As the Mumbai terror attack played out through Thursday and Friday bringing India’s financial capital to a grinding halt, the Internet became the link between people across nations. It has been in many ways the coming of age of the Indian blogosphere.

While the Twitter network competed with TV news channels with minute-by-minute updates of the terror attacks, blasting out dozens of updates every minutes as the high drama unfolded through the night, Mumbaimetblogs was also on the job, sending out calls for blood donations, listing out hospital numbers and baring the sense of public outrage and helplessness.

Arzan’s post on Mumbaimetblogs details how and when he learnt that his city was under siege. “If there’s one thing that I didn’t think I’d ever do when I took to blogging, it’s live-blogging during a bombing/hostage situation. Today was the premiere of the movie The President is Coming. While we were drinking free white wine, courtesy Sula, gunmen armed with grenades and automatic weapons stormed into the Taj and the Trident in Nariman Point. They were boys of about 20-25 year-olds and apparently they demanded that people with American and British passports to identify themselves. It’s now 12.56 am. The news channels are saying now that the terrorists are dead. Two have been shot at Girgaum Chowpatty.”

The ensuing sense of anger was also captured. A blogger writes, “We cannot tolerate these fanatics arriving in a boat on the Mumbai coast armed with explosives and guns. We cannot tolerate the fact that they got into high security stations and so called well protected hotels with guns and bombs and held people hostages. We cannot tolerate the fact that they killed people to just prove that they were capable of doing so. I refuse to be resilient. I refuse to be tolerant. I want answers and I want them now. I want to know why the intelligence did not spot this. I want to know why the coast guard did not spot this. How can we let these uncivilised people hold the city at siege? I don’t care if this post does not make sense”.

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