Terror is not a body count in a news report or a headline for those who have lived through it or lost a loved one to it. It is the twitch of a lost limb, the memory of a loved face and a sense of random victimhood and the question, why it had to be you or someone you loved in the line of fire on a wrong day at a wrong time. 26/11 for most of us was televised horror stretching over 60 interminable hours when we shuddered through the horrific details of lives lost, unspeakable violence and evil that scarred landmarks, targetted innocents and left in its wake, a feeling of violation, of helplessness,of anger. But we have moved on since then.
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But a Karambir Kang won’t get past the horror of the hours that easily when he was busy trying to save guests at the Taj during the siege while his wife and two children died in a suite on a floor that had been set on fire.For Tukaram Omble and Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan’s family and friends, this day will always be a soul wound. As also for the families of victims of the CST massacre, the siege at the Taj, the Oberoi Trident and for little Moshe, the survivor of the Nariman House terror where his parents were killed mindlessly, needlessly.
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In a strangely ironical way, it is incidents like these that somehow poignantly, painfully underscore the beauty of everyday life. Of the gifts we take for granted including those we love, we work with, the buildings that are a part of our inner landscape and that we cannot pass by without feeling a sense of ownership and pride.
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It is the normal things like commuting in trains, in taxis, meeting friends over a cup of coffee, saying goodbye to someone as they leave the home with the knowledge that they will come back to us, that are suddenly taken away from us when terror strikes. I wrote a few days after 26/11 when there was an attempt to intellectualise and contextualise what had happened, “The people who came in a boat to kill six people of a Muslim family at the Chhatrapati Shivaji station among others did not do so because they were speaking on the behalf of the repressed but because they were brainwashed and dehumanised. There is no justifiable context for violence that killed a waiter, incidentally a Muslim at Leopold and the chefs who were lined against a wall and shot in cold blood at Taj.Yes, human rights violations and lives lost anywhere must be focussed on. Yes, we need the media to focus on tragedies in the North East, in Kashmir but what has happened in Mumbai is a national tragedy. It is time to stop intellectualising it, commenting on it derisively and playing one aspect of it against the other. It is time.”
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Three years since 26/11, the question is whether we can just move on without acknowledging that terror can be of many kinds. It could be the terror unleashed by Khap panchayats, moral sainiks, land gobbling business empires, policemen who rape women in chowkis, all those who are responsible for the unmarked graves in Kashmir, for rising custodial deaths, eve teasers, children of powerful men and women who run over pavement dwellers or shoot toll booth attendants for doing their duty. Terror is about attacks on sacrosanct spaces, inner and outer. It is about taking away our sense of inviolate selfhood.
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Today this kind of terror is not contained in a terrorist’s grenade bag. It is everywhere.And there is no date or ceremony to mourn the loss of our collective innocence at the hand of these multiple terrors.
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is a mother, an RJ , an artist. She runs Unboxed Writers from a rickety computer , edited Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, authored Perfect Eight and earns a lot of joy through her various roles and hopes that some day working for passion will pay in more ways than just one. And that one day she will finally be able to build a dream house, travel around the world and look back and say, “It was all worth it.”