Kasab 'connect' galvanizes online users

BANGALORE, INDIA: As soon as the initial reports about the Mumbai serial blasts started streaming in on Wednesday evening, two pieces of information related to the dastardly act also started floating along with the facts and figures.

The far-fetched one of the two was that the attacks coincided with the birthday of terror attack convict Ajmal Kasab. Incidentally, it helped galvanize the online community into getting on its feet to offer help and support, though the news turned out to be a hoax.

Even before checking the veracity of the news, quite a few people tweeted and texted the 'Kasab connection'. It even prompted renowned film-maker Ram Gopal Varma, who specialises on underworld flicks, to tweet, "Apparently, it's Kasabs birthday today and it looks like they are celebrating with bombs rather than with crackers." (sic)

Though the tweets reflected the sentiments of a nation, which has suffered badly in many terror strikes, including the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, such tweets rather pointed towards the tendency of rumour-mongering.

Of course, Indians live in the world's most troubled region, in the words of Home Minister P. Chidambaram, but that should not affect our power of discretion, because such rumours send out a wrong signal.

The second information was true and so spooky that it sent a chill down the spine. The synchronised triple blasts in Mumbai have been timed to be two days after the fifth anniversary of the bomb attacks on seven local trains at different parts of the Mumbai suburban network. In those attacks, 189 lost their lives and more than a thousand were injured and left scarred for the rest of their lives.

Fortunately this time around, the help and rescue scene was not exactly the same as in 2006, as technology came to the fore in salvaging the situation to a certain extent. It can be attributed to the fact that tech-savvy people got to know these details — about the co-incidental connect of Kasab and the 2006 train attacks with Wednesday's blasts — even before others as they were hooked on to several online networks.

Soon after the attacks, Twitter users had three handles — #here2help, #needhelp and #mumbai — ready to serve as helplines to hapless victims, and their kith and kin. One of them even created a crisis map on Ushahidi’s platform, an open source technology for real-time crisis mapping.

Although many concerned users tweeted their phone numbers at the beginning without realising that telephone networks were jammed, later they began sharing their addresses, e-mail identities and other relevant details. It was another stark ground reality that highlighted the increasing importance of online platforms.

Also there was a Google Spreadsheet — which was compiled in a jiffy — to offer information on volunteers and others, who were willing to extend support to victims. A real-time Mumbai Web page to report incidents on the ground, help offered and resources available was also created within hours after the blasts.

All these acts of goodwill just reinforced the notion that the gap between the real world and its virtual identity is truly disappearing faster than we expected it to be.