They came by boats

says Outlook and
"In many was, this was India's 9/11, an attack on mainland India on a scale it has never witnessed. For a nation that has dealt with armed insurgency and terrorism soon after independence, this was still an unprecedented scale of attack. It was just not prepared for anything even remotely like it. "It is one thing to plant bombs and melt into the crowd. It is another to come in from the sea and launch an attack such as this," a senior intelligence official told Outlook."
It is difficult for me to think of any thing else today. I spent some of the best years of my life in this area, some of them about 200 meters from the Taj Hotel. Some of the visiting professors to TIFR used to stay there (those days the concessional rate was 2500 rupees for a month) and we visited the hotel often. It could have been there that Grothendieck attended a formal dinner barefoot but I am not sure. We used to wander around the second hand book stalls near CST (those days Victoria Terminus) and drench ourselves in the rains near Nariman Point when the monsoon started. It was like a second home to many of us who grew up professionally in Bombay. May the metroplois recover soon.