I'm No Terrorism Expert But..., Ctd.

A column in today's Times is a great place to start understanding what happened in Mumbai. It seems that it is about Indian issues, about the clash between traditional religious ideology and the new, business-oriented, cosmopolitan India that it opposes. Mumbai is the commercial center of India, the center of Bollywood filmmaking, a place that attracts international travellers and Indians with dreams of making it big: "Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia."

And all this worldliness is anathema to the fundamentalist religious traditions in India, both Muslim and Hindu:

In today's Mumbai... Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

And now it looks as if the latest terrorists were our neighbors, young men dressed not in Afghan tunics but in blue jeans and designer T-shirts. Being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that preachers of every religion thunder against. It is, as a monk of the pacifist Jain religion explained to me, “paap-ni-bhoomi”: the sinful land.