I was immersed in typing out my report when I noticed from the corner of the eye that small groups had gathered around the few TV sets in the Times of India newsroom.
Iu00a0was immersed in typing out my report when I noticed from the corner of the eye that small groups had gathered around the few TV sets in the Times of India newsroom.
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Strange occurrences are commonplace in a newsroom, and I didn't bother to get up and check immediately.
Only after I saw their stupefied faces did I walk up to the TV.
9/11 was playing out like a simulated video game, and the first raw moments of the spectacle seemed like an elaborate prank by a special-effects genius on the world's sense and sensibility.
Sitting more than 10,000 km away, I didn't realise that my life would change too.
That from then, I would be watched through closed-circuit cameras at malls, cinema halls, hotels and airports, and would even have to reluctantly flash as last resort something eminently private my Hindu identity at more than half-a-dozen immigration counters.
I am not a Muslim, but I am under no less of a siege.
I now notice if gentlemen with flowing beards or women in burqa are boarding a plane with me. I would not earlier.
Now I am never annoyed by stray luggage at a station or airport; I am always alarmed. I think before having a chat about the Quran even with the most liberal of my Muslim friends.
It is truly tragic. A life of doubt and mistrust is but half a life. 9/11 has made us accept, and in some cases, enthusiastically adjust to it.
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Two burning fingers of American supremacy had split history like a pudding, and we are doomed to the side on which one constantly asks for the proof.
In a dazzling piece to mark nine years since 9/11, ex-Newsweek and now Time magazine editor Fareed Zakaria argues that the US overreacted to the event (read excerpt).
He says America's reaction was knee-jerk and alienated its own citizens, placed them under siege.
Zakaria's point on the US overreaction is pertinent. What I am arguing is that the US, and indeed the world, under-responded to 9/11, if ever there was such a word.
Imagination is more important than knowledge Albert Einstein
9/11 was a trailblazing piece of evil imagination. Somebody had the audacity to imagine that two planes can be hijacked and crashed between the 94th and 98th floors of the twin symbols of the mightiest nation's financial might.
Our biggest failure post 9/11 is that we have failed to counter that diabolical leap of fancy with a piece of positive imagination of that calibre and magnitude.
If Renaissance was the West's beautiful, imaginative answer to the fall of Constantinople, it has still to come up with one after September 11, 2001.
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| Twin beams of light illuminate the sky above lower Manhattan near the site of the World Trade Centre, to mark the third anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. |
Much of art and cinema have got fixated on 9/11 and refused to leave it behind. The corporate world has steered away from troubled regions. Most importantly, there has not been a single, sustained act of inspired diplomacy.
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Obama has disappointed as the 'World President', flirting with symbols and doing little.
Camels and tents in Afghanistan are being bombed while sponsors of terror in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan continue to be rewarded for cooperating to bomb a nation already torn to shreds.
Billions have been spent on surveillance cameras and metal detectors but almost nothing on examining and reformatting education that leads to hate.
9/11 is profound enough for the United Nations to stand united for once, and put in money, time, effort to bridge the two worlds with a sweeping, highly visible set of actions born out of positive imagination.
In his book The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman quotes computer scientist Irving Wladawsky-Berger: "We need to think more seriously than ever about how we encourage people to focus on productive outcomes that advance and unite civilisation peaceful imaginations that seek to minimise alienation and celebrate interdependence rather than self-sufficiency, inclusion rather than exclusion, openness, opportunity, and hope rather than limits, suspicion and grievance."
Babri Masjid-Ram temple:
Can India imagine?
India will be wise to introspect on the ninth anniversary of 9/11.
Later this month, the Allahabad high court will deliver its judgment on the disputed Ayodhya site. Thousands of Hindus and Muslims have been killed over which god to worship on that piece of land, and the demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, is in many ways to the Indian psyche what 9/11 is to the world.
While the hawks will screech on both sides before and after the ruling, it is a chance for both the ruling Congress and the main opposition party, BJP, to undo the harm they had inflicted on Indian public life by allowing an event that led to deepening of the communal rift.
And again, what we do with the disputed site will be a question of imagination and courage. Can we boldly, imaginatively create something at the site that stands for generations as the symbol of how India's two foremost communities stood together celebrating their difference? Or will we waste it either by inaction or by feeding more carrion to birds of prey?
It is our moment to show the world how 9/11 could have been dealt with. I'm hoping my hunch is wrong this time.
'What America Has Lost' Excerpt from Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek piece: Since September 11, 2001, the US government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organisations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that's the public number, which is a gross underestimate).
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That's more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet-the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons.
Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built at a cost of $3.4 billion to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
This new system produces 50,000 reports a year 136 a day! Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj.
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Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained.
The father of the Nigerian "Christmas bomber" reported his son's radicalism to the US Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber's own incompetence and some alert passengers.
Our biggest failure post 9/11 is that we have failed to counter that diabolical leap of fancy with a piece of positive imagination of that calibre and magnitude
Dates in the mirror
9/11
New York World Trade Centre came down in a kamikaze attack
11/9
This day in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down to unite the two Germanys
