Published in The Hindu on Sunday December 7, 2008

In the last week of November, all of us living in Mumbai went through a succession of mental states. Ranging from incredulity, rage, cynicism, disbelief, shock and nervousness, to fear, sadness, numbness, hate, and and the most disturbing of all, fascination. A morbid fascination for the ability of a handful of young guys to create mayhem in the city, shake Indian politics, and hypnotise the global media.

Surely these were no ordinary kids. They were well trained, fully equipped and possibly driven by faith. Thanks to GPS technology they could navigate an ancient sea route that connects two colonial cities partitioned by history. Thanks to their urbane appearance they could sit down at Leopold café and enter the city’s best hotels without raising any suspicion.

They checked in at the Taj next to the general manager and transformed their quarters into a five-star control room. After brutally killing scores of tourists they cool-headedly recharged their AK-47 and rampaged the city. They killed Mumbai’s top cops and hijacked police cars, twice. Till the end they defied India’s best commandos. For a moment it seemed that the country’s entire army could not stop them.

Before last week, a movie script based on this sequence of events would surely have been deemed far-fetched. The audacity of this attack is indeed incredible.

The accomplishment of extraordinarily audacious objectives has precedents throughout history. Not too long ago, the word audacity was being brandied in a completely different context and with a completely different meaning. In fact, at the other end of the spectrum altogether. A group of determined men and women succeeded in carrying their candidate all the way to the highest office, beating the most powerful political apparatuses in the US: The Hillary campaign and the Republicans. The Obama campaign provided magical inspiration to people all over the world and revived some hope for the world’s most powerful (and dangerous) democracy. Such a comparison is itself audacious, but there is a reason for making it.

If anything could be learnt from last week’s event, it is the lesson about the power of audacity. Audacity is precisely what Mumbai has been lacking, especially since the 1991 communal riots. Instead of defending its multicultural identity, forged by a history of trading and migration, it allowed goons turned politicians to rule and tear apart its unique brand of cosmopolitanism. Innocent scapegoats were killed and cowardly mobs were rewarded, setting in motion a cycle of violence that just took a new spin last week.

A response to last week’s events driven by fear and paranoia against our immediate or distant neighbours –which seems more than likely– will only feed into a further destructive spiral. If we don’t want to stand mute witnesses in the face of history, we will have to reclaim audacity for ourselves, and prove against all odds that yes-indeed all things are possible; including transforming our city’s mindset and reclaiming diversity and openness as Mumbai’s main strengths.

To do that we will have to rise above our prejudices against certain communities, neighbourhoods, slums, even ordinary people. These prejudices put us at threat more than anything else. Here is a concrete example: Of all the failures that paved the way for last week’s disaster, the biggest was that the police didn’t follow up on an alert given by members of Mumbai’s oldest communities, its fishermen. They were the first to report abnormal activity on their shore. Unfortunately they were not heard.

Read another airoots article on this topic published in the Mumbai Mirror, December 3, 2008