Reading terror146;s mind

The Mumbai attacks are behind us, and they will never be behind us.

The Mumbai attacks are behind us, and they will never be behind us. For many years now, no one will be able to walk past the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal and the Taj and the Oberoi without remembering. I have never seen Nariman House and I am not a terrorism tourist, so I doubt if I will ever see it, except by accident, but the name of that one innocuous building will stay with us for ever, as will the image of little Moshe crying outside his home. Day before yesterday a paper carried a photo of Moshe in Israel, still in his nanny8217;s arms, laughing, and that photo would have made any Indian who spotted it smile, from deep inside the heart.

It is very difficult for a normal person assuming you are 8220;normal8221;, and I am too to understand what drove these ten young men to do what they did, to kill men, women and children they had never known or met, who had never hurt them in any way, and never even dreamt of doing so. Common everyday people who were taking the train home after a Wednesday spent earning an honest living, people who were celebrating a birthday or a wedding, people who were just walking their familiar streets. The Mumbai attacks were not about the banality of evil, of clerks and accountants dispassionately auditing the Holocaust. They were about a primal, primeval, pre-human hatred that feeds on the far side of insanity. If there is any such thing called insanity.

It was Graham Greene, I think, who wrote that hatred is finally about a breakdown of communication. Cruelty, Ian McEwan has said, is a failure of imagination. 8220;Novels,8221; McEwan said, 8220;are not about teaching people how to live, but about showing the possibility of what it8217;s like to be someone else. It8217;s the basis of all sympathy, empathy and compassion. Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.8221; It may seem banal to invoke literature to make sense of a tragedy and an outrage of such magnitude, but what tools do we have at hand? Given the preposterous size of what we have witnessed, reason seems a weak instrument, applicable only to the essential examinations of the how and the when and the what. This too is more paperwork really, than reason; data, not knowledge. Great tragedies generate a lot of paperwork. Great tragedies cut down a lot of forests.

The police can never get to the why. The terrorists thought they had a why, but they were deluded by visions of both impossible injustice and improbable pleasures. The men who branded these visions into their skulls thought they knew a why, but they were deluded too, by their misreadings of a what: a universal truth and an objective reality. Or they knew the exact why that could be planted in the heads of ten fools. Whatever really transpired inside those fevered minds, we have to perhaps conclude that it is about communication and imagination. And these are two qualities that distinguish humans from animals.

The 8220;theory of mind8221; is the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. Being able to attribute mental states to others and understanding them as causes of behaviour means that one must be able to understand that others8217; mental representations of the world do not necessarily reflect reality and can be different from one8217;s own. While we are trying to figure out what the terrorists8217; representation of the world was, it is also important to know firmly that they made no effort8212;or were deskilled explicitly in that respect8212;to understand ours. They were without8212;or robbed of8212;key attributes that we assume, rightly or wrongly, as givens in a human being.

They were not men. Yet, as far as I know, animals never kill anyone without a reason. They kill on threat perceptions, or when they are hungry. They take lives only when they need to. The Mumbai terrorists did not think they need to massacre innocents, they felt they should. 8220;Should8221; is what we come to finally. A dangerous word, tyrannical in its demands, blatantly armoured against scepticism, a hammer that is its own anvil. A word which involves both a negation of dialogue and a refusal to imagine. Perhaps this word is what we should zero in on, what it does to our lives and in our world. Just a word? A word? But what other tools do we have at hand?

Sandipan Deb heads the RPG Group8217;s planned magazine venture

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