Live Blog: Bombay under Siege X

10.30 p.m.

The strangeness of it all. You get up, the usual boring day ahead, you go through the motions of getting ready for work. An SMS comes from Max asking if I am okay. What's happened to me? I am dumb. I ask him if anything is wrong. He says, "Wake up, John," and then I turn on the television. Actually I hadn't watched television last night. Son is going through a bad eye infection and soon after I came back from work, I had to take him to our family physician for a second opinion on the state of his swollen eye. He insists, his exams are near. I had taken him to a eye specialist on Monday, but he isn't satisfied. So I take him, the doctor assures nothing is wrong, and I come home and forget to watch the television. 

The idiot box is what I have been watching for the past 12 or so hours. I am amazed by the strangeness, the irony of it, which strikes me only now. Some people from across the border land in the country walks into its two best hotels and kills a few people and takes around 40 people hostage. Weren't anyone alert enough to sense this danger. What is it that makes these people so reckless. A whole nation is rendered powerless against a few youths. The might of our special forces and military cannot bring a few (only five) youths to justice. Can you imagine such an improbable situation. 

Aaj Tak goes all mushy and has this documentary "I am the Taj." "They fired bullets on my chest," mushy mush all right. There's no end in sight even by nightfall. Now there's the possibility of the crisis carrying on into the next day, tomorrow. Will they sleep? Will they be ambushed at night? 

Again questions and no answers. No one can give an answer, not our leaders, not protectors of the law, not the man on the street, not the "media karmi" as the channels say.