some of the what ifs.

What if the Big Bang, or whatever caused all this Universe getting created, had not taken off? Nothing, absolutely nothing would have been here, not me, not you, not this laptop, no birds and bees......yes, yes I will stop here. Maybe, there would have been some other type of everything...........ask those clever physicists.

They tell us that all the millions of Galaxies in the Universe are moving away from one another.............they have concluded this by the red shift, the spectrum of light coming from all these bodies out there; it indicates everything is moving away from our galaxy, hence by physics analogy, every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy!

For now, this was good.........our Solar System, and billions of other systems had ample "breathing" space, hence planets formed around stars. But billions of years from now its going to be pretty lonely..............we won't be around to see that...........the entire Universe is going to disperse into oblivion.......billions of galaxies will be infinitely distanced from one another..........what an awesome thought! (And here we, petty petty piece of nothings, are trying to match wits with one another.)......

I have just seen a very informative, and not very pleasant, documentary on History channel (3/Dec/2008) with astronomers prediction that our Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with the neighbouring galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy......if our huge spiral side of our galaxy where our Solar System is located remains outside the collision, we will witness astronomical fireworks that may last a million years!!!

This Earth is estimated to be five billion years old...........does this include the billion years it was in some dust and gaseous state, slowly solidifying into a rock? (the outer crust we live on; otherwise, below the crust is a fiery ball of fire!)
The Universe is variously calculated a 13 billion to 15 billion years, our Star, the Sun, should be around of a much younger age, because the old blokes have lived out their full life, become huge monsters and then collapsed by the awesome force of their own gravity, become Black Holes......Black Holes, one is at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, (estimated to be a million times bigger than the Sun, sucks in everything that comes near, even light is absorbed..............gluttons of the Universe!

So our tiny Solar System is lucky it remains "unscathed" so far!!!

Now here goes, if the Earth had not solidified to its present state, not formed the atmosphere needed for life to sustain itself, this happened by a torrential rain that lasted some 70,000 years, life as we know it, again impossible............anyhow life would have evolved someplace else; in any case, scientists conjecture, life, several million times over, is replicating in other parts of the Universe.

There are some conflicting theories on how life formed, and physicists in particular thrive on this; life came from meteors that crashed into Earth, these bringing bacteria and building blocks of life from deep Space. No, others differ, life was accidentally formed from the soup of chemicals in our oceans that churned out the right mix of building blocks that form life.

Are there any other theories? I can't think of any right now, no wait.........I think I had read somewhere, bolts of lightening flashing across the skies triggered life formation in the oceans. One of these or
some other, not yet postulated, formed life.

Perhaps there is most likely some Force, some Energy, a Supreme Intelligence, not the God we conjecture and imagine we are made in His image, but a Force with an infinite Intelligence...........how else can you explain the pattern in everything..............the atomic structure in everything, the atoms are an universe within itself........zillions of Universe, each atom with protons electrons neutrons and the smallest particle, the Quark.............my apologies, if more infinitely smaller particles have been discovered...............I don't know.........I feel like an illiterate who has only learned to sign my name yesterday!

But I have heard of the String Theory, all things in the Universe are "connected" by an infinite infinite number of strings, smaller than the atom(?) that holds things together, read Stephen Hawkinns "A Brief History of Time."

Look at the pattern...........this Earth revolves around the Sun, is at the exact optimal distance that keeps the right atmosphere etc in place for billions of years, billions of years............sorry, no amount of persuasion from physicists that a number of clever mathematical formulae explain this and many other things.............ok, a huge number of formulae..........but how and where did these formulae, perfect explanation for everything, spring from? A Nature without intelligence or a Force hidden behind Nature that provides this intelligent pattern.

Look further at this pattern of all things..........all species mate within their species, every specie has its own DNA structure and set of instructions ...........a cow's DNA structure is not going to accidentally produce a human............but the DNA instructions will make you look a little like your father and mother!

or, a DNA structure with instructions for your nose is not going to "build" your ear...............look at the heart, it has DNA instructions, giving the heart's "battery," the small Bundle-Recording above the heart, to give out electric currents to beat the heart ceaselessly for the life span of the owner......amazing!

Its the same pattern, the same infinite number of events and coincidences or patterns that got the human race going ...................from remote hominids, around four million years ago, who from the neccessity to stand upright to observe danger better........ started our species! Vertebrae, those series of bones running down the central back part of the body, had evolved for some million years, enabled life to walk on fours, and then, our hominid ancestor, on two......legs!

And millions of years before this, in a one in a million rare event, a huge meteor, crashing into the Earth, "destroyed" those egg laying dinosaurs...........in fact, scientist tell us, dinosaurs never died out, but evolved over millions of years into birds! (When you eat chicken, remember its ancestor was probably a specie of dinosaur!)

In the meantime, species, that "grow" their off springs in a womb within their body, the mammals, unlike through eggs that incubate the offspring outside the body, got preponderance, with the big bully dinosaurs out; and these, the mammals, began to do better in the game of evolution.

Some of these mammal species began to use their hands and fingers, one of the first things.....to hold their bodies from falling, these mammals held tree branches with their limbs, thus giving an impetus for the brain to "grow." These were the ancestors of the ape family of which we humans are a branch. (If these ancestors, of hominids, were to have stretched their necks to reach out for food-berries etc, growing on trees, we would probably have evolved into an animal with long necks and a small head with a small brain!

With more flexible fingers, and hands, these early apes began to hold foods in their hands, eating, by transferring foodstuff into their mouths held in a grip in their fingers.............this "tool, our hands and fingers," got more agile only by an increased brain capacity.

And with better food intake, the bodies of some of the ape species grew larger..........at this point, for reasons still not understood, one branch of apes separated from the other, and the ancestor of hominids began to evolve............a specie of more intelligent ape that used more small rocks to break open nuts etc...........and easily from there, the descendant of these apes, the hominids, began to "flake' these stones to form tools, their brain capacity growing larger, the forehead gradually standing higher to enable enclosure of a larger brain.

It took a few million years for the early hominids- the Ramapethicus, the Homo-Habilis, and many other branch descendants of hominids, to evolve into ancestor of Man, the Homo Sapien Sapien....................even here, great competition for space, and what else, took place between the Neanderthals (one descendant branch of later hominids or early humans) and the Homo Sapiens Sapiens (that's us)............with the latter winning out!!

A further quirk of evolution, more recent, humans branched into several races, the Caucasoid, the Mongoloid, the Brown, the Negroid (the last probably the oldest.)

And one spark, one spark accidentally produced from friction of flints, caused man to make his own fire..........the world's greatest ever invention!! and the seeds of civilisation..........domesticating the first wild seeds and shifting out from caves to the first simple structures..............burying the dead or exposure (cremation), domesticating goats first(?) then cattle........

The West and the East--The tortoise comes in from the rear!

This seems to be the decade of the tortoise!

This laggard (one of the synonym describing this shelled friend in Thesaurus) has come in from the back and overtaken the hare!

Aesop's Fable tells this story where the timeline is just a few hours; but the tortoises of the world have been trudging for centuries and the hares (plural sense) have been running as well..........looks like the hares have tired out, at least for now, from this race of centuries!

The West is the hare, the East the tortoise-(this is the case since the great Industrial Revolution in the west.....otherwise the East was for centuries fabulously rich-Alexander the Great's soldiers needed several thousand camels to take away loot from the Persian capital, Persepolis.....the kings of india wore rubies the size of eggs!); now, the tortoise, this slow shelled scaly skinned creature is aptly carrying a burden on its back- the shell, very easily symbolic of the East, burdened with its baggage of poverty( more poverty since its colonisation by the West,)...... religious prejudices, "slow" modern development begun decades after the West, huge number of ethnic groups, high castes and low, and many other disabilities.

The West, inventions of the modern age, the Industrial Revolution, discoveries, science and medicine, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Pasteur, the humanists and social scientists, with an ugly side as well, the pirates and the colonists, the slave traders and the racists, apartheid, and dictators like Hitler and Communism, East Europe and Bosnia. (Of course, the East gives us the Pol Pot in Cambodia, Saddam Hussien, the Taliban, the harsh regimes of North Korea, and China- harsh where it suits them.)

Somewhere in between is the great continent of Africa, mother of the human race! Its people under great burden, first 'inflicted' by their ancient rulers, then by the western masters, and now by their new leaders; and you have Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Congo, blood diamonds, and a new breed of mercenaries that terrorise its people, Idi Amin and others. But the one person that belongs to all ages and peoples of the world is Nelson Mandela, whose "mentor" Mahatma Gandhi the great sage of the modern world who had spent some years in South Africa.)

I would group Africa with the East, so the election of the first Afro-American as the President of the United States, Barack Obama, in a sense stands for the tortoise winning (although Obama himself never never uses his black background to any advantage,)...........and, in hindsight we should not be that surprised.

The one voice that is heard so avidly in the US is that of Oprah Winfry, an Afro-American (this info for those very few who don't know!) , America's best rated talk show hostess, and who the world saw crying at Obama's speech in Chicago (after winning elections;) and the greatest icon of that country, Hollywood, has more than its fair share of black actors: Morgan Freeman, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Jammie Foxx, Samuel Jackson, Forest Whitaker, Halley Berry, Queen Latifah and Whoopi Goldberg. US sports has been dominated by Afro-Americans for decades, the athletic fields at the Olympics splashed with black, not just from America but from Africa as well!

And now, China and India, and the wealthy countries of the Middle East, Dubai and Saudi Arabia, cheap and very hard working labour, software and outsourcing, oil money, seems to confirm that the tortoise is in the winning game!

And what happened to the hare?
Decades of a very liberal society, born from the very high ideal of freedom, but which has given the world hard rock music and drugs that have held young minds in the new shackles of free sex and drugs, hip culture and what else!

Whilst the deprived child in India, for example, did his school homework below the street lamps for lack of lights in his home(and because he works during the day), a burning desire to educate himself, and thus seek freedom from poverty, his western counterpart chose a different kind of freedom, filling the streets of cities with violence and petty theft. (Please forgive me for the generalisations, the west still has the very best educational institutions with a fair share of the young there studying for the "college degree.")

And the West chose to work at very high salaries, and spend spend spend, no savings and mollycoddling by their governments, ............buy homes on unaffordable mortgages, change cars on a whim, go on world tours, over dress, fashion and cosmetics; and the masters of the great companies, with their craze for profits and piracy in their veins, chose to take jobs where they did work cheaply (to the few people I have talked with, westerners, they seem to point fingers at India and China for the loss of their jobs. This is only partly true, the blame should also be placed on those thousands of Companies and their CE Os for deciding to take jobs to the cheap markets.....you cannot clap without two hands!)

And, no one seems to know that the lowly priced Indian Rupee, in the Foreign Currencies Exchange Market, proved a boon...............a salary of Ind. Rs 50,000 per month-- (it can buy you the world in India-bread Rs 17/; good pair of shoes Rs 4000/; haircut-gents Rs 100/; a midsized Chevy- Rs 4,00,000 [US$ 8200])-- works to US $ 1,000 per month!!! .........................and the hare got left behind!

But the world should be a place of equal opportunities, no hare and no tortoise; somehow a logical, not equal, distribution of all the world's resources, an end to all forms of exploitation, a sharing of and pooling of talent and jobs, an ideal Platonic world where the whole human race stands to benefit............with the first logical requirement- all those men who would do anything for money, power and personal gain, somehow neutralised!

Software Parks, MegaCenters, Malls, Pune 2008

For the past two decades, India is following an economic policy, with private enterprise and foreign direct and indirect investment encouraged, where wealth created is expected to trickle down to people, thus alleviating poverty; yet somehow, the problems are not getting solved at the right pace.

Although for the first forty years, since becoming an independent country, India followed the socialist path, discouraging monopolies, more weightage to the growth of indigenous industries, nationalisation of all infrastructure- railways, roads, water resources and electricity, airlines; there was a good side to this which is now apparent.

A massive boost to education, since independence, for example, churning out graduates by the thousands, did not make sense, until, some decades now, these educational institutions began to pay dividends by a wise switch to quality education- so India has one of the largest pool of engineers and software engineers, followed by good doctors, and management cadres..........some of the best international companies have Indians at the top- CE Os.

What seemed senseless some forty years now, building of water dams all ac cross India, seen as a threat to ecology, are now also seen as paying dividends; India is self sufficient in agriculture, its milk and wheat production, for example, is one of the highest in the world.

Nationalisation of banks, for example, was decried loud from the rooftop, and some of the nationalised banks are seen as poor cousins, in terms of efficient service, of private banks, established later; but these banks, thanks to regulated financial activity by government, are very strong financially whilst foreign banks and finance hubs like Lehman Brothers collapsing like nine pins.

Some of the indigenous companies, allowed during those years of socialist policies, like Hindustan Motors, churning out old models, have now taken a deserved beating; but some of the pharmaceutical, steel, hotels, and others, changing with the times and pursuing the best business policies, companies like Tata Steel from earlier days, or Reliance Industries and Airtel, which came up later; Reliance has, for example, put up the largest oil refining plant, in Asia, in Gujarat. Airtel has one of the largest network of mobile telephony in Asia. Heritage hotels run by various companies are running some of the best hotels in the world.

Whilst in India, in September-October this year, I watched quarterly results of some Indian companies on CNBC, and Infosys, and others, continue to make profits, planning to increase staff!!

Economic policies that take a very severe beating are the nationalisation of electric production..........in Pune, thanks to this very inefficient handling of plans for growth of electric infrastructure, power is shut for six to seven hours each day!! Just last Sunday, from here in NZ, where I now read Indian news reports, power was shut in some parts of Pune from 7 a. m. to 8 p. m.

When this happens most of the companies, industries, hotels, restaurants, malls, provide power to themselves from generators run on diesel............I wonder how much diesel is consumed this way.........and how it might be more pricey than electricity. Now, the electricity provider, the MSEB (Maharashtra State Electricity Board ) wants to raise rates, pay more per unit, for assured 24 hour supply!!!

Since the opening up of the economy, some two decades now, the India story has never looked back...........huge building construction, for residential as well, but most parts unbridled, with roads and water and electricity poor and far behind; new hotels, new cars manufacturing, restaurants, shopping malls, software parks, call centers, innner walled in cities, multiplex cinema, and modern industries-mobile telephony, airlines, textiles and fashion, software and outsourcing, new pharmaceuticals, oil refining, the list can go on ..................just one of the enterprises run by the government seems to do well, atleast partly, the railways, with luxury trains for tourists, and running some 11000 trains ac cross India.

But pollution and dust, water and electricity shortages, poverty and old badly dilapidated houses, are very much evident as well!