very exciting! bombs in bombay!

or, as gandhi would say……….

july, 11, 2006 (the new “7/11”)
6 pm

mumbai, ind-ja

well, while you were sleeping............. 6 or 7 bombs just went off in the train stations today along the “western line” in mumbai (bombay)!

check out CNN. luckily, you won't see me in any of the footage. i was too busy seeing gandhi's house and being overwhelmed by bombay’s unbelievably intense and stifling heat, rain, & humidity, its extreme filth, poverty, deprivation & density of human flesh, and by the recognition of my own middle aged bourgeousity!

i haven't slept for 3 nights, but this is just to let you all know i'm ok.

of course, my 1st instinct of fear and self-preservation, is to get on the next plane outta dodge and fly home. i don't think i want to relax into the great om void of india and travel around, what with all the bomb alerts, closings, heat, dirt, and poverty. but i also don't think i can even get to the airport or on a plane to LA.

so – i'll just sit tight for a couple of days and see what happens…
see what it, and i, feel like. see what, if anything, i can do about it.



haha!

someone up or down there must be having a good laugh at my expense, eh?

no, i’m not really self-centered enough to think that trouble is following ME! that i brought the bombs to bombay.

but having been to new york, london, madrid, and now mumbai (all just after terrorist attacks), it seems more that i’m just following, or gravitating towards, the “conflict between civilizations”. tracking the current crusades. me, the anti-american ex-pat wannabe - just missing the wrath of the islamic world upon my country.



and am i crazy for wanting to blame good guy, green peace guy, ralph nader, for all this? for his hubris of staying in the 2000 US presidential race, despite being asked to withdraw? because had he withdrawn, and his votes gone (most probably) to good guy, anti-global warming, al gore, perhaps the whole balance of current world politics, the whole balance between world civilizations, islam versus the west, the whole shift against america, against its pre-emptive policies, against its moral posture and what it represents in today’s world, against its wrong-headed imperial hegemony, leaving so many innocent corpses in the wake our great george dubya’s “war on terror”…
perhaps all this would be different.



i also can’t but help think of gandhi, the great mohandas karamchand gandhi, who, it must be said, did not succeed in the end. yes, he helped found the modern indian nation.
but perhaps he did not pass the torch of non-violence and civil disobedience far enough.

“i want world sympathy in this battle of right against might.”

“it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of...”

“i regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men, women, and children as the most diabolical use of science.”

“ a democrat must be utterly selfless. he must think and dream not in terms of self or party, but only of democracy.”

“tribulation and death seem to me to present a phase far richer than happiness in life. what is life worth without trials and tribulations which are the salt of life?”

“man’s happiness really lies in contentment. he who is discontented, however much he possesses, becomes a slave to his desires.”

“real disarmament can not come unless the nations of the world cease to exploit one another.”

luv from mumbai,

--boom boom trules