Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not India's 9/11 | World news | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

A sensible commentary on the state of India.

The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender. We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush's famous "Why they hate us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim hate Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness." His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever." Didn't George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself. Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.

Article on 926 tweeting from CNN.

Interesting! how social media sites can be helpful (as well as harmful?) during a crisis...

Article suggests 6M Twitter users ...

If I didn’t hear about something important happening by watching my Twitter stream, it’s the first place I go to get an idea of what’s going on. Years ago I would have turned to the cable news channels, now it’s Twitter. It’s not just the speed of early reports either. Twitter also serves up a constant stream of updates as situations progress. The facts seem to be irrefutable. But some people disagree, as they wrote in comments to my Mumbai post. You should also read TomsTechBlog, who argues that it’s irresponsible to think of Twitter as a news source. The reason? The facts are often wrong. This is the same argument that mainstream journalists used against blogs when they rose to fill a void in the news over the last few years. Yet even the NY Times admitted years ago that blogs were an important news source when disaster struck: “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.” But blogs are nothing compared to Twitter, which lets any

Tech Crunch post about use of Twitter in Mumbai

Interesting view. I'm still on the fence.

Twitter is emerging as a major force in breaking news.

Microblogging and news reporting...

people (who need it) point to this as major validation

chaotic situations result in poor information flow — even to the “professional” journalists who are working at the scene. First-hand and second-hand reports on Twitter are no worse. Should anyone take them as gospel, or the final version of the events? No. Obviously, at some point someone has to check the facts, confirm reports, analyze the outcome, and so on. News reporting and journalism are much more of a process than they are a discrete thing. But as I have tried to argue before, Twitter reports are a valuable “first draft of history,” and that is a pretty good definition of the news.

Globe and mail online journ writer