When terrorism hits home

Last night Mumbai suffered what some news reporters called the worst act of terrorism India has ever seen. Mumbai unfortunately, is no stranger to acts of terrorism but these attacks were of a completely different kind, the attackers definitely suicidal who just wanted to kill as many people as they could before they themselves were killed. Even after 24 hours, the drama still is not over with the security forces still trying to rescue people who have either been taken hostage or have been stranded locked up in their rooms.

I was glued to the NDTV live steam for most of the night and since I have woken up this morning, and on tracking the story on search.twitter.com as well as occasionally jumping to BBC news or CNN. My first emotion was anger. Mumbai was my home for a while and its still my favorite city in the world. And to see it virtually being held hostage by these loathsome assholes enraged me. My sentiments towards the government and the security forces were those of sympathy almost, they are trying their best arent they?

But I talked to my brother over chat then and another friend who also often visits Mumbai, and they were less so. The attacks in Mumbai weren’t unexpected, after the recent attacks in other big cities where Mumbai was conspicuously out of the list. Its the job of the government to keep its citizens safe, and it failed miserably this time. While the on site journalists kept insisting that the city will bounce back and take it in its stride, I really hope this wakes us up as a country and makes us ask some serious questions of ourselves and of the people we put into power to make sure things like this don’t happen. Its time we stopped being reactive and “politically correct” and just root the sources of such terror out. Lets stop taking the safe and conventional responses. Give the security agencies more rope and let them go after the core of the threats irrespective of political sensitivities. We need more supercops like KPS Gill

The drama still goes on in Mumbai but I hope this is a wake up call to us all.

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur