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Different City, Different Response: Londoners wake up to Terrorist Attacks - Sunny Singh Sunny Singh was born in Varanasi. She received her education in various parts of India and the world. She has worked as a journalist, teacher, and as a management executive for multinationals in Mexico, Chile and South Africa. For the last four years, she has been writing full-time. She is also a playwright. Her first play, Birthing Athena, focussed on evolving relationships and the price of ambition in post-liberalisation India. The Times of India described the play as "an intensely cathartic experience." Her first novel, Nani's Book of Suicides, had been published by Harper Collins Publishers India. Described by the Hindustan Times as a "first novel of rare scope and power," the novel explores the cultural identity of an Indian woman through a fund of myths, family lore and contemporary reality. Her second book, Single in the City: The independent woman's handbook was released on Dec 22, 2000 by Penguin India. Visit Sunny Singh's website at: http://www.sunnysingh.net/

Years ago as a twenty-something, I never thought I would ever say this: “It is true, I am a creature of habit.” Not very many habits of course, and none of them truly limiting or obsessive, but nevertheless in my increasingly long adult-hood, I have developed some basic behaviour patterns. On a typical morning, I wake up to switch on the computer on the way to the kitchen where I blindly make the first cup of tea. Its not until the first sip, seated in front of the computer screen, that I open my eyes. Sitting there, every morning, I systematically go through my emails, the various newspapers from around the globe, and finally my favourite three cartoon strips. By the time I finish, its time for another cup of tea, and for true wakefulness.

On Thursday morning, that routine was interrupted. My home page was already flashing news of the London bombings when I sat down. With my brother and sister both living in the city, and one of them next door to Russell Square, I spent the first half-hour trying to locate them. Once their wellbeing was confirmed, the morning settled into an oddly familiar – albeit dreadful – routine that has also developed over the past years. Living in Delhi, one grew slowly inured to terrorist attacks. The civilian (and personal) precautions were taken almost unconsciously: don’t go to Lajpat Nagar or old city around major festivals, watch for unclaimed bags, and the depressingly familiar Delhi Police signboards explaining a citizen’s responsiblity regarding terrorism. Atiya Fattiha lays flowers at Kings Cross station (© AFP Carl de Souza)

On 9/11, we hovered between the television screen, the telephone, and the computer trying to located friends and loved ones. Just last year, the scene was repeated in case of the Madrid bombings, accompanied additionally by a worried warning from our Catalan cleaning lady to stay off the streets in case of racist right wing reprisals.

Pedestrians walk along the Embankment after terrorist attack in London (© AFP Jack Guez)

With those two experiences behind us, last Thursday we seemed to be repeating some strange emergency drill with the procedure now perfected:

1. Locate loved ones who live or work or are travelling to the city in question
2. Pass the information about each of them to others around the world who may be worried and/or trying to reach them
3. Follow the story, hoping against hope that the body count won’t go up further.

In the years since 9/11, the drill has not only become familiar, but been refined to a fine art. After Madrid we realised that cellphone networks would collapse quickly in case of an attack, with sheer volumes or by government measures. The alternative has become the internet, with emails and internet telephony filling the gap in communication. Of course, the issue is to achieve online communication quickly, before the servers begin to collapse or jam up. However, so far, the internet is the most reliable form of communication in moments of emergency.

Moreover, we have learned that it is often easier to communicate to places outside the area of attack. On Thursday, I forwarded news of friends in London to each other on the net as they could not communicate directly to each other, a scenario reminescent of a sci-fi movie.

I also realised something else on Thursday: regardless of all hype of the global village, we continue to act and react in accordance with specific cultural norms. The hysteria and super-macho aggression of 9/11 was perhaps most indicative of US contemporary culture, where even recent immigrants from old cultures “forget” their experiences to belong to a “new” collective that seems to be ignorant of its own (and definitely the world’s) history.

The Madrid bombings brought forth the anger the Spaniards had felt at being lied to by their government. The bombs didn’t lose Aznar the elections three days later; the lies that followed in wake of the carnage very definitely did. Spaniards seemed to wake up on “11-M” to a heightened – and regained – sense of political activism, reminiscent of their sustained opposition to Franco and the Fascists. Within hours, spontaneous demonstrations were organised in key cities, and the numbers who turned up at the protests were overwhelming.

Train passengers pass a newspaper advertisement at Kings Cross train station (© AFP Carl de Souza) The London bombings have brought forth another way of reacting – and perhaps more overtly and quintessentially linked to a culture and people. The classic English gift of understatement was evident on Thursday when a survivor of the attacks, still dazed and shaken, ended his eye-witness account with a calm “This has not been a very good day.”

Stoicism developed over hundreds of years of wars and carnage came forth again on Thursday. Passerbys calmly and efficiently aided the injured. A friend explained how stunned tourists near the Tavistock Square explosion were told by locals to duck down and wait after the first blast; just in case there was a second one! Most importantly, there was none of the machismo, the swagger, the “we will hunt them down” bravado, so typical of across the Atlantic.

Londoners know that the bombs are linked to a series of political and economic decisions taken by their government. They may agree or not agree with those decisions, but their sense of history – both personal and collective – lets them face the terror and “get on with it.”

Watching the news clips, I was constantly reminded of how we Indians cope with incidents of terror. Although our emergency systems perhaps don’t work with nearly as clear a clockwork efficiency, the average citizen on the street – in Mumbai or Delhi – seems just as stoic. I remember images of the last bombing at Mumbai’s India Gate when autos and taxis stopped of their own volition to take the injured to hospitals, when average citizens stepped in – in their drab office gear – to act as emergency Florence Nightingales. And through it all, we had the same lack of hysteria and anger that London has displayed in the past two days.

Two men look walk past pictures of the people missing following the bomb attacks (© AFP Odd Andersen)

Perhaps history inures us to facile solutions. Perhaps in older cultures, our collective memory of the past makes us stoic and strong in face of present-day adversity. That is not fatalism, just a realisation that this too shall pass. Perhaps that is something America will learn – with time, with history. In another five hundred years or so....

P.S. One final point: I am ever so grateful that we in India are news junkies! And that we have such a healthy competitive fourth estate. The privilege of a free press, entirely unfettered by the government, has never been clearer than in the days following the London bombings. News from the UK has been tightly controlled, filtered and edited, with all channels replaying the same “official” images. I will write more on this in the future, but for the moment, I just want to send out a huge thanks to all those “press-wallahs” who ensure that our right to information is untramelled, even in face of, and specially in case of, national disasters!

Till we connect again...

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