Don't hate Mumbai because it's beautiful

OP-ED: "What They Hate About Mumbai," by Suketu Mehta, New York Times, 29 November 2008.

Good piece.

Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India.

Besides staying at the Taj in 2001, when I was there for the International Fleet Review, I attended a concert at the Gateway (military bands).

The truer gist:

Why do they go after Mumbai? There's something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

We think of globalization = Westernization = Americanizaton, but in South Asia, it equals Mumbaization.

Same essential difference. The decadent city is hated opposite of the pristine, romanticized past dream of the countryside. This is where Occidentalism originates, oddly enough, in the West: when the cities take off thanks to industrialization.

Comments

[Ted O'Connor]

This attack obviously was designed to provoke a response by India. What would the desired response be? Who gains from this?

[Joseph Nobles]

Vanda Feldab-Brown, a fellow at the Brooking Institution, was just on C-Span. She pointed out that Pakistan is now pulling troops from the Afghan border to head to the Indian one, and this gives the Taliban and Al Qaeda a lot of breathing room to train, resupply, and move across the border.

LeT certainly had its own reasons for the attack, but this is a definite result that AQ is going to take advantage of. Let's hope that LeT isn't coordinating with Al Qaeda on this level.

[ryan]

This attack is designed to provoke an uncontrolled/mismanaged or otherwise exploitable response from India, thereby creating rallying of calls of patriotism from within Pakistan and eventually to alleviate the pressure off of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

At first glance, it appears not to make sense; India, US, and Pakistan all recognize Lashkar e Taliba (LET) as being responsible and will therefore form a united front against it. What makes this situation difficult is the Pakistani public's perception. A large portion regard LET as patriots and/or place blame for the attacks on separatist groups in India. Any attack on LET will be regarded by the Pakistani populace as an attack on all of Pakistan.

This is quite a microcosm of the war on terror, ie. a large portion of the populace being either ill-informed, uneducated, or reliant on extremist propaganda as a primary source of news and information.

India needs to carefully manage it's pretext to any response; ie. stay away from Pak v India and isolate those responsible.