Should India have its own 9/11 memorial?
Melissa A. Bell -
Saturday, September 12, 2009 12:10 PM
Eight years ago, 34 Indians were murdered at the World Trade Center in New York. It’s not a huge number. Many more died in Bhopal, in Mumbai, in Ayodhya. But after the UK and the US, India lost the most citizens out of any other country in the world on that bright blue morning.
And now, according to an article in the New York Times, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (the company that owns the remains of the WTC), are offering cities free of cost the twisted remnants of steel that once stood towering over Manhattan. About 1,800 pieces are available to any city in the world that requests one. I’d like Mumbai to ask for one.
Every year on this day, I remember the worst day of my own life: the terror, the pain, the fear. But this year I also remembered something else. Those shining, beautiful days afterwards, in which we walked around shorn of our defenses and our pride. United by pain, but united nonetheless. It was a heady time. For a few weeks, we were not strangers, the world embraced us, and we were all just people vitally aware of our own fragility.
Tim Kreider wrote of this feeling today in the New York Times:
“Jealously tended hierarchies temporarily evaporated, and the worthless currency of human decency reacquired street value… Graffiti appeared that actually spoke instead of just marking territory, like the overheard murmurs of a city talking to itself or fitfully dreaming. I saw a spray-painted message that would’ve seemed trite or sentimental a week before: YOU ARE ALIVE.”
Rather than dwell on the terror wrought that day, the wreckage later strewn across Iraq and Afghanistan, the ill will the US has rightly brought on ourselves, I’d like to see the world celebrate what has lingered of that feeling—the walls that have been torn down, the relationships that have been strengthened. Eight years ago, India and the US were not close. Now, the US is lucky to have India as one of its strongest allies.
I’d like to see a 9/11 memorial in India. And I’d like to see a 26/11 memorial in New York. We need a reminder, not that terror exists, but that after the terror, we are still alive, we are not strangers, and we should all be embracing one another more often.