The Mumbai attacks are behind us, and they will never be behind us. For many years now, no one will be able to walk past the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal and the Taj and the Oberoi without remembering. I have never seen Nariman House and I am not a terrorism tourist, so I doubt if I will ever see it, except by accident, but the name of that one innocuous building will stay with us for ever, as will the image of little Moshe crying outside his home. Day before yesterday a paper carried a photo of Moshe in Israel, still in his nanny’s arms, laughing, and that photo would have made any Indian who spotted it smile, from deep inside the heart.

It is very difficult for a normal person (assuming you are “normal”, and I am too) to understand what drove these ten young men to do what they did, to kill men, women and children they had never known or met, who had never hurt them in any way, and never even dreamt of doing so. Common everyday people who were taking the train home after a Wednesday spent earning an honest living, people who were celebrating a birthday or a wedding, people who were just walking their familiar streets. The Mumbai attacks were not about the banality of evil, of clerks and accountants dispassionately auditing the Holocaust. They were about a primal, primeval, pre-human hatred that feeds on the far side of insanity. If there is any such thing called insanity.

... contd.