`The few signs that pointed to Pakistan as their homeland had been shorn and they had been turned into faceless martyrs in a conscious process of attenuation that saw their willpower and self-image whittled away, until they felt grateful for being sent to their own deaths.`
Started the new reading year so well. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark's The Siege is, in the best tradition of thrillers, a book you will read with a hammering heart. As also a sinking heart, because it is an account of the 26/11 attack on the Taj Mumbai, a story we can't help but take personally. Before long, `epic intel failure` and `sinisterly inexplicable inaction` are terms that fall like boulders into the reader's head and stay there till the last page is turned. An impeccably and unsentimentally told story, skillfully edited, with masterly use of language.
Everyone emerges with warts on them. Everyone except the real heroes, the National Security Guard commandoes who rush in where most feared to tread and take the gunmen out.