9/11: A collective imagination failure
Updated On: 11 September, 2010 11:36 AM IST | | Abhijit Majumder
I was immersed in typing out my report when I noticed from the corner of the eye that small groups had gathered around the few TV sets in the Times of India newsroom.
Iu00a0was immersed in typing out my report when I noticed from the corner of the eye that small groups had gathered around the few TV sets in the Times of India newsroom.
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Strange occurrences are commonplace in a newsroom, and I didn't bother to get up and check immediately.
Only after I saw their stupefied faces did I walk up to the TV.
9/11 was playing out like a simulated video game, and the first raw moments of the spectacle seemed like an elaborate prank by a special-effects genius on the world's sense and sensibility.
Sitting more than 10,000 km away, I didn't realise that my life would change too.
That from then, I would be watched through closed-circuit cameras at malls, cinema halls, hotels and airports, and would even have to reluctantly flash as last resort something eminently private my Hindu identity at more than half-a-dozen immigration counters.
I am not a Muslim, but I am under no less of a siege.
I now notice if gentlemen with flowing beards or women in burqa are boarding a plane with me. I would not earlier.
Now I am never annoyed by stray luggage at a station or airport; I am always alarmed. I think before having a chat about the Quran even with the most liberal of my Muslim friends.
It is truly tragic. A life of doubt and mistrust is but half a life. 9/11 has made us accept, and in some cases, enthusiastically adjust to it.
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Two burning fingers of American supremacy had split history like a pudding, and we are doomed to the side on which one constantly asks for the proof.
In a dazzling piece to mark nine years since 9/11, ex-Newsweek and now Time magazine editor Fareed Zakaria argues that the US overreacted to the event (read excerpt).
He says America's reaction was knee-jerk and alienated its own citizens, placed them under siege.
Zakaria's point on the US overreaction is pertinent. What I am arguing is that the US, and indeed the world, under-responded to 9/11, if ever there was such a word.
Imagination is more important than knowledge Albert Einstein
9/11 was a trailblazing piece of evil imagination. Somebody had the audacity to imagine that two planes can be hijacked and crashed between the 94th and 98th floors of the twin symbols of the mightiest nation's financial might.
Our biggest failure post 9/11 is that we have failed to counter that diabolical leap of fancy with a piece of positive imagination of that calibre and magnitude.
If Renaissance was the West's beautiful, imaginative answer to the fall of Constantinople, it has still to come up with one after September 11, 2001.
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