Mumbai blasts
It would feel weird not to write something about what’s happening in Mumbai right now - despite never having been there it’s an important city to me, which is pretty evident on this blog.
But you know what? I don’t feel like linking to any of the news reports I’ve seen so far. The reporting on the blasts disgusts me. The way it’s being reported serves the terrorists, not the people.
Apparently one of the Polish TV stations said that the Mumbai airport had been bombed. They assumed that something with the word “Terminus” in it must be an airport, when in fact it’s a railway station - a very famous landmark one at that…
On BBC I heard an interview with a doctor in one of the hospitals to which the victims of the blasts are being transported to. The journalist asked the doctor if their hospital was the one that had been bombed - it wasn’t.
Perhaps the most disgusting instance was when one of the TV stations in India broadcast information that people were hiding on the 19th floor of one of the hotels. They practically passed on that information to the terrorists so that they could find those people easily.
The ingenuity of these attacks is that the terrorists have succeeded in getting the media to turn it into a reality show. The attack is already being said to be on the scale of 9-11 by some media people, when we don’t even know how many people have died or been hurt.
As I write this, the number of deaths stands at either 119 or 125 (I’ve seen it change from 125 to 119 rather than the other way round), the number of hostages is being reported at anything between 43 and 200 and the number of wounded is very tricky to establish - I think they say it’s around 300-400 at the moment.
In the 9-11 attacks almost 3000 people died. Can the scale of destruction really be compared? Or are they comparing the scale of reporting?
This may turn out to be the biggest terrorist attack India has seen. On the other hand it may not. The numbers are so chaotic at this point that it’s hard to say. The death toll as it stands now is half of the toll in the 1993 Mumbai blasts and also somewhat smaller than the one in 2006.
