Professor's blog chronicled the terror

MGH researcher was visiting his kin in Mumbai

CITY OF HIS CHILDHOOD "It was very traumatic to see this happening to my home," said Arun Shanbhag of the attacks in Mumbai.

Arun Shanbhag awoke at dawn Thursday, ready for his daily 4-mile jog through Mumbai, but was blocked by his mother, who was hysterical and insisting that he not leave their second-floor flat.

A block away, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel had smoke billowing out from the windows and was surounded by police. The city of Shanbhag's childhood was under attack.

Rather than succumb to fear, Shanbhag took his digital camera and ventured into the streets, where he began to chronicle the violence in words and photos for his blog.

"It was very traumatic to see this happening to my home," said Shanbhag in a telephone interview yesterday. "It was so emotionally draining, posting on [the blog] was a way to keep my emotions off of it."

Shanbhag, 46, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital who moved to the United States in 1985, had returned to Mumbai to visit his parents the week before. He was still recovering from jet lag when the siege began Wednesday and had slept through the opening attacks.

After he left his parents' apartment that morning, Shanbhag headed for the Taj hotel, where he was ushered through the police barrier along with a group of camera-laden French journalists. No one asked for identification, he said.

"Scarily lax" was how Shanbhag described security at the Taj, where police kept media barely at arm's length and barriers were erected first only in a one-block radius.

"It didn't appear as sophisticated and as well organized as it would have been in the US," Shanbhag said, although he added that he did not want to be too critical of the forces. "I do not know their challenges," he said.

"I see a general anger at the political establishment," he said, because politicians have not rallied public support. "They have failed us," he said.

The attacks, which claimed at least 188 lives, left the city's streets stained with blood and buildings riddled with bullets. The photographs posted on Shanbhag's blog (arunshanbhag.com) tell the story of horror that permeated the city's streets, where Shanbhag spent the past several days amidst the smoke, blood, and panicked crowds.

In yesterday's interview, he described the scene outside a cafe, where a waiter's serving tray sat in a pool of blood on the sidewalk and Indian troops rappelled onto a rooftop.

Shanbhag said he did his best to keep composed, distracting himself with the process of collecting information, taking photos, and posting them. But the feelings he tried to suppress emerged Thursday night as he watched the flames from the Taj hotel melt into the purple night sky. He remembered the hotel as a place where he and his brothers played ball, raced one another, and listened to waves crashing at the waterfront nearby.

"When I saw the whole dome of the Taj going up like a campfire, that's when I got all my emotions out," said Shanbhag. "I broke down right there."

Shanbhag said questions linger in his mind after the ordeal - "What if [the next time] 100 people come in? What will happen to our city?"

Yesterday, Shanbhag took his morning run for the first time in two days, he said. His route takes him through the city, past the Oberi Hotel, another terrorist target, to the waterfront. All along the way, he said, he observed people going about their daily routines among a growing number of memorials cropping up along the streets.

"We are reclaiming the city," he said. "We don't want to live in fear."