MUMBAI: It is back to business as usual here, two days after the 60-hour siege by terrorists ended at two luxury hotels and other places in the city's southern end.

Hordes of people got back to work and to their schools and colleges. Travelling by city bus and suburban train, this writer found the usual Monday morning rush, ending a prolonged and tense weekend that saw shops, schools, colleges and cinema theatres closed.

"What will I do sitting at home?" was a typical comment of a train traveller eager to get to work.

This is the typical Mumbai that has learnt to move on after each calamity, both natural and man-made.

For the second day in a row, the huge promenade before the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, which was the terrorists' prime terror target, attracted tourists, curious onlookers and even families, coming to see what the 105-year-old hotel looked like now.
Many personalities, such as film-maker and lawmaker Shyam Benegal and The Hindu newspaper's top executive, N. Ram, spoke on television to vent their feelings.

Joining in are social activists, leaders of non-governmental organisations and others. The mood is anti-government, anti-politician, even anti-Congress, the party that heads the coalition governments in New Delhi and in Maharashtra state.

Demonstrators carrying placards and posters asking the government to act, the prime minister or chief minister to resign, to be accountable and so on, crowd before the TV cameras.

The TV stations do not want to miss the "photo ops" and the angry soundbites these articulate people offer.

Some of them move from one TV camera to another and from the Taj to the Oberoi Trident, the other luxury hotel that was attacked last week.

It has been a trying time for media personnel -- from Mumbai, New Delhi and a host of foreign organisations.

A score of broadcasting vans have become homes to many a TV anchor, household names like Barkha Dutt, Srinivasan Jain and others.

Some of them appeared non-stop for 46 hours with short breaks as the siege of the Taj raged last week.

For lesser-known journalists too, it was a trying time. Many of them women, they crouched and squatted to escape bullets or shrapnels, holding microphones and speaking incessantly.

For the cameramen, it was even more trying since they had to worry about their "angles" and orders by their studios to "zoom in" on the spot of action.

The image of crouching, ceaselessly-talking journalists, some of whom were seeing terrorists in action for the first time, the militants' faces, the black T-shirts, have been burned into the Indian public mind.