'That's it, this is World War III': Indians remember 9/11

Ten years after 9/11 two things, apparently contradictory, are clear. The attack took place far away from our soil. And yet it was close to us in ways we didn’t anticipate. Many had relatives in the US, some in New York City itself. Anisha Lakshman’s relatives ran an export business. Their whole stock was in the World Trade Center. Lakshman, now 21, remembers her parents glued to the television, desperately trying to contact the relatives. They were fine, though the business suffered a big setback. Nitasha Gaurav, 37, a fashion consultant, had just returned to India after a summer in New York at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). At first she thought FIT had been hit. Others had family in the United States at the time. “My mom and dad were in the US then,” remembers Samir Bhatnagar, a 27-year-old lawyer. “I immediately got on the Internet and emailed them.” “My brothers were in the US, just three hours away from New York City. So I was really worried,” recalls 30-year-old Abhijit Singh. Singh, a marine engineer, was sailing off the Spanish coast at that time. He remembers getting all his updates from the tiny television on board. “It was very sad, my friends and family were shocked, as was I.” he says. [caption id=“attachment_80867” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“A box full of credit cards, identity cards, drivers licenses and various other items recovered from the debris sifted. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times”]  [/caption] The overarching feeling though was really one of disbelief, both at the scale of the attack and the fact that it had happened in the US. Abhishek Shukla, 31, now a marketing manager was an engineering student in Surat in those days. He says he was returning to his dorm when friends rushed up with the news. “Our collective reaction was of course, ‘Pagal ho gaya hai, koi disaster movie ka trailer dekha hoga.’ The TV room of the hostel was packed with students and we were glued all night, shocked to see what had happened, and also surprised that such a thing could actually happen in the US.” But even as they saw it happening, it was still difficult to grasp the magnitude of what was unfolding. It did feel like a disaster film on television, one that was hard to switch off.  Once Bhatnagar heard from his parents that they were safe, he says he was just glued to the television treating it as “spectacle". Some admit that they did feel the United States would finally understand that it couldn’t just be a superpower and ride roughshod over the rest of the world. “My reaction to it was pretty simple and maybe even crude when I think about it now,” says 28-year-old entrepreneur Kiranjeet Borthakur. “America is paying for its crimes and this is just the beginning.” “I thought that’s it; this is the Third World War.” Himika Chaudhri, 33, then a reporter for a daily in Kolkata says that while it might not have been the Third World War it was a huge wake-up call for everyone. “It didn’t just bring Al Qaeda into the limelight, it made us wake up to the reality of terrorism,” she says. Chaudhri, now the Joint Secretary for Media and Communication at CREDAI says it was a sobering realisation that even a country as powerful as the US could have been oblivious to terrorists planning such a massive attack within its borders. Continues on the next page At that time, people were just engrossed in the drama as it unfolded on television screens. Few understood the ways in which its effects would be felt as far away as  India. Nishat Fatima had very little information about what had happened. Hyderabad had had a 6-8 hour power cut that day. She’d just heard there had been “a terror attack in the US.” Fatima, 34, a freelance writer and photographer, says she didn’t understand that it would become “an excuse to declare war on Iraq, bomb the heck out of Afghanistan, and completely change the way Muslims were regarded.” 9/11 would affect the lives of others in much more personal ways. Shahbaz Ahmed was a college student then. He had watched it huddled with friends in the hostel common room. Their college course was designed so that they could spend two years in India and two years abroad. Soon after the reality of the attack set in. Getting visas became a nightmare especially if you were a Muslim from South Asia. Ahmed, 27, now lives in Canada. He didn’t face any visa problems but has friends who did. Gota Jha, 40, a taxi driver, had many relatives on his maternal side in the US. One cousin was actually a taxi driver in New York. He was safe but for six months after the attacks, he couldn’t drive his cab without being abused or yelled at by passengers. He had things thrown at him while walking down the street. For the first time in his life, Jha felt that India was way better than America.