Monday Musings: 25 Years of 9/11

September 13, 2026 Amitabh Srivastava #25YearsOf911, #9/11, #9/11Memorial, #911Anniversary, #AdamRizvi, #IndiaAmerica, #IndiaUSRelations, #MondayMusings, #OsamaBinLaden, #Pakistan, #PakistaniPropaganda, #September11, #September11Attacks, #Terrorism, #TheIndiaObserver, #TIO, #TwinTowers, #USHistory, #WorldTradeCenter

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By Amitabh Srivastava , Edited by Adam Rizvi, The India Observer, TIO: The year 2001 changed America forever.

As we watched pictures of the four living former US presidents—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden—and their wives, along with Vice President JD Vance, paying tribute to the innocent victims of that vicious attack on the Twin Towers, it reflected the grief of an entire nation that had once thought itself invincible.

The scars of the terror attack, which claimed nearly 3,000 lives, according to the FBI, are still visible in the form of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

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The world watched in horror as two commercial airliners crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Another struck the Pentagon, while a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania, sending shock waves across the globe.

I have some very interesting memories of those days that I would like to share.

I was posted as the first Hindustan Times correspondent in Dehradun in 1998 and was given an office-cum-residence for the first time.

Uttarakhand was created in 2000, but there was not much work as we had been given only one page for the entire state.

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My son had joined an engineering college in Roorkee in 2001, and he had come home for his Dussehra vacation.

Two days after the horrific attack, I asked him to join me at my computer. At night, we used to play chess on the internet through Yahoo with international players, mostly college students and other young people who had access to the internet.

While playing with a group of students, I expressed my sympathies to the American youth over the terror attack.

Instead of thanking me, however, they asked where I was from. I said India.

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They then started abusing us, saying, “Indians also don’t treat Pakistanis well. Don’t lecture us.”

What they probably meant was, “You don’t treat Muslims well”—something that the Pakistani propaganda machine had been telling the world.

I explained to them that Muslims were living peacefully in India and that there was nothing to distinguish between Indians and Pakistanis.

But then one of them stated, “You have a lousy Prime Minister” (Atal Behari Vajpayee was Prime Minister at the time), “and Musharraf is so smart.”

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We could not tolerate this, obviously.

I told them there was no comparison between the two.

“Atal Behari Vajpayee is a poet and Musharraf is a dictator. How can you even talk like that?” I said.

That did not seem to register with the Gen Z of that era. But within half an hour, I had become convinced that Pakistani propaganda had a much stronger presence in America than India’s laid-back foreign policy.

But we went from one table to another, playing chess and talking to the young people.

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Finally, I managed to convince some of them that India and the US should stand together because both were democratic countries, while Pakistan was a military dictatorship.

I also explained to them that they were supporting a country that had become a refuge for terrorists—the same terrorists who had attacked the Twin Towers and killed innocent Americans.

The final hurrah came when the young people we were playing with ended up saying, “India Zindabad.”

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Years later, when Osama bin Laden was killed in a house in Pakistan, my interpretation of the events of 2001 seemed to have been vindicated.

But 25 years later, I think Donald Trump needs to play chess with me.

The India Observer — Fearless Journalism. Facts Matter.

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