‘There’s no facility in India for lessons learnt’

“Ordinary people quite often do extraordinary things. And that matters to me.”

Our idea was to write a book that is (long pause) embedded in the emotional experience of the attack, but also meticulously rooted in detail and to achieve that goal in the shortest number of pages possible.

The problem with 26/11 is that it has not been talked about enough in the right way, the emotional horror we lived with, just as everyone else did. Afterwards there was a meagre post-mortem.

 Especially at the government level?

The government level was nebulous. What the government did at the state and central level was to bury it as quickly as possible under 3,000 feet of earth. Like I have said many times, there was no post-mortem worth its name.

 Everyone talks about Mumbai’s resilience. But do you feel the offside can be forgetfulness?

The resilience is with the people. And the forgetfulness is with the government. What we say is Mumbai saved itself and of course the government wouldn’t have that debate.

 You are very critical of the RAW and NSG… there is that really sad scene of a cop throwing a plastic chair at a terrorist when his rifle jams..

And that is the reason so many people came forward. It is not just our view, it is the view within the institution because there is no system to reform and no amnesty offered for forthrightness. And no climate created for honest debate.

Which was the toughest part to piece together?

NSG was the toughest part to tell. Because the establishment did everything they could to prevent us from the telling of it. To persuade people to talk was difficult. Pain wise (long pause) I am not going to single out names because it was private things said by different individuals.

But there are people who I sat down with who were still very broken. And the reason is because there is no adequate closure.