December afternoons can, in some parts of Delhi, be quite idyllic, pastoral almost. Like it is the other day when we meet — a quartet of friends — for our usual bi-monthly lunch. This time, in the garden-restaurant that has nibbled into the magnificent Lodhi Gardens. The sun’s rays come down gently through the trees arched over us, like panoply. Birds twitter. Behind us a boisterous kitty party is under way. The sounds and snarls of traffic muzzled by nature asserting itself.

Yet, something, perhaps everything, has changed. Some sort of shadow has fallen across life, like a permanent stain. I watch the moving mouths of my friends but their words barely reach my ears. I am elsewhere: my mind keeps replaying my last day in Mumbai, that fatal last week in November. The guns had finally gone silent when the car loaned by a concerned friend made its way, with an anxious me inside, to the airport from Warden Road.
But there was an eerie, fearful silence en route. Most shops had downed their shutters. Even the coveted fruit-sellers of Warden Road had disappeared. But it wasn’t just the absence of the usual hustle bustle of this city that is said to never sleep that bothered me. It was the sight of the Haji Ali shrine. There wasn’t a soul on the gently curving walkway that links the land to the little island in the Arabian Sea on which the shrine of the Muslim Sufi saint was built. There had been a rumour (amplified by the electronic media) that a few terrorists in a car were going about South Mumbai shooting people. Usually, there is an unbroken stream of pilgrims making their way to Haji Ali. I just could not get the surreal image of the stark, unencumbered walkway out of my mind: it was now just a line across the water.

Meanwhile, back in New Delhi at the restaurant the mood is turning sombre. Art is usually the main course on the menu of our conversation topics for these get-togethers: each one of us is directly or tangentially involved with the world of contemporary Indian art. Normally, there’s even a competitive edge underwriting our chat session that each of us subtly steers towards our individual achievements, fanning our egos over coffee and dessert. This time, however, the art talk is cut short. The Mumbai tragedy has shaken us: it has brought into sharp relief the precariousness of life. And, with it, the preciousness of life as well.
Coffee done, we hurry home, with an unspoken resolve to change the way we think and live. Family we iterate, almost in a chorus, must come first. The chota-mota or even mota ambitions of life have to be put on the back burner as we re-jig our priorities. For me it’s a call for honest introspection, for a need to press the pause button on lives stuck in fast forward mode. It’s also time to make a few notes to the self.

Note number 1: Words said in the heat of the moment are almost impossible to take back. They often do irretrievable damage as well. During the few days that Mumbai was under siege and the nation held its collective breath, hysterical television anchors — not to speak of their celebrity guests — would have had us go to war with Pakistan. By the way, what were the celebrities doing there in the first place?

Note number 2: That old chestnut about no man being an island — it’s so true. Tragedy and terror are equalisers. We need to work together and bring down the barriers between the Us and Them. Yes, old John Donne was so right when he wrote:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main....
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Note number 3: It’s time to offload the cynicism that the generation of Midnight’s Children (disclosure: I am one of them) has been carrying for so long. Come to think of it, considering the sorry impasse that The Complacent Generation or The Greediest Generation (to borrow Thomas Friedman’s phrases) has brought India to, it’s time for GenerationNext to grab the baton. Perhaps new technology will bring about the change that in the past only revolutions had been able to. SMSs and the internet have stirred people out of their apathy, spurring an interest in the body politic. They have galvanised both the young and the not-so-young across the nation to press for a better India. I just hope that the rage that propels this push for change does not peter out.

Note number 4: We need to read children and adolescents better: we are deaf to their cris de coeur. An analyst friend tells me that he can’t leave Mumbai for a wedding of a close friend in Delhi because he has been inundated by young people traumatised by what happened in Mumbai. I will never forget the words of an adolescent I once interviewed for a story about depression. “We may look as if we are made of steel but we are as fragile as an egg. Crack us open and darkness will ooze out.”

Note number 5: Respond immediately to a plea for help, even if it’s inconvenient. Many years ago my childhood ayah called me out of the blue. I had not seen her for over two decades. She told me that she was in trouble and asked me to come and get her. I was too caught up with my career as a reporter for The Statesman to respond to her plea for help. I tried calling her the next day. Her employers insisted that there was no such person there. I have not heard from her since. Nor have I ever forgiven myself. This was the same woman who rescued me (a bratty three-year-old) from the second floor bathroom I had accidentally locked myself in, by climbing the pipes on the wall of our house in London. After 26/11, Sita’s voice, for that was her name, returns to haunt me.

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