Lets give it an honest thought. Imagine a situation where gunmen/terrorists had taken a chawl in Bombay hostage instead of the Taj. What do you think would have been the nature of media coverage ?

If he is talking of the Indian media, then yes, they would have covered it almost as breathlessly as they covered the Taj and Oberoi standoffs. 

Look, I am not claiming that the media covers everything evenhandedly. Yes, it focuses more on people like us than on people like them. Mumbai receives greater coverage, if for no other reason than that it has more reporters per square inch. As soon as it starts raining, reporters crowd around Milan subway, stand in ankle deep water, and pontificate about how heavily it is raining. Why Milan subway and why not Ratnagiri? Why, because for one, Milan subway is closer to the news channels’ offices and it is less of a journey in the rain. Also because more people who watch English news channels are interested in the state of the traffic under Milan subway than are interested in the people dying in Ratnagiri. 

Obviously, the Taj and Oberoi got more attention because of their iconic status. Would a hostage situation in VT station, which has greater iconic status, but more likely to contain poor people, have gotten the same media coverage? Absolutely.  It would have got more  coverage. 

What about a chawl in Mumbai? Dude, in Mumbai, even chawls have iconic status. A hostage situation in a chawl would have cameras positioned there as intently as they were trained on the Taj. 

Also, we criticise the media quite a bit, but let’s be fair to them, okay? There is this boy-in-the-borewell phenomenon that has been happening quite a bit in the past couple of years. The children who fall into the borewell tubes are usually from poor families. There aren’t that many borewells in Mumbai; usually these things happen in distant villages.  And yet, they have been focusing their non-stop attention on these children, rivetting the attention of the entire nation and organizing prayers and havans all over the place. More importantly, in these cases, media coverage must have saved some lives by forcing the authorities to act faster than they otherwise would have.  

Once again, this is not to say that the media is fair and balanced in every case. Yes, it is swayed by things that ought not to be relevant. The boy-in-borewell phenomenon gets more attention because children are involved. Hostage situations will get more attention than mere bomb blasts will – what with bomb blasts occurring too frequently these days. A terrorist standoff has greater chance of grabbing a nation’s attention than a mere gang war would have. Given all this unevenness, is the greater coverage that the Taj got because it is frequented by rich people significant? I don’t think so.

Yes, there is a class divide in India. There is a divide between the literate and the illiterate. There is a divide between those who read English newspapers and those who don’t. There is a divide between cities and villages. Now, the whole point of a class divide is that those on one side of a divide feel greater kinship among themselves than with those on the other side. Readers of English newspapers like to read about the travails of other middle-class readers like themselves and don’t care much about farmers dying in Vidarbha. A citizen of Mumbai cares more about people dying in train bombings in his city than he does for deaths due to Naxalism or caste wars. That makes sense.

But if you try to stretch this standard argument to argue that this particular terror strike is getting more attention because it was targeted at the rich South Bombay types, that is where the argument snaps. The typical English speaker is far more likely to travel by train than be able to afford coffee at the Taj or Oberoi. He is much more likely to feel kinship with those who died in a train blast on July 11, 2006  than with those who died in the November massacre.  

There is a sliver of truth in the argument – in that it is true that the attacks got more attention in the West because Americans and Britons were killed.  But using the argument to explain why they have generated such an enormous outrage amont Mumbaikars involves lazy thinking as well as an active effort to avoid the blindlingly obvious.

I am usually contemptuous of attempts to link enormous tragedies to the writer’s minor personal misfortunes, but bear with me on this.  On 27th November, I was stuck in a hotel room in the United States, unable to return to Mumbai because my flight was cancelled due to the terrorist attacks. I had missed breakfast because I was glued to the television, and because it was Thanksgiving day and no restaurant was open, I faced the prospect of staying hungry throughout the day. I was also feeling exceedingly lonely and was desperately missing my two-month old infant son.   

My problems, needless to say, were trivial compared to what my city went through. The reason I am mentioning them is to explain why the incident of Karambir Kang, General Manager at the Taj,  losing his wife and two daughters in a fire while he was saving hotel guests caused me to burst into tears. 

It has been over a week since, and I am still seething. This is not the first terrorist strike on Mumbai or on India, and the way things are going, this will not be the last. But there was something different about this one. It is one thing to anonymously set off a few bombs and kill a couple of hundred people. It is quite another when 10 or 20 people, armed with guns and grenades, hold off the might of the Indian State. This is probably the greatest display of India’s military weakness since the defeat of 1962.