9/11

Today is the 17th anniversary of the most cataclysmic day of the 21st century. I am not a fan of historical accounts that place too much emphasis on specific events or individuals. "What if this hadn't happened or this person hadn't been born?" is an interesting thought experiment, but little else. But so much of today's turmoil can be directly traced to that September morning in New York and the chain of events it set in motion--the wars in Iraq and Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, the rise of far-right nationalism, terrorism. It almost feels like Sept. 11, 2001, marked the end of a more innocent time. In the new era, airport security checks would become an unavoidable menace, young brown men would be singled out for extra scrutiny by all types of security personnel, Islam would become a byword for  terrorism, America's wars would be fought with drones and without boots on the ground, and liberalism would face its biggest crisis since the War. The events of the day itself remain shrouded in mystery and its not just conspiracy theorists who believe that 9/11 was an inside job.
For my grandparents' generation, the era-defining question was what were they doing at midnight on Aug.  15, 1947, when India gained independence from the British. For my and my parent's generation, the question is what were we doing on September 11. I remember that it was evening in India when a friend called to tell me to switch the TV on. This was before the days of broadband internet and social media, so the TV was the primary source of real-time news. For the next few hours, I was glued to the TV. Little did any of us millions of people across the world watching the TV know how dramatically  our world was about to change.