Mumbai

I spent a couple of happy days at the Taj Mumbai a few years back. I certainly don't know anything special about today's calamity but let me share some thoughts:

• Mumbai has had, I think, a remarkable record of staying cool in troubled times--I remember being more or less locked down for several days at another Mumbai hotel during a pretty poisonous time for India as a whole. But Mumbai itself stayed quiet and orderly--well, as quiet and orderly as a city of 19 million can expect to be. Of course, all it takes is once...* **
  

• The talking heads keep talking about Mumbai as a city heavy with Americans and Brits. Granted, the terrorists may have targeted Americans and Brits, but I think it is worth keeping in mind that a lot of the real action in Mumbai comes from Gulf Arabs, who like to do in Mumbai what they don't want to do at home.

• Deccan terrorists? Well, what do I know? But I do know that the south of India--the Deccan and beyond--has been a theater of fairly amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims.

• I suppose you'd have to assume that this means the end for the moderate, technocratic government of Manmohan Singh, surely one of the most knowledgeable and level-headed (if not necessarily effective) of world leaders--and a resurgence of the roughnecks from the BJP, those folks who never have seen a political fire they haven't wanted to pour gasoline onto.

*A correspondent says I am forgetting the July 11, 2006 subway bombings that took 209 lives. I'm not. I still think that all things considered, Mumbai's record is/was pretty good.

**Yes, yes, and the1993 bombings. Well, maybe I can't sustain the point. But Mumbai is a city with an amazing lot of raw energy, and I'd rather think about the things that work.