• Morning after … it’s calm here in the land of the bomb blasts on
    trains. Grey skies, no rain, gentle breeze from the sea, swaying palms,
    people out for a jog. And as on the morning after every crisis, whatever
    it is over the last few years, our newspaper, milk and bread is
    delivered bang on time. (Exception: riots of 1992-93, when the then
    milk delivery guy was murdered). – Death Ends Fun
  • The Mumbai police have set up a web page
    linking to lists of the dead and injured from yesterday’s terror
    attacks in the city. The death toll this morning was standing at 183
    with some 700 people injured. Shortly after yesterday’s blasts,
    bloggers were also offering help
    and information. Some of them were among the many office workers who
    stayed late last night, keeping track of developments via television
    and the web and allowing time for the ensuing transport chaos to ease.
    One of the most useful sites is Mumbaihelp,
    which is offering to assist people who are anxiously trying to reach
    relatives or friends in the city, India’s financial hub. The people
    behind the blog also created a similar help blog after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. – Guardian News Blog

  • Trains began to come and go at Mahim Junction at 4:30. Travellers
    looked tired and upset. Small bits of the damaged roof continued to
    fall. The debris was in a pile on platform three. Among it were twisted
    metal spectacles without the glass lens. Workers sat around, their work
    not yet done, sipping tea and finally finding time to talk. One claimed
    he had found three headless bodies, and even more in the city’s
    suburban stations. In a few minutes they restarted work. A policeman
    summoned a ragpicker to sort two piles of cloth. One was what people
    had donated. The other belonged to the people in compartment 528A. A
    wallet fell out when he picked up the second pile. He dropped the pile
    and opened the wallet. There was nothing inside. He flung it away
    forcefully, and it plopped on Tulsi Pipe Road, the road that runs
    beside the tracks. Picking up the pile again, he stepped into a moist
    puddle of blood at the station entrance and was on his way. – Green Channel
  • A friend called
    me up at
    five in the morning after a night spent in hospitals and morgues and
    stations, and the scenes he described were stunning. Mangled
    bodies… the pools of blood at station platforms, the rows of
    bloody stretchers outside hospitals; the screaming of people whose face
    was pulp; the crying of people looking for their loved ones, and not
    knowing what to look for. He’ll write about it soon, but no matter how
    vivid it is, it won’t be just a good piece, an interesting article.
    It’ll be a portrait of me and everybody I know, because those, but for
    the grace of sheer luck, could have been us. – India Uncut
  • Indians often take the secular fabric of their society, and their
    tolerance, for granted, and brush off communal violence as just an
    aberration. There are now two challenges that lie ahead of them.
    One is the obvious one that India’s law-enforcing agencies face, to
    act pro-actively and nimbly to outsmart terrorists who can strike
    anywhere and at any time. The other is for civil society, which must
    refrain from the temptation of giving a religious dimension to such
    terrorism, regardless of the communal biases that sections of it may
    nurture.

    If these challenges cannot be met successfully, things may well
    unravel, and the country that began in frightening communal violence
    may be consumed by it. – Amit Varma on

  • Wake up people, before it’s too late again – switch off your
    televisions. Don’t let the 24×7 news channels make you believe
    anything… If you must believe
    something, believe it because you have seen it, because you know it. Do
    not pay heed to the politicans, they are mere opportunists trying to
    further their political careers on the shoulders of our dead. Do not
    blame a community, a religion for the terrorist activities for
    terrorism has no nationality and no religion.

    Mourn the dead, but also plan for the future. This attack proves
    that we have lapsed, something somewhere has gone dreadfully wrong. And
    we need to see our shortcomings to come up with remedies. – Selma Mirza on Metroblogging in Mumbai

  • Updated information and photographs, including a first-person account from a reporter who was on one of the bombed trains. – Ultrabrown