unavailable | tampha

It was a bright day outside and that day the journey from CME to Null Stop was very uneventful. An evening shift wasn’t really what I was looking forward to but then I couldn’t really complain either – better in the airconditioned cubicle than the scorching midsummer heat of Pune. The call volumes into the call center was also not particularly high and so I could catch up on other office work as well. And then this interesting call came in. This young man said – Madam do you know that there has been a terrorists have declared war in America! He was trying to call his friends in Washington but was unable to do so. I was slightly taken aback & didnt know how to react! What was this man blabbering about – what attack? What call issues? Hmm..maybe it was worth a check. And so I stood up from my cubicle and looked around… it seems that many of my colleagues had recieved such calls. They all had puzzled expressions.

It was hard to tell what was going on in the world outside our cubicles when we were taking calls. It was getting all very odd so one of my colleagues called up his wife to check. What she had to say left all of us very confused & disturbed. Some planes had crashed into the Twin towers in the US of A and a war had broken out. What was all that?

There was loads of broken bits of information coming in. I tried calling up my friend in Canada but the lines were busy. So another colleague tried calling his friend in New Jersey & he put the call on speaker. The response to his call was – Sorry, the country you are calling is currently unavailable!!!!! Another message we heard was that the country you are calling doesnt exist! We were desperately trying to assimilate all the information that was coming in. We had calls pouring in from concerned individuals who were unable to get through their relatives & friends in USA. I thought it a good idea to check with my friend in Toronto so I quickly dialled his number. To my absolute surprise, I got the same message on calling his number – The country you are trying to call is currently unavailable! We couldnt even get through over mails. It was so bizarre! Adrenaline rushing mixed with panic and confusion; someone was concerned that America will declare war over the rest of the nations; opinions were running amok!
On my way home, apart from trying to steer clear of mad highway traffic on my little scooty, my mind was full of questions. It was almost 7 hours since I’d heard that news and hadn’t seen any of the visuals or heard any news about the incident. I remember rushing to see the news & being in absolute shock watching the planes fly into the twin towers and the buildings crumble as if they were made of matchsticks. It was terrifying – there were hundreds of people in those buildings… and sorrounding buildings as well… who’ll save whom? How? It was heartbreaking.
8 years later looking back on that day, one cannot help but feel how drastically lives changed for Americans, the Afghanis & Iraqis. Many conspiracy theories & hundreds of documentaries have been made ever since covering all kinds of facets of the incident! Michael Moore’s Farenheit 911 being one of the biggest eye-openers of them all personally. It is hard not to be affected by it!
What a day that was… the day that America didnt exist!