Never Again

I've tried to blog several times this past week. I thought I had something to say, about terrorism and fear, the killing of innocents, the pointlessness of it all... I wanted to write a tribute to the heroes who died in the encounters, to speak of the photos I saw of CST, its floor smeared with blood or about the candlelight vigil I witnessed where strangers stood together and paid homage to those who were gone.

As I sat in my room, trying to understand everything that was happening, to frame sentences of the flurry of thoughts in my mind, someone let off a firecracker outside. Immediately, I froze. For one brief second, I was afraid it was a grenade, that a terrorist had found his way into our campus. I held my breath, waiting for screams and gunfire.

That moment of terror made me furious with myself. For it was conceding victory- to those terrorists who went from room to room in the Taj hotel shooting the guests they encountered, to the terrorist who dropped a rucksack with a bomb in a marketplace in Ahmedabad that was picked up by a four year old girl, to all those mindless, faceless cowards who resort to violence against defenseless people in the name of religion. They had made me afraid for one brief second.

This blog has always been about the simple pleasures of life, food and travel, love and epiphanies. Tomorrow, it will return to that. But today, I vow, never to be afraid again.