Mumbai Attacks Hit Home For Young South Asian Americans

A few of us were recently interviewed by the New America Media - here is an excerpt from the interview. Click here to see the full interview.

Living here in the United States, do you feel detached from violence in India?

Urvi Nagrani, 21, Student, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA
Maybe I'd be able to feel detached if I lacked personal ties to the situation, but I've been to all of the sites that were attacked, I have family members who live very close to all the sites. I was unable to enjoy the luxury of apathy.

Shima Khan, 24, High School Teacher, Austin, TX
I'm definitely upset with what has happened. Clearly, there was an internal glitch as well. Why wasn't security tightened after the 2006 blasts?

Shivani Mehta, 28, Fashion Designer, New York, NY
Bombay is so fresh in my mind. When they attack the train stations, they were attacking working class. When they attacked temples, they were attacking the middle class. Now they attacked the Taj and Oberoi, so they're targeting the upper class.

Taz Ahmed

Since I'm the only Muslim blogger on Sepia Mutiny, I didn't want to post anything because I knew there would be a bunch of attacks against me. I primarily identify as South Asian American, but I think situations like these literally force my Muslim identity to be brought out.

Yagnesh Vadgama

When I was in India, I would hang out at Leopold Café because my Marathi and Hindi aren't great and people spoke English there. When I heard Leopold got attacked, that news hit me really hard. And when I heard the train got attacked as well, that news hit me hard, too. I never had a personal driver when I was in India and I only took local transportation like the train. I felt this wave of burnt out disappointment and exhaustion from these acts of violence constantly happening. It hurt even more this time because the memories of these attacked landmarks kept replaying in my mind.

Muffadal Saylawala

The American media kept mentioning that India suspected the source of the attacks to be from an "external force", which is a code name for Pakistan. I watched the Pakistani news channel and they showed footage of complete chaos in Pakistan, with troops assembling in Kashmir. India and Pakistan were supposedly going to strengthen peaceful relations at this very historic time, potentially ending 60 years of strife and suffering. And it all fell apart in two days.