Tagged: Vinukumar Ranganathan RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:08 am on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Arun Shanbag, , , , , , , , , Rahul Bhatia, , , , , Vinukumar Ranganathan   

    Social Media & Citizen Journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai Terror Attacks: A Case Study 

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    Introduction

    Late on November 26, 2008, India was shaken by a series of terrorist attacks across ten prominent locations in Mumbai, India’s cultural and financial capital (Wikipedia).

    The ten terrorists, linked to Islamic terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, managed to hold Mumbai hostage for more than 60 hours and killed 171 people, including several foreign nationals.

    Citizen journalism played an important role in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack and several observers, both in the mainstream media and the tech blogosphere, have written about it from many perspectives.

    The story has been framed in several ways — “participatory media vs. legacy media”, “Twitter vs. blogs”, and even “Indian internet users vs. American internet users”. As someone who tracks social media and citizen journalism in India very closely, I thought that it may be worthwhile to write a long article length post and separate the myths from the reality.

    I’ll divide the case study into four sections —

    - Section 1: What was the role of citizen journalism in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?

    1.1 The role of blogging, photo-blogging and video-blogging in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.2 The role of Twitter in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.3 The role of dedicated citizen journalism websites during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.4 Reactions to the Indian news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.5 Reactions to the international news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.6 The role of citizen journalism in the aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

    - Section 2: What lessons can we learn from citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?

    2.1 The importance of mobile applications in crisis reporting.
    2.2 The interdependence of legacy news media and participatory news media.
    2.3 The scarcity of “real” news in participatory media in crisis reporting.
    2.4 The difficulties in extracting meaning from online conversations in real time and the role of curators.
    2.5 The problem of recursive rumor loops and the importance of fact checking.
    2.6 The dynamics of participatory media critiquing the coverage of legacy news media.

    - Section 3: How was it different from earlier instances of citizen journalism in crisis situations in India and elsewhere?

    3.1 From mobile 1.0 in the South Asia Tsunami to mobile 2.0 in the Mumbai terror attack.
    3.2 From photo-blogging in the 7/7 London tube attack to micro-blogging in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    3.3 Citizen journalism in a distributed crisis situation (China earthquake) versus a concentrated crisis situation (Mumbai terror attack).
    3.4 Extracting meaning from citizen journalism on a structured platform (Ushahidi in the Kenyan post election violence) versus an unstructured open platform (Twitter in the Mumbai terror attack).
    3.5 Citizen journalism to mobilize a snap mob (in the Greece riots) versus a silent movement (in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack).

    - Section 4: What does it mean for the future of citizen journalism and crisis reporting in India and elsewhere?

    4.1 The prominence of new media curators in legacy news organizations.
    4.2 Citizen journalism platforms that are designed to extract aggregated meaning from distributed reporting.
    4.3 Ubiquitous use of tools that extract meaning from user generated content in real time.

    Section 1: What was the role of citizen journalism in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?

    1.1 The role of blogging, photo-blogging and video-blogging in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

    The citizen journalism narrative during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack was not about bloggers going out into the disturbed areas with their camera phones, shooting photos and videos of the live action, then uploading it to their blogs or social networks, and writing in-depth commentary to accompany it.

    The only exception to that broad statement is 20-something Vinukumar Ranganathan (or Vinu) who stepped out into the night with his camera and uploaded some of the first photographs of the Mumbai terror attack (112 of them!) to photo-sharing website Flickr, before proceeding to tweet about them.

    Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks Flickr

    Vinu’s photos were quickly picked up by all the major news organizations, including CNN, and his Flickr photo set had received more than 78,000 pageviews by the end of day 2.

    Apart from Vinu, the only original first-hand accounts of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attacks came from the writer-blogger trio of Amit Varma, Sonia Faleiro and Rahul Bhatia, who were stranded along with their partners in the Gordon House Hotel, a stone’s throw away from the Taj Mahal Hotel, the center of the terror attack. The three well-written posts are surreal, when read together, because it’s almost impossible to imagine that they were written by three people who shared the same experience. Amit, whose first novel is coming out in a few months, later appeared on the Larry King Live show and BBC, amongst others –

    Finally, early on the 11/27 morning, South Mumbai youngster Arun Shanbag woke up oblivious of the previous night’s mayhem, then stepped out with his camera and started live-blogging the Mumbai terrorist attacks with original pictures.

    Apart from these three exceptions, I haven’t seen any examples of serious “journalistic” user generated content in the context of the Mumbai terror attacks.

    As I said in my interview with Journalism.co.uk, I am a little surprised that there’s is so little journalistic user generated content around the terror attack. In fact, I spent the entire night on 11/27 going through Flickr and YouTube, but there were few original photos on Flickr and only television recordings on YouTube, not a single user-generated video. I would have expected at least a few others to venture out and shoot photos or videos. That happened only when we moved into 11/28.

    In fact, very few Indian bloggers were blogging about the terror attacks on 11/26, apart from Manish Viz at Ultrabrown, Arzan Sam Wadia at Mumbai Metblogs, Neha Vishwanathan at Global Voices and Peter Griffin at MumbaiHelp. Only in the early hours of 11/27, the other live-bloggers showed up and Indian link-blogging websites like DesiPundit and BlogBharti were strangely silent on the Mumbai terrorist attacks till early morning.

    Even on 11/28, when many Indian bloggers were live-blogging the Mumbai terror attacks — and DesiPundit, Global Voices and myself were working hard to highlight good posts — I saw few first-hand accounts or photographs, and no user generated videos. Most live-bloggers were merely posting news and (often premature) opinion based on the mainstream media news coverage.

    There’s value in reposting news, and there’s a good time to offer opinion, but I think that the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack was a time for first-hand original reporting, and the Indian blogosphere didn’t quite rise to the task.

    1.2 The role of Twitter in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

    On the other hand, micro-blogging service Twitter quickly became the best source for real time (citizen) news on the Mumbai terror attack, and the hashtag #Mumbai quickly rose up in Twitter trending topics. But the search volume for #Mumbai quickly became too high to handle, so some people first shifted to geo-tagged tweets from people living close to Mumbai, and then to such tweets containing links.

    As the Twitscoop graphs below (screenshot taken at 12:18 pm India time 11/28) show, the volume of tweets related to the Mumbai suddenly jumped to as high as 1000 per hour.

    Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks Twitter TwitScoop

    Not only that, most of these tweets were from Indians as the volume dramatically came down during the night.

    Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks Twitter TwitScoop

    The first photos of the Mumbai terrorist attacks went up on CNN-IBN and NDTV and both CNN-IBN and NDTV quickly started streaming live video feeds of the unfolding situation.

    India has more than 30 television news channels and all of covered the crisis comprehensively (perhaps too comprehensively). So, it’s safe to say that most people in India were undoubtedly getting their news on the crisis from television, especially since less than 5% of Indians have access to the internet.

    However, as I said in my interview with Daily Telegram, in the first six hours of the crisis, none of the international news channels were covering the Mumbai terror attack in any meaningful way the news was often updated on Twitter (much) faster than on international news websites.

    In fact, as I said in my interview on LiveMint, Twitter quickly become the de facto source for on-ground intelligence for mainstream media, and the few citizen journalists on-site in Mumbai become in-demand pundits overnight.

    In the early hours of 11/27, human powered search engine Mahalo and citizen journalism website NowPublic became the first comprehensive sources of (mainstream + citizen) news on the Mumbai terror attack and, by the morning of 11/27, Wikipedia had emerged as the definitive source on the emerging situation.

    In the early hours of 11/27, Xeni Zardin at Boing Boing and Noah Shachtman on Wired also did roundups of citizen journalism coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attacks (the only ones at that point, I think, apart from my own).

    By the morning of 11/27, both tech blogs and the mainstream media were talking about the role of Twitter in citizen journalism in the Mumbai terror attacks, and the discussion intensified during the day.

    By the afternoon of 11/27, all the newspapers and TV channels were interested in the story on the role of social media in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

    Twitter, however, was not interested and posted a two sentence official post on the Mumbai terror attack.

    1.3 The role of dedicated citizen journalism websites during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.4 Reactions to the Indian news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.5 Reactions to the international news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
    1.6 The role of citizen journalism in the aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

    Section 2: What lessons can we learn from citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?

    Section 3: How was it different from earlier instances of citizen journalism in crisis situations in India and elsewhere?

    Section 4: What does it mean for the future of citizen journalism in India and elsewhere?

    To be continued…

     

    • Mayank Dhingra 12:28 am on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Very True. Most of the updates that I saw were also from people nowhere close to mumbai
      but spreading information(true or false) as if its first hand.

      There’s a lot of noise in the information generated from citizen journalism

    • Rachit Chandra 1:34 am on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I agree, so much RTing was happening on Twitter that I just logged off it and followed the whole blasts on \mainstream\ media

    • Saurabh Pandey 1:36 am on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      You echoed my thoughts Gaurav. But neverthless I guess the reality of the situation is that only a few bloggers will write about the live situation, while there would be a collaborative and aggregating reaction by others.
      # mumbai is the largest followed/read/talked about topic in twitter and that says a lot about the concerns of Indian netizens on this situation. But overall- I agree with you- we could have done with a few more serious bloggers on this issue.

      I am trying to contribute in a small way on http://www.atomthought.com

    • Ben 3:20 am on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Not saying this applies here or not, but I think it might be worthwhile to put together a “citizen journalist’s toolkit” if there isn’t one already, so that someone who is breaking a story will know what tools to use for it.

      In fact if there isn’t one, then maybe we can put together one and organize it after the semester ends?

    • Vinayak 7:28 am on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Great post with some nice links!

      And yes…Sonia Faleiro link is pointing to the wrong post. I guess the link is:
      http://soniafaleiro.blogspot.com/2008/11/children-of-bombay.html

    • Gino Van de Walle 4:44 pm on December 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      One of the things we have to learn after these dramatical attacks is that international terrorism has made another step to professionalism. Unfortunately, we will have to learn to live with these attacks..
      http://www.ginovandewalle.com/terrorism-part-ii/

    • RAJ 12:17 pm on December 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Gaurav. Thanks for sharing. You have fantastic coverage here. I have been going through your site for a while now and really appreciate the excellent posts. I have a blog covering the very best views and news on terrorism in India at http://www.IndiaAwakening.com. The goal is influence positive change in India on all fronts. I will be adding to it daily. Hope you can take a look. Let me know if you have any feedback.

    • footballworldcuptickets 3:30 pm on October 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Your hotel travels post is very nice I like your post. You can also get good information and best facilities of hotels for travel and you will get all the package of traveling.

  • Gaurav Mishra 6:30 pm on November 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Vinukumar Ranganathan   

    My Interview with Indian Daily DNA on the Role of Citizen Journalism in the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks 

    Earlier today, Indian daily DNA interviewed me for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

    Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks Gaurav Mishra DNA

    Here is the full text of the DNA story –

    Twitter edges out blogs, Flickr and YouTube survive
    Sreejiraj Eluvangal / DNA
    Friday, November 28, 2008 03:03 IST

    Twitter blew apart the blogosphere, as netizens clamoured for information about the Mumbai attacks

    When Vinukumar Ranganathan spent about Rs1 lakh on a digital camera and lenses; he never thought it would one day lead to international fame. But thanks to the increasing power of the Internet, even a hobbyist like Vinu has suddenly become the celebrated face of citizen journalism.

    “Yesterday, at about 10.30pm, I heard two loud bangs,” says the 27-year-old mobile software-builder, who lives next to the Colaba Fire Station in South Mumbai. “I did not pay much heed to it. But my sister was watching the TV and suddenly she said, ‘there’s shooting at the railway station’. So, I collected my camera and stepped out to investigate.”

    Vinu did not need to reach the railway station. Almost as soon as he stepped out of his house, he could see debris lying on the road. “Then I realised that the noise I heard were explosions next to the Nariman House,” he says. Vinu quickly snapped away, returned home and uploaded all 112 pictures on to the photosharing website, flickr.com. “I have been using Flickr for four years now, and I get about 10 views per photo,” he says.

    This time, it was different. “By 3am, the first photo I uploaded had already been viewed 40,000 times,” he says. By afternoon, his photographs, which were being linked to by mainstream news websites as well, had received 220,000 page views.

    Vinu’s photographs are not the only evidence of the Internet coming into its own as a news medium. Around 12 hours after the attack, the mass messaging service, Twitter.com, was seeing around 1,500 user-generated updates on the terror-strike every minute, from its users. In other words, 25 users were pasting their opinion, information, or other links, about the attack, every second.

    “All the first information about these events in recent times has been through Twitter,” says Vinu, “Whether it was the Bangalore blasts, or the Nobel Prize.”

    Three-year-old Twitter, projected as a ‘micro blogging’ site by the tiny firm that runs it, has around six million users. The service works like an instant messenger, but with a ‘broadcast’ option that allows you to send the same message to all your contacts. As a result, depending on the number of people you have in your contact list, you can end up getting quite a few number of updates every minute.

    “Twitter is more live than live TV, the pace of the updates can be quite scary,” says blogger, ethnographer, and social media expert, Dina Mehta. Dina, like many in the ’social media’ community, believes that Twitter is coming up as the medium of choice when it comes to news dissemination on the Internet, a role that was earlier confined to blogging. “I am finding it a difficult to keep up on the blog. Blog is now for analysis and things to do with specific issues, while the
    interactive conversations have moved to Twitter,” she points out.

    Vinu, a die-hard blogger, who has regularly updated his site for the last three years, agrees: “I am an impulsive blogger. I don’t plan what I am going to write. However, these days, Twitter helps me release it faster and easier.” He confesses that from 20 blog posts a month, he currently posts only three or four. In contrast, his Twitter page had 50 updates in the
    first 18 hours after the shooting.

    Another blogger and ‘tweeter’, Prem Kumar, an IT consultant from Bangalore, points out that Twitter has altered his consumption of news radically. “In India, people are watching TV and putting whatever they see into their Twitter updates. So, even while I am watching one channel, I am also seeing what is there on the others, thanks to Twitter,” he points out.
    Since Twitter can also be used as an instant messenger (IM), he says, it also adds a level of interactivity to news. “If I want to know more about something, I can simply message the person who posted it back immediately,” he says.

    It is perhaps little wonder that while photo- and video-sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube continue to see frequent updates from netizens, the blogosphere has been largely confined to long, first-person accounts, that do not fit the Twitter format.

    Gaurav Mishra, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, who studies online social media in developing countries, says such services combine the best of three worlds – broadcast media, blogging and person-to-person instant messaging. “In two to three years, such services will gain a lot of traction in the market,” says the professor, who organised India’s first ‘twitter meet’, a year ago. “Though they may not replace mainstream media, they will increasingly become the source of your first information,” he says.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 4:00 pm on November 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Journalism.co.uk, , , , , , , Vinukumar Ranganathan   

    My Interview with Journalism.co.uk on the Role of Citizen Journalism in the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks 

    Earlier today, UK-based Journalism.co.uk interviewed me for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

    Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks Gaurav Mishra Journalism.co.uk

    Here is the full text of the Journalism.co.uk story –

    ‘I am surprised by the lack of user-generated content’, says Mumbai attack live-blogger
    Posted: 27/11/08 By: Judith Townend

    The mainstream media may be paying attention to blogs, microblogs and social media sites to report on the terrorism attacks in Mumbai, but there has been a surprisingly low level of user-generated content said Gaurav Mishra, who has been live-blogging events for 21 hours (at time of writing) from Washington.

    This is not the first time the world is witnessing a huge event through user-generated content, Mishra, the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence for the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, told Journalism.co.uk.

    Take the Asian Tsunami coverage as an example, Mishra said. “At that time there was no Twitter but people were text messaging from the ground.

    Over the last 24 hours, ‘in terms of original content there’s extremely little’, he added.

    “The only meaningful example of first hand citizen journalism in the entire episode,” Mishra said, “were the 100 plus photos from Vinukumar Ranganathan, or ‘Vinu’, uploaded on Flickr, early in the seize.

    “I would have expected at least a few others to venture out and shoot photos or videos. That’s only beginning to happen as the day comes to an end,” he said.

    “I kept going through Flickr and YouTube all of last night, and there was nothing. Television recordings. Not a single user-generated video.”

    “Even in terms of blogs. A lot of Tweets about it, but very few people have tried to put together a narrative on their blogs. The only first person narrative is by Amit Varma and Sonia Faleiro – both of whom are writers and bloggers. They’ve written about it in a meaningful way.”

    It’s not so much a story about user-generated citizen journalism, but one about people sharing information, such as helplines, he added.

    There’s a ‘nice interplay’ between Twitter and mainstream media, he said. “Both of them are listening to each other and there’s an interesting interplay there. It’s the first time this has happened in India.”

    Popularity of Twitter
    “Lots of people are Tweeting, who would have blogged otherwise. It’s a mix of many things. It’s a question of access,” he said.

    Whereas specific types of phones, or computers are needed for updating blogs, Twitter allows quicker dissemination of information, he said.

    “By Tweeting, they can tap into [an existing] momentum on Twitter and get out what they’re saying much faster,” Mishra said.

    The mainstream media has quoted Twitter as a source, he said. “That’s a big thing, for India. Many people hadn’t even heard of Twitter before.”

    A lot of people discussed how Twitter isn’t a reliable source of information, he said, adding that “of course it’s not a reliable source of information!” There is a huge and diverse mix of people using Twitter to spread information, he explained.

    He had deleted religious extremist comments from his own blog, he added.

    Not much ‘new’ news
    The interesting thing, he said, was that there wasn’t much new information to report over the first 18 hours.

    “Of course, there are some developments,” he said, “but everything is still speculation.”

    “You can speculate about it, or you can report facts, which too many people are doing. You try to look for [other] voices.”

    After the event
    “When all this has happened, people will write post after post on this, and analyse it,” he said.

    “At some point in time, I’d like to go back and make some sense of this,” he said.

    Mishra said his own motivation was not to report events at the scene, but to look at how it was being covered by social media: “I started tracking it to stop myself worrying about it. All my friends were in Bombay; I was in Bombay myself three months back. This was all extremely personal to me,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

    “I have tried not to keep linking to the media stories because a lot of other people were doing that,” he said.

    “Also, I’m not in Bombay. I don’t see what’s happening there. So, I wanted to put together a narrative of what people are talking about there from Bombay and otherwise, tracking discussions on how people are using social media.”

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 3:45 pm on November 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Vinukumar Ranganathan   

    My Interview with Indian Daily LiveMint on the Role of Citizen Journalism in the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks 

    Earlier today, Indian Daily LiveMint interviewed me for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

    Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks Gaurav Mishra LiveMint

    Here is the full text of the LiveMint story –

    Web a-twitter with terror attacks
    Social networking sites act as news media for thousands during terrorist attacks that killed over 100 people
    Melissa A. Bell

    New Delhi: Shortly after terrorist attacks riddled South Mumbai, rather than turning on their televisions, thousands of people across the world turned to the World Wide Web for instant information.

    Social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, were instantly updated with on-the-scene information, all compacted into 140-word updates. Twitter seemed to be the most popular site, with 50-100 messages uploaded per minute, and tagged under the chain of “mumbai” or “#mumbai”.

    Some pleaded for information: “‘Emergency’ can some one check if there bomb blast of some shootout in Oberoi hotel of anywhere in Mumbai? I am at Inox inside”.

    Meanwhile, other users broadcast the news: “Guys pls stay wherever u r…mumbai is under terrorist attacks… god help us.” Throughout the night and into Thursday, the site had a constant stream of voices reporting, commenting and lamenting the state of Mumbai.

    Gaurav Mishra, a research fellow at Georgetown University studying social media, tracked the unfolding events in Mumbai by linking to other blogs, twitter posts and online articles on his Gauravonomics Blog.
    He says Twitter had become a “de facto source for mainstream media”, and that the few citizen journalists on-site in Bombay had become in-demand pundits overnight.

    One such instant celebrity journalist, Mumbai-based Vinukumar Ranganathan, took around 300 photos around Nariman House shortly after the attacks began Wednesday night. An hour later, Ranganathan uploaded the photos onto his Flickr account and the news spread across Twitter that photos had been taken at the scene. The photographs have since been viewed over 50,000 times on Flickr and major international news outlets, such as Fox News and CNN, broadcast his photographs on air.
    Writer Amit Varma posted a live account on his blog from Colaba’s Gordon House Hotel after narrowly escaping a shooting. He spoke on Larry King Live the next day to discuss the shooting.

    Dina Mehta, who twittered and blogged about the attacks from her Mumbai home, said this sort of social media reportage had been used during the 2004 tsunami, and again during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Gustav. But technology has advanced to include programmes such as Twitter that allow far more people, especially less tech-saavy people, to participate: “You have a space where anyone can actually contribute to it,” she says.

    The freedom of the Web, though, can also lead to rapid-fire rumours. At one point, Twitter users thought the terrorists were finding out about army movements from the website, and Mishra said he had to delete a series of Hindu fundamental propaganda posts from his site. However, he says the propaganda and misinformation is a small percentage of the postings and other users are quick to point out the mistakes.

    Mehta agrees, “It’s a self-regulating kind of space.”

    When Mehta first heard of the attacks through a friend’s phone call, she turned on her television and her Twitter almost simultaneously. She said the two mediums complement each other and that she updated her Twitter account with news items taken from the local television to help inform people living abroad who didn’t have access to the Indian news channels.
    Marc Florez, a financial adviser in New Mexico, wrote in an email that he became frustrated with the lack of news reports in the US media which “were reporting this as just a minor story among many.”

    He logged on to Twitter and searched for “Mumbai” and instantly he “had a live feed of local twitterers who were the equivalent of an army of media reporters throughout the city of Mumbai… Real Mumbai citizens were communicating and in direct dialog with me”. Sharon Lovell also followed the events via Twitter from her home in California. She said, in an interview conducted over Twitter, that news broke on the website 20 minutes before the mainstream media picked it up.

    Other websites also quickly filled up with information: Wikipedia had a page up on the attacks by early Thursday morning. By afternoon, it had been updated at least 500 times. A Google map was created just hours after the explosions to mark the locations that had been hit. By Thursday, it had been viewed at least 13,638 times. The South Asian Journalists Association, based in New York City, aired live webcasts discussing the event.

    The Web also offered people a quick way to respond to large numbers of concerned friends, as users reassured one another via Facebook and Gmail status messages that they were alright: “Thank God our friends are safe this morning. Prayers for those still in the two hotels.” And “Suzanne is safe from the massacre in Mumbai. Will try to stay away from landmarks in Delhi. Thanks”.

    Mumbai Help, a blog about “Surviving Mumbai—Information for emergencies in the Bombay area” offered to locate people in Bombay for friends outside the city and posts on Twitter implored people to donate blood.

    Rahul Chandran contributed to this story

     

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