Ankit Lad heard the gunshots echoing through the halls of buildings in his hometown of Mumbai, India. He saw the flames usurping the Taj Mahal hotel. He saw flashes of terror on the faces of natives and tourists who were caught in the middle of the worst terrorism attack in India’s past.
Lad, a graduate student in engineering, was more than 8,000 miles away from Mumbai when a group of terrorists seized the city’s center and killed more than 150 people, but he witnessed the events through televised news briefs and Internet media.
In Raleigh, Indians closely followed the news through online news Web sites and microblogging sites like Twitter. They called family and friends to make sure those who were still living in their native city were safe. For three days — from Nov. 26 to Nov. 29 — they searched for up-to-the-minute updates on the situation, waiting for news of its culmination.
Checking in at home
Lad moved to Raleigh from Mumbai in 2007, when he started his master’s degree in engineering. His immediate family — parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles — still reside in the city, which sits on India’s west coast.
They are all safe, he said.
“They live some distance from the scene where all the things happened,” Lad said. “But the entire city of Mumbai is really unsafe when these types of things happen. It can happen anywhere.”
Lad said the city has seen its share of terrorist attacks, the most recent of which occurred in July 2006, when a series of blasts throughout the city killed 187 people.
This attack was different. Terrorists targeted the city’s center — not just marketplaces or areas where populations, though large, are not as dense — and attacked multiple prominent city landmarks, including a Jewish center, two hotels and a train station.
“Mumbai is a big city, but it is a crowded one,” Lad said. “My parents travel through where these things happened. The Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal railway station, they frequently travel in that area. That place is actually a business area. My father does business and has many clients over there. Most of the people do travel in that part of Mumbai.”
Lad’s day was normal until he got a call from a colleague in the early afternoon of Nov. 26. The colleague, who is also from Mumbai, gave him a report of what was happening in the city when the attacks first started. As soon as he heard, Lad said he checked online news sites to get more information and then called his parents and friends.
“It was very shocking to see. I’ve lived there since my childhood, so it’s very shocking and really sad to see that happen in the place I grew up. It’s always going to be my favorite city,” Lad said. “As soon as I saw the things happen over there, I called my family and my friends to see if they were safe. The same thing happened with all my friends who lived in Mumbai. They all called their parents to make sure they were all safe.”
Sameer Tendulkar, a graduate student in mechanical engineering whose hometown is Mumbai, went through a similar process when a friend informed him of the attacks.
“I was just calling up a few of my friends around here. One was a friend who also lives in Mumbai. He asked me to go online. Since Wednesday afternoon, I have just been watching live TV and checking what’s happening,” Tendulkar, whose parents, grandparents and younger brother live in Mumbai.
“I called my kid brother to see if all the stuff was fine. I was very concerned because, obviously, my family is there,” he said. “A lot of my friends from undergraduate live in that area.”
Tendulkar said one of his friends was “very near to the region where it was happening,” but no one was in the city’s center during the attacks.
Live updates, tweet by tweet from Twitter
“Alexcouey has learned that his relative was rescued from the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, India… phew close one..!!!”
“Rajthackrey war…War…WAR….this should be the cry of every Indian #mumbai.”
“Gregggallagher @beelinebill If I had a friend in Mumbai (Lisa was 4 days from going there, BTW) I would see Twitter as a more valuable/pertinent source.”
These are only a sample of posts from Twitter, a microblogging site in which users frequently update their statuses to share with friends, or “followers” (imagine a site composed only of Facebook statuses). The site rose from among other blogging sites to become both a forum for citizen journalism and eyewitness accounts of the attacks, as well as a place for discussion about what the Indian government should do about the attacks.
And as people updated their statuses — or “tweeted,” in the site’s lingo — Yogasudha Veturi, a graduate student in statistics, followed the news closely.
“I don’t have immediate family, but I have a lot of friends, really a lot of friends, in Mumbai,” she said. “I was browsing through all the sites that were available. CNN, BBC. I logged on to Twitter. There were a lot of tweets out there. They gave minute-to-minute updates.”
Veturi said she didn’t post any tweets herself, but followed a search thread under the city’s name.
“I was following everything that was happening, getting updates from them,” she said. “They weren’t my friends, but people from all over the world. You could read their posts about Mumbai, all the posts that have been there regarding the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. There were scores of people from all over the world. It was an effective way of keeping yourself abreast of the situation.”
She also used Flickr, a photo sharing site, to search for updated images of the city and its people.
Indians used Orkut.com, a site Lad said functioned like Facebook, to keep up with political opinion surrounding the attacks.
“There are blogs over there that were like ‘What should we do?’ discussion forums,” Lad said. “What should be done to stop these kinds of things? What stand should leaders in India take? These are questions that show what kind of situation we are facing.”
Honoring the fallen
Members of Maitri, an on-campus Indian club, plan to meet with the Student Resource Center in Talley to seek permission to hold a candlelight vigil in the Brickyard sometime this week to celebrate the lives of those who died in the terrorist attacks.
Mehul Thakkar, a graduate student in electrical engineering, said the group will meet in the morning to attempt to get a permit.
“If they give us permission, then we will hold a vigil,” he said. “But I don’t know when that will be right now.”
Tendulkar said the attacks have instilled a sense of fear in Indians, especially those living in Mumbai.
“That train station is the busiest area in Mumbai. It has tons of people moving around every minute,” he said. “People must be afraid, to have an attack on something like that. Normal people — students like me — go there.”
