#adrian levy

THE SIEGE: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark I just finished reading this book based on the 2008 terrorist attack in India. I didn't think I would like this book but once I started reading it I couldn't stop. This book focuses on the attack on the Taj Hotel, even though the terrorist attack took place at numerous sites. There were a number of terrorists inside the hotel just walking around killing innocent people, and no special corps went in there to help them until 6 hours later. If they did go in there sooner, lives would have been saved. Sadly over 100 people died and many more injured. Not only did the terrorist kill people but also set fire to the hotel which killed victims hiding in their hotel rooms. There was one officer who did go in and his name is Nangare Patil (Vishwas Nangare Patil) who is an absolute legend. This guy was like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, even though he was outnumbered he went after the bad guys as well attempted to save the victims. He was also joined by a few others, it was them alone trying to help the situation. You know how in action movies there are explosions and people fly in the air, well that's what happened to Patil, they thought he died but he didn't, he survived. This book tells the story about the Taj Hotel as well as what happened through survivor accounts. It is extremely interesting, and I want to visit the Taj Hotel one day after reading about the building. Good book.

Talking about the Mumbai attacks of 2008, Adrian Levy pointed out the lack of information made available to the general citizenry in India. The Pradhan report was a mere 64 pages, in contrast to the hundreds of pages produced by the 9/11 commission or the 7/7 London bombings. There is no ‘lessons learnt faculty’ in the Indian government, Levy said, unlike Laskar-e-Taiba, which studies its failures in order to engineer more sophisticated but not necessarily expensive attacks. Eventually the city saved itself, Levy found in his book, The Seige, with unlikely heroes in the Taj staff, a US marine of Indian descent who helped evacuate scores of hostages to safety and of course NSG commandos inspite of the lack of coordination and avoidable bureaucratic delays along the chain of command and between liaising intelligence agencies, ministry officials and the police (investigating the attacks, Levy also found that some intelligence was available since as early as 2006, but wasn't adequately mobilized).

The NSG is supposedly rehauling its response procedures and equipping its commandos with state of art gadgets post 26/11, but the lumbering machinery of the government seems intent to forever look forward and neglect reviewing the past. Anemic (especially TV) reporting in India, consumed by the vast majority of its middle class citizenry, is content with demonizing terrorists and of course Pakistan, rather than probing the organization, alliances, ideologies and means of financial support erected by planners and facilitators of terrorist attacks. The interviewer speaking with Levy, at one point, called the boys involved in the Mumbai siege 'remotely operated robots.' Levy on the other hand described the relationship between the boys and their handlers as paternalistic, where the boys were infantilized by the handlers who could be heard to admonish them in the uncanny tone of adults chastising children. The image of the mindlessly robotic terrorist holds no nuance and tells us nothing about their 'creation' in some rag-tag 'jihad camp.' Levy finds Lashkar training camps to be extremely sophisticated in their organization and extremely disciplined in training their cadres. These are no 'brainless' ideologues out to destroy random targets to fuel hatred and bring about a new caliphate. Their goals and agendas evolve too, while we are left to our un-evolving caricaturised and racialised understanding of 'terror-mongers,' whom we ought to hate unreservedly.