A couple of years ago, I was telling Sakthi, a close friend of mine in Bangalore, about how shocked I was that a gigantic North Korean container ship ended up near one of the inhabited Andaman Islands and no one noticed it for days. His tongue-in-cheek reply: "This is India, everything goes unnoticed, except a couple sharing a kiss."
You'd think that after an 8000-tonne ship drifted into the waters off Bombay's suburbs in July, such an incident wouldn't happen again. BANG. The M V Pavit, a 1000-tonner lands up and is on the beach towards the Versova side. The ghost-ship has become a tourist attraction. I only noticed it this morning, when I saw a crowd clicking photos and admiring the vessel.
What the "arrival" of these 2 ships shows is that our maritime borders are not even close to being safe. If 10 Pakistanis on a dingey could turn up in South Bombay and hold the city hostage for days, I break into cold sweat at the thought of how many people and weapons can be hidden in a ship like that. Imagine the scale of the massacre if one of those Trojan horses actually has the next set of Kasabs!
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