On November 26, 2008 at 21.15 commuters and travellers waited to board trains to take them home. Diners were being served at Leopold Café, at the various restaurants of the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Trident Hotel and at the Oberoi Hotel. And then there was mayhem and carnage and the world turned upside down for many of us in this city. It impacted the emotional world of people in myriad ways. Some children wanted a promise from parents that if they went out they would definitely return. It was imperative for them to somehow reestablish their certain world. How do we think in the midst of terror?

A woman in her 40s has a dream
“In my dream I was asleep. My mother, dressed in a salwar kameez, entered my bedroom and took all my love letters. I froze and pretended to sleep. I wanted to escape.
I had to escape. I am suddenly in the bathroom frantically trying to call for help. My phone becomes a computer or a Blackberry, and it becomes hard to use it. I couldn’t make it work. I banged the phone on my palm. It was difficult to reach help. She was killing all my memories of love. The feeling was that from nowhere….she was now here, destroying all the letters written by my husband and me to each other. I submit and lay in bed, frozen. “I have come here to kill you,” my mother said, and I woke up absolutely terrified…. Thank God it was a dream!”
But the dream is real in the internal world!
In this dream, the mother who is normally the protector and a loving trusting figure has become the destroyer of love, thereby reversing the image of the mother in her mind.
There is hatred of love in her. She believes that submitting in a placating manner can save her from the destruction. She is not able to reach out to anyone for support. This is a dread that terrorises us all. In the dream there is an experience of total and utter helplessness and she becomes passive and dysfunctional.?The experience of terror and dread exist in us from the time we are born. The move from an aquatic world to a gaseous world and the loss of a defined space, is the first terrifying experience that we all undergo as we enter this world. It is an experience that remains with us through life, which can get rekindled by external events. What form of security can be created within to deal with this terror within us and to enable us to feel that we have a home where love exists?
In her dream the home of love is destroyed, and she wakes up with severe anxieties.
When the terror attacks took place in Mumbai, they created similar anxieties of having no home. Homes had been violated by the terrorists. In an emotional sense, a feeling of homelessness is experienced. People have houses but they have lost a home which gave them security and a joy in living.

Heroes at the Taj, by Michael Pollock
Michael Pollock was at the Taj hotel when the terrorists attacked, and survived.
Michael said: “I lay in the fetal position keeping in touch with Anjali via the blackberry. I cannot even begin to explain the amount of adrenalin running through my system at this point. It was this hyper-aware state where every sound, every smell, every piece of information was ultra acute, analysed and processed so that we can make the best decisions and maximise the odds of survival.”
We can observe two different approaches of Michael and the forty-year-old woman, to their experiences in the external and the internal worlds. Michael in his description is active and alive; and, draws his security from his fetal position and his ability to be able to think in the midst of terror. He is acutely aware, in contrast to the woman mentioned earlier, who in her dream became passive and was unable to protect her love. Her belief in security comes from becoming a slave to the terrorising mother in the dream. Is it that terrorists rely on producing this latter state of mind to perpetrate their violence?

The comfort of the fetal position
Another young woman studying in London who is deeply involved with Mumbai was shaken by the unfolding events. She talked with her parents and watched television. That night as she tried to sleep she was extremely restless. Eventually she fell asleep and had a dream. She was lying in a fetal position. A feeling of being in the womb where there is love and security.
The young girl was not threatened by any external violence; but, she experienced the violence in Bombay through the televised images and her telephonic conversations with home. She had to reach a place of hope, life and security in her dream.
A man in his 30s, dreaded the fact that his family and his loved ones could be attacked from the city’s unemployed population. This unease created difficulties for him to leave his home. He saw the danger as coming from the outside world. Recently, he felt intense hate towards and deep disappointment with his loved ones. He felt helpless, despondent and full of hatred towards all the people he loved at home. He felt like murdering all of them. The hate within him made him vocalise how he was going to kill. He was afraid to act out his hatred, after which he realised that the killer was within him. All these years his anxiety about attacks from outside was connected to his internal hatred.

How do we deal with violence coming from within ourselves and outside? The terrorist creates fear which evokes and echoes our internal terror, dread and persecution. Appeasing a terrorist is no solution. In a public space, Gandhiji showed us how he dealt with fear in South Africa in the 1890s. He experienced disrespect and humiliation. His response was to look at the facts, examine all the options and take a stand. Gandhiji did not give in to fear. He created a series of actions to deal with social injustice, getting increasingly involved in the fight against all forms of injustice that led to the creation of the Natal Indian Congress – an organisation dealing with injustices to Indians living there. What he demonstrated in practice was the method of transforming the internal and external world simultaneously.
Gandhiji was an amazing man. Reading his Satya Graha in South Africa made me realise that he learnt from his own experiences where he changed his internal world and, through action, the external world – evolving and preparing him to come to India and lead it to freedom.

“Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. Reverence for life affords me, my fundamental principle of morality, mainly, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life; and that to destroy to harm or to hinder life is evil.” – Gandhiji

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