Technology will refine the citizen journalist’s role, says the man whose pictures of 26/11 were viewed by thousands within the first few hours of the attack

On July 12, 2006, a day after serial blasts aboard the suburban railway threw a shocked hush over Mumbai, Vinukumar Ranganathan recounted on his blog how mobile networks were jammed on his way home the earlier evening. “...But the GPRS was working and we were checking news in the car from our own site...,” he wrote. He wasn’t to know it then, but over two years later, the young software engineer who designs and sells innovative solutions in the mobile and messaging sphere for a living was to play a more active role in reporting news from the site of a terror attack.

For 27-year-old Vinu, the November 26, 2008, attacks began with “two loud bangs” he heard from rather close quarters as he was winding up for the day at his Colaba home. Minutes later, there was a ticker on television about an attack at nearby Chhatrapti Shivaji Terminus, but what he surmised as blasts, were certainly closer than CST. “I grabbed my camera and headed out,” he says, recollecting the details of what was his busiest night yet, his first as a serious citizen journalist and one he will remember vividly for a long, long time.

The scene outside — Vinu lives close to the Colaba fire station, barely a few hundred metres away form Nariman House — was chaotic. “I kept clicking, not really looking for great shots, just capturing everything I could,” he says, almost three months later. The policemen were mostly “clueless”, he remembers, fewer than one might expect, and not all of them armed. “Anyway, for the first several minutes, nobody was quite sure what had happened, where the terrorists had gone or why. It was a foreigner I bumped into who told me Israelis live in the building behind the one he lives in.”

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