10 Minutes for Mumbai

1o minutes is not sufficient time to think and write about the attacks in Mumbai this week, but it's all I have this morning and it will have to do. I just read an interesting op-ed in the NYT about the "sin city" status of Mumbai in the South Asian world: because Mumbai is the economic and entertainment center of India, and so many wealthy Indians and westerners flock there for business and pleasure. Muslim and Hindu radicals have long targeted the city for its transgressions, replacing, as the op-ed writer suggests, the bloodless quest for lucre with the bloody public slaying of the irreligious.

I think it's a good time to remind ourselves that the quest for lucre is not bloodless. It's just that all of us who live well, and want to live better, don't have to see the humanitarian consequences--collateral?--of our consumption and dreams. The fact that the modern Western concept of success is built upon an Indian graveyard of third world labor and environmental pollution is not a justification for violence. But it is irrefutable, and it may lend some insight into the motivations of the Mumbai terrorists.

I know that it is possible that these men, like other terrorists, are just unhinged religious fanatics who want to impose their idea of God onto everyone else. But that is too easy an answer, and it allows us no culpability and no possibility for discussion, self-criticism, diplomacy, or societal revision. Religious fanatics exist, but I think that they are primarily charismatic individuals who manage to attract mass followings because those following are feeling unfulfilled. Maybe because they're poor and disenfranchised members of the global community; maybe because they see through the Western dream Shangri-La to the heaps of garbage pushed into the corners and out of sight. Maybe because they are that garbage.

So what can we do? Because this killing, it is so wrong.