All said and done!!
Finally the ordeal is over and many of our MS friends are really pouring their hearts out in more ways than one... Writing reviews, recently the one by shyamnambiar, is a very hard hitting write up that sums up the total damage done! Its rvealing in its dissection and the special appeal made by him to us all just tells us the pain and anguish suffered. Time for action ... Time for Kill!!

Well, I am going to look back at the footprints left by the perpetrators in the heart of us Indians and also pierced a deep knife in the heart of hospitality that runs in the blood of us all!!

Targetting hotel sites, particularly the ones which still stand proudly after braving all forms of attacks and landmarks by themselves, was indeed deliberate!! Why??

Any terrorist group has onlyone single aim: Kill, kill aimlessly... Spread the terror and teach a lesson o the world peace finders that they are around and alive and will not let things go any which way without their say!! Well the only language they understand is "Let Blood Flow... endlessly!! Let lives be reduced... !!"

The Taj and The Oberoi have been majestic and structures who have witnessed a change in time and suroundings right from the time they have been allowed to stand!! The culture of HOSPITALITY imbibes only one thing in us all... "ATITHI DEVO BHAVAH!!" All people who enter the dome of these buildings are guests and are as equal to us as God visiting us! We shall give the best of our services and food to appease the guest and give him / her an ambience that will remind the guest of his abode that he has left and will remind him of the food that he likes to eat and the comforts that he has built for himself... His HOME away from HOME!! Thats the mantra that our Hotel Industry works from. How many times are you at awe just looking at it from the outside and wishing you would one day be allowed to experience the very warm interiors,the plush lobby, the smiling faces greeting you on arrival, the "what would you wish to do Sir?"... The syllable called Sir being addressed towards you... It was so easy to enter a hotel lobby till 5 days ago..

Dress well, the durban salutes you and maybe even open the doors for you... People would then saunter into the plush lobby, seat themselves on the carefully selected upholstered seetees and leather sofas.... Ah!! Luxury at its best!!

You are seating inside there, feeling all important, looking at all the foreigners and the staff bustling about serving the guests... Its an awesome feeling!! It was so EASY....

What will happen today?? By shattering the core of the hospitality brick, lobbying grenades and not giving any reason for innocent foreigners who converge under this one roof, we have led us to be traced, searched and believe you me... made to feel like prisoners while entering such buildings called HOTELS!! We have single handedly finished the sheer reason for our country earning foreign exchange that went to the Govt reserves for better tomorrow... Hotels in India are special. Special because people who run it are professionals dedicated to make the face of India look beautiful, make India a beautiful hostess that beckons one and all to discover the magic thats hidden in her sands of time!!

These sands have footprints now.... Cruel, thick, deep and very bloody footprints!! Striking at these has really shaken the Entrance of outsiders to our land!!

Its just my post to really ruminate a bit of my own experience working in this industry... I was sad, very sad and in fact broken!! I was a core of this industry once and when I now looked back...

It made me shiver and cry....

The melee, the disaster, the destruction and the trauma that has been caused over a period of 60 odd hours is expected as terror brings with it devastation and combatting terror brings with it death and a stench of bullet riddled lives!! The win not withstanding, I think it is a time for us to raise our head and look skywards with a pride that befits a tiger and say, "We did it!" But in all this, the one gentleman who stood his ground, trembling maybe with anger or even an anticipation of what next as he spoke to the media, is none other than Mr. Ratan Tata!! I salute this true Indian. He has given us everything from Steel, Iron, Cars, Hotels, IT, Solutions in TELECOM etc.. It is all INDIAN!! I salute this man thinking what must be truly going through him when he is witnessing some cracked jokers devastating and destructing his most beloved and the flagship property THE TAJ MAHAL, at will!!! I am sure he was burning with hatred at every flame engulfing his rooms, he must be seething anger at every blast that were being heard and yet his resolute and calm have been a picture of immense control. He has withstood the pressures of SINGUR and now the epitome of the sight that greets us at the GATEWAY of INDIA.. which stands solid but looks defeated, charred by some monkeys weilding guns and grenades.... Finally its over, thats what they say. The ordeal, the drama and the trauma.... To all those who stood resiliently reporting to us the second by second happenings, to all those who willingly gave away the most precious thing called life at the blink of an eye and justa command, to all those who serve the guests who visit us and not withstanding the family they cannot give attention to.... MY SALUTE from the heart and a silent prayer to GOD to bless all!! This is dedicated to the TRUE INDIAN.. MR. KARKARE, MR. KAMTE, MR. SALASKAR, MR. UNNIKRISHNAN, MR. KANGS family and the others... YOU ARE TRUE INDIANS!! Special mention for the foreigners who were innocent victims of the madness... Pray to GOD for your peaceful journey ahead!!

People are the most vulnerable when they are scared of the most valuable thing that they have called LIFE!! When facing life threatening situations particularly like the ones we in Mumbai are going through, it can be traumatic and very exhausting mentally!! Even a flat tyre sound can race your heart beat and can possibly make you to take cover... Miscreants will be exactly what they are... They will sms such incidents to TV news channels and will also laugh at their monstrocity. The spread of rumors at this time is the highest. And its natural for people to get affected and make a run for it!! What really happens no one knows. Let me try and decipher it. Media is blatant about issues that concern Politicos and their actions and reactions. At the same time they have to render news that is completely true and unbiased!! That is a task and an impossible one at that. Also when the politicos use a lot of bureaucracy, power play and of course favoritism, the media has to play the hand asked of them. sometimes in such situations the media takes a huge beating when they BREAK a news and then they themselves have to rate it as a RUMOR!! This is in fact a play of not allowing PANIC to set in the hearts of the people residing in the area of such terror activity. At times the Government controls the death toll numbers of such activity stricken areas only to comfort the people that the SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL and loss of life was also controlled. Media is played like a puppet at times and we as viewers and intelligent watchers describe it as "MEDIA CIRCUS". Things like these rumors that spread like epidemic are then asked to be reported as rumors and sometimes even the TRUTH actually is passed on as rumors!! We have to be intelligent and logical in examining for ourselves what the Government will allow to be exposed to the public and what will be detrimental and harmful to the people around us.... But making the media out to be a dog all the time is questioning our own intelligence!! Are we not people who seek jobs for such posts too..??/?

Needless to say that when they telecast the rescue operations, there is always a raisk of the same being watched by the pereptrators and being relayed to the said terror youths via sat com!! But the media is speculating and they will never be privvy to the actual plans... also, the Hotels had rightly cut off the Tv cable broadcast so as to keep the youths guessing as to whats happening...But seeing operations of the troops landing on the roof tops and then that being conveyed to the youths is not going to cause any more trouble than it already is!! Thats because the youths are cornered and they have the ammunition to trigger a huge explosion that will engulf the troops, the buildings and themselves... Why hasnt that happened yet??? Please think that the media at this time is a big boon for us to take heart in and also in keeping with the rights of humanity where people from other nationality have been killed needlessly, our country has got the right to show the safety operations that are being carried out for the rescue of these foreigners!! Let the media be and do not just create a hullabaloo at all... Please think logically.. Thats my reatraint to all of my MS friends...

In the wake of whats happening lets not forget that if the media wasnt around, you would never know where and what is a safe place to be in at all!! Stop slam banging the media ll the time... If there is a scene of a terror crime happening then the media has to be present in its full glory for the people living in the area where the scene is being enacted in. Just take a case of what happened a few minutes back... Fresh firing has broken out at the CST again!! how would you know such a thing if media was not telecasting it??? Why are we so closed on the fact that they are always sensationalising?? If TIMES NOW is telecasting without a single commercial break is it really for TRP or PUBLIC SAFETY??? There is a fresh lease to the firing again and I can now tell my friends to get out of the vicinity of the CST station immediately!!! So please stop this slam banging and think logically!! More later..

Continuing the Nonsense that I had started... Does a PARADOX amount to a NONSENSE?? Maybe. Read this carefully. how would you define this platform that we are on? A sensible or a nonsensical place? And please do not answer both because that would amount to Nonsensical place. MOUTHSHUT, is one the biggest paradox that I have come across and running successfully at that. There are so many Mouthshutians who do such a lot of talking albeit with their mouth shut! Isnt that Nonsensical?? For me it is when I take my statement at face value. For me it means how can someone talk so much by keeping their trap shut? Well this paradox works in the opposite way. Now that is really nonsensical. Okay, let me explain this further... When you are furiously tapping the keys on your keyboard what errupts on screen? A row of words which you have learnt over your period in school, which has been forced on to you to say it like so because the Dictionary says so,..blah blah blah.. So there you are and hey, why dictionary?? Diction relates to the way the words are su[posed to be pronounced right? Why should I look it up to see if a word exists and if it does what is its meaning?? Nonsensical isnt it?? Are we then really trying to justify Nonsense as being the sensible thing to do? IS MS a platform to give credibility to Nonsense? What is this fascination, I ask myself, to make sense out of Nonsense? Its a quest that I really want to prove to myself that I am not a nuisance creator neither am I endorsing Nonsense but am i making SENSE at all?? Still looking at the FAR HORIZONS just to see if there is a silver lining to this dark cloud?? Help anyone... This is maybe not making a lot of sense to a lot of people but thats the point of this post. So to know where it began please go to my earlier post of Nuances of Nonsense!!

Appalled?? I am. How else would you justify Sense from Nonsense? Does Child is the father of man make any sense till it is explained as a paradox? Did you know what a paradox was till you learnt Figure of Speech? Speech is not necessarily anything that one says relevant to a topic but it could be a babble of words which anybody can speak without any relevance to any topic. Is it then that to cover NONSENSE we have tried to drive sense to somethings that otherwise would have sounded absolutely irrelevant? Does this make any sense at all?? I think yes. Since I have asked them :)) Seriously, it does make sense to me. It makes a sense of deriving some sense from something that would not have made any sense! Indulge me here. What would a world without a dictionary be? A world of alphabets which are grouped together with no perception of how it is pronounced and why is to be pronounced in that particular manner could be to drive home the fact that Do is (DU) but GO is (Go)not GU!! Now The nuance is to understand that the communication is to drive home the said meaning (derived by whom and why not known but thrust on us) of the said words without them sounding Nonsensical. Meaning if the do and go were to be pronounced with a 'u' and an'o' in the reverse manner would you be able to actually decipher where and how they apply? ... OR is it the other way round?? Complete Nonsense I say... Lets learn more about it!

You know when you start the actual WALK of your life which first takes you to the first step of your career ladder, what is the first emotion that you experience? Is it too much anticipation or too much confidence??
Difficult to decipher. Its actually a little of both and then there is a minor rush of adrenaline that causes the thoughts to go haywire.
Why does this happen? Its basically our eagerness to take the task at hand to our heart and to naturally say to yourself, "Hey world watch out, here I come!". This starts the famous dance of the yuppy-puppy turned eager-beaver, his first step into the unklnown, into the world of PERFECTSTRANGERS!!
Funny when you step onto that first step that you actually want to shake everybody's hands and make friends out of unknown faces and unexplored minds!!
The journey thus begins for the first lessons to be learnt about how YOU are going to be received and perceived by the world!! Thats where words like personality, grooming, outlook, appeaerance and CONDUCT hit you and hit you hard. The world seems to be always asking questions of you for which you rag your grey cells for answers and eventually end up by saying,"I am wrong, I did not understand you.." So on and so forth. But if you introspect to check what really went into the situation, you would find that if you had CONDCUTED the proceedings well, the questions would have to be asked of others and not YOU!!
I am clearly heading towards a series of this post. Hence please use this as a free bouncing board so that I and you together can really spread the CHEER that needs to be thrown around here!!
:))

It is a queer thing!!
Here I am on MS for about a month and a half and already there are healthy exchanges of thoughts. I have always been a person who likes to extend myself beyond just a physical handshake with people. Connection through a medium like the internet, where you talk with your MOUTHSHUT... is really something to look forward to!!
Look at the amount of affection, emotion and expectation that flows here!! i think that is basic bonding just my means of a words straight from the mind. I think its amazing the interaction, the gusto to write diaries and the innovation to spell logical riddles and also love songs :))
Its been an interesting journey so far... just hope the bond develops and remains intact... Not brittle to just break off!!