This is a well written well thought out piece by Arundhati Roy, writer activist anti Globalist. She is the author of "The God of Small Things".
My favorite comment of her was directed at Tom Friedman, when he was commenting about those wonderful jobs in India, she politely said "He should take one of them. Anyhow, the tragedy of Mumbai is not 9/11 and it is sign of American arrogance to compare it to 9/11.
A. Roy makes the following points
- The lush life reported in Mumbai is a far cry from the life of your average Indian. India is still poor and the hunger and poverty is consistent with many of the so called "Third World" (used for lack of a better term)
2:It is important that while Ms Roy is a Christian (not a Muslim) she is very critical of the Hindu nationalists and their repression of Indian Muslims.
The Kashmir issue is another issue deserving of its own thread
PS, while not stated in the article, Indian Muslims have expressed grave outrage at the attack and many have refused to have the attackers buried in their cemeteries. And there were Muslim victims at Mumbai just as there were on 9/11 and both facts are totally ignored by our wonderful media.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Please allow me to post the following passages:
We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11." And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys," he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.
But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.