27th November, 2008. Prime time television in India changed for ever today. It is not the never ending soap operas, it is not the quickly ending twenty-twenty cricket match, it is something that India never thought it would watch from their couches. Live telecast of terrorism. In our own country. In our own Mumbai.

We even saw what they looked like. Dark turtle necks with chest-prints, cargo trousers and electric blue back-packs. Clean shaven, fair complexioned and almost bordering on being handsome. Put them in a group at a mall and they would be fun loving youngsters, bullish about a zest for life despite the economic recession. Give them an AK-47 and they would be very different – the zest for life replaced with a disdain for death. This is the new face of terrorism in India.

Twenty four hours later there is no S.W.A.T. team storming the hotels like Israeli forces stormed the Uganda airport in 1976 and finished things off in 35 mins. It is understandable. A nation always strives to protect resources that are scarce and with 1.2 billion homo sapiens walking our nation’s soil, human life can hardly be labeled as scarce. A few hundred dead will be just a blip. Politicians responded to this crisis with what they are best at – empty rehtoric. The leader of the ruling party (and you thought that was the Prime Minister, eh, stupid?) delivered a speech with a distinctly audible prompter nudging her through the italian accented hindi (Jesus Christ, even such a thing exists in phonetics).

The indominatable spirit of Mumbai will not be tested this time. It is not the Kambles, Bholes, Narvekars and Jambodekars travelling on the 6:47 Churchgate Slow who have been attacked this time. The nameless vote bank is not the affected party this time. Absolved with the responsibility of clearing human debris, the common man in India for the first time has the opportunity to sit back and, to use a macabre phrase under current circumstanced – savour – the seige that Mumbai has been put under. And audaciously ask themselves and hopefully later the person who kocks to beg for the ballot a simple question. How can you guarantee that I will return home today? Alive?.