Joe Nocera in the International Herald Tribune:
The flight into Mumbai was late, and it was nearly 2 a.m. when we stumbled into the car our hotel had sent to pick us up. Walking out of the airport, my girlfriend and I were bathed in klieg-like lights shining down on what appeared to be an endless sea of people crowded behind a police barrier – families waiting for relatives; drivers searching for passengers; vendors and beggars, policemen and businessmen; and every other form of Mumbaikar humanity. Or so it seemed to us.
That is your first impression of this sprawling city of 16 million – the feeling that there are people just everywhere, spilling into streets, crowded into tiny storefronts, filling up giant slums, even milling about international airports at 2 in the morning. Shanghai and Beijing may have more inhabitants, but they don’t feel like this.
We arrived there three weeks after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, a horrifying three-day ordeal in which 163 were killed and some of old Bombay’s most notable landmarks, including the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel and the Oberoi Hotel, were left looking as if they had been through a war. Which, of course, they had been. After beginning their murderous spree at the famous Victoria rail station, which is now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the terrorists had moved through the fashionable streets of the Colaba district, finally holing up in the two hotels, where they killed guests and staff indiscriminately, and then settled in for a 60-hour siege.
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