Information Sciences and Technology

Dispatch from India: Reflections on the bombings

IST student dispatch from India series

Steve Garguilo, Joel Boucher, Matt Prindible and Larissa Andrejko are rising seniors in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. They are spending this summer in Bangalore, India, interning for Honeywell International, a diversified technology and manufacturing corporation. They are blogging about their experiences on the other side of the world. Included in this dispatch is an installment from Garguilo’s blog.

I don't know how much the news has traveled to the U.S., but there were a series of bombings last week in Bangalore. We were locked down at our office, along with a large part of the city, in an effort to keep order and keep everyone safe.

I just wanted everyone at home to know that we are all OK. Unfortunately, this has been a terrible tragedy here, and it's the deed of cowardly terrorists who seek to disrupt the Indian people, their government and their resolve. The will of the people, of course, is for this not to happen, and they won't let the terrorists succeed in that regard.

I sincerely hope that this will be the last of such events occurring here, and I want to express that my thoughts go out to all affected. Things like this help put in perspective just how lucky I am and how lucky many of us are.

It’s not every day that you hear about bombs going off in your city, and it's not every day that you hear about bombs going off across your country, but it's something I've lived through here, and it has been a unique experience.

I don't want to downplay the scale of these attacks because any activity is certainly too much, but at the same time I don't want people at home to be too worried because, in the grand scheme of things, it's what happens after the attack that really was the goal here rather than the attack itself, from what I understand. What those ramifications  remain to be seen, but we all plan to be very careful for the duration of our stay.

 

Last Updated March 19, 2009