Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Two minutes to honor the dead ...



Bombay came to a standstill earlier today, to remember those who were killed last week. Even after the 1993 bombings, I don't recall this kind of display of solidarity.
The entire city came to a standstill at 6.25 pm, the time of the first explosion at Mahim station last Tuesday, mourning silently for the over 200 people who died in the terror attacks. More than 270 sirens wailed for a minute at 6.24 pm to signal the two minute homage. Short text messages were sent by the Maharashtra government asking citizens to observe the two-minute silence. All traffic came to a halt, no flights landed or took off and trains on the Central, Western and Harbour lines stopped in their tracks for two minutes. The President, accompanied by Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil, Governor S M Krishna and senior railway officials also laid wreaths at a specially erected memorial plaque at Mahim station. Theatres stopped screening films and shopping malls stopped business for two minutes. Muslim organisation Raza Academy said it would release pigeons and white baloons from Minara mosque in South Mumbai as a sign of peace.
Here's the story from Asianews.

2 comments:

Napoleon said...

It's interesting that the government can use technology to spread news about a moment of silence, through text messages, but they restrict blogs. They at the same time seem contradictory and yet both smack of big brother (do they use that term in India). This is just me talking about something I know nothing about. Peace.

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

Oh yeah, Big Brother is everywhere. Government is everyone's Big Brother here. This is most definitely not the country of limited government. Government is supposed to solve all our problems. Sarkar bhagwan hai Government is god.

Interesting to think that the IT revolution of the past several years has, in part, been successful because of the benign neglect of the government.

As to contradiction yes -- but it's not the same branch of government doing this. One was the state govt. sending out text messages. The other was some bureaucracy in the Central (i.e. Federal) govt. that was set up to regulate communications but obviously is completley clueless as to how the Internet functions. Despite the blocks, I'm still able to view any blogspot or typepad site!