The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, currently in India, is expected to address concerns in India over attacks on Indian students.

The issue blew up in May this year after a spate of attacks on Indian students amid allegations of racism.

The Australian leaders have been defending the safeguards and measures taken since then, but every time there is a fresh attack the media goes to town with the issue.

With over 80,000 students enrolling in Australian every year the attacks, whatever their nature, have hardly dampened the outflow of students.

Rudd won’t be the first to offer a reassurance and given the regularity with which incidents are reported it doesn’t look like he would be the last.

Indian students continue to be interested in Australian education.

Is this because they can sense that the issue is has been blown out of proportion?

Or are they voting with their feet on the state of Indian education system?

Are we still sold out over the lure of a ‘foreign degree’ and willing to run the risks for it?

September 11, 2001 — I was at university attending a freshers’ welcome bash in New Delhi.

That was a time before cell phones had become affordable and news travelled slowly.

There were murmurs of an attack, something about the U.S. and a trade center but I didn’t pay much attention.

“Is Osama coming?” someone sniggered, about a senior who shares his name with the infamous al Qaeda chief.

“Osama is sleeping in the hostel. Why are you bothering him?”

Back at the hostel, my roommate asked me if I had heard the news.

“Go look, it’s on TV. They ploughed planes into a building.”

I went to the common room, thinking randomly of Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh.

All the TV news channels were showing footage from the attacks — over and over again.

I had just read the book ‘The Inscrutable Americans’ and as I saw the towers go down, I remembered these were the first buildings the novel’s protagonist had seen in New York.

I was glued to the television screen, unable to tear myself away.

Scenes from assorted Hollywood movies played through my head as I tried and failed to make sense of it.

The spectacle of thousands dying beggared my imagination.

As I turned in for the night, I couldn’t shake of the thought that if this could happen to the most powerful country in the world, then what about us in India?

A spate of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney has seen the Indian media accuse Australia of being a racist nation.

Newspaper articles warning of a culture of “curry bashings” in Australia have sparked off debate and people around the world have spoken out against the attacks in online forums.

Some insist the majority of attacks may have been purely criminal.

As an Indian studying in the U.S. for the past three years, I am yet to come across any instance of Indians being targeted on the basis of their race.

I have never heard my American friends say anything against Indians or students of any other nationality.

Does that mean Indians are safer in New York than in Melbourne?

The attacks on Indians did take place in Australia, but then they could have happened anywhere.

Even in India, there are cases of what some may call racial bias. In fact, there is a debate on whether discrimination on the basis of caste is the same as racial discrimination.

While the attacks in Australia are wrong, unjust and unfair — some say it’s difficult to classify them as racist, others feel the numbers are too high for them to be random acts of violence.

Even those who think the attacks were race-based blame the global economic slowdown.

“Racist outrages are an expression of a deeper malaise,” Sitaram Yechury, a communist party leader, wrote in his party organ — “People’s Democracy” — this month.

“The Australian Prime Minister has declared, for the first time, that the economy has moved into a state of recession,” Yechury said.

In his Business Week blog, Mehul Srivastava agrees that not all of it is “simple racism”.

“It’s anger and resentment tinged by economic envy and by anxiety over their own financial conditions.”

Some 93,000 Indian students study in Australia. Last week, hundreds of them marched through Sydney calling for more action by authorities to protect their rights.

On Wednesday, a public interest petition was filed in the Supreme Court urging the Indian government to engage in pro-active diplomacy to prevent similar incidents.

Now it looks like even Bollywood is taking up cudgels on the students’ behalf. Filmmaker Mohit Suri has announced he’s scripting a movie based on the attacks in Australia.

What do you think? Are Indians in Australia being preyed on by petty criminals? Or are these racist attacks?.

The concept of a televised war was born in January 1991, when news networks reported live on the missiles slamming into Baghdad and millions watched from the comfort of their living rooms as tracer fire lit the sky above Iraq's capital. A decade later,  the world watched in minute-by-minute horror as the twin towers came crashing down in New York. 

Now, with the ferocious militant attacks in Mumbai, we have arrived in "the age of celebrity terrorism". Paul Cornish of Chatham House argues that apart from killing scores of people, what the Mumbai gunmen wanted was "an exaggerated and preferably extreme reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion". 

It's too early to tell if governments will respond with extreme reaction, but the saturation coverage of the drama in the world's media would suggest that, at least on this level, the killers were successful.  

"Almost within minutes, television screens showed harrowing scenes of pools of blood where people had died or been injured, hotels ablaze, Indian army snipers firing at distant targets, and CCTV images of the attackers," Cornish writes.

The first reports of shooting in the streets of India's financial capital did not actually come from the mainstream media.  A BBC news technology blog suggested that the social networking site Twitter  "came of age" during the attacks because it carried messages on the shootings some time before television networks and news agencies started reporting them. Indeed, according to a Reuters report, blogs fed an information frenzy on the 60-hour gun rampage and siege, underlining the emergence of citizen journalism in news coverage.  

However, the live coverage that followed on television networks, particularly Indian ones,  was shrill, sensationalist and bordering on the hysterical. As the Financial Times points out, this is not new in India's competitive television market, where some channels flash the words "Breaking News" all day and "the only thing that matters is to be 'first', even if first is wrong".  The blizzard of reporting inaccuracies over this incident was astonishing. In a despatch on why we should take reports from the scene of a massacre with a grain of salt, Jack Shafer catalogues the instances from Mumbai of what he calls "crap masquerading as authoritative news".

How does high-octane reportage like this feed into the popular mood, and how far could that influence the hands of policy makers in New Delhi and Islamabad?

To find out, watch for Breaking News.

The Heavens rained down tears of sorrow on Mumbai on Saturday morning as the death toll from the attacks on the proud city climbed steadily.

The unseasonal rain marked the third day of the siege of the city’s landmark Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

I have spent the past three days covering the story day-and-night and sitting here in the rain on Saturday morning watching the flames pour from the 105-year old Heritage Building and listening to gunshots, I have to wonder why this has gone on for so long.

I’m sitting well back from the lobby area by the famous Gateway of India and even here occasional bullets are hitting TV trucks and whistling overhead.

When I arrived here on foot at around 1030 on Wednesday evening I certainly did not imagine I would still be here nearly 60 hours later.

During the long vigil the gunfire and grenade explosions have been intermittent with fierce gun-battles for a few minutes then long periods of silence.

As far as I have been able to tell the battles have been widely spread around the Heritage section of the hotel and the outbreak of fire have been similarly widespread.

I made my way round to the back of the hotel in the early hours of Saturday where the crack Sikh regiment was stationed.

It was very quiet and very dark and as rats scampered around our legs we chatted to the soldiers who were stretching tired, cramped legs and easing stiff back.

The language barrier meant it was hard to communicate with these fierce warriors but it was clear they had been on duty for many hours and at least as long as I had been.

I had been able to enjoy at least some breaks for naps but I do not think they had.

It was very quiet at the back of the building but I could still hear a lot of gunfire from the front of the building, again, it seemed to be ranging widely along the length of the corridors at the front and not around the pool area which is situated at the back.

The Taj is U-shaped with the pool forming the gap and I could clearly see the palm trees in the gardens surrounding the cool waters I had swum in on occasionally when visiting friends had found enough money to stay at the swanky hotel.

Sitting with the other journalists on Wednesday night we all thought the siege would be over by the morning.

Dawn broke with no change in the situation. Moving back and forth between the three attack sites during Thursday and everyone thought “This will be over by nightfall” was the perceived wisdom.

How wrong that prediction turned out to be as the Trident/Oberoi and Nariman House sieges continued.

The Nariman House siege was particularly puzzling after I counted at least 13 commandos were dropped on the roof by helicopter.

It is only a five story building after all, surely it would not take long for crack troops to resolve the situation?

But the siege dragged on as the militants managed to evade both the bullets, grenades and capture.

In the rabbit warren that is the Taj and the Oberoi the running battle also dragged on and on with resolutions coming only slowly.

It will certainly be interesting to find out, if indeed we ever do, the fine details of the assaults and exactly how the battles were fought.

Compared with similar situations around the world in the past these sieges do seem to have taken a long time to resolve.

As I sit by the Gateway of India writing this, the siege at the Taj seems to finally be over.

The famous NSG ‘Black Cat’ Commandos who were ranged around the perimeter have moved it towards the building and fire trucks are arriving to attend the various fires which are still burning.

The body language of the troops would certainly seem to indicate that at long last the nightmare of India’s 9/11 is finally over.

Just returned from the Oberoi where hundreds are still inside - Indians, foreigners, cooks and cleaners. London in 2005, Mumbai trains 2006.

Each time I follow the same movements - learn what, locate where, retrieve family, check team, do phoners, make frantic calls with London desks.

And then reflect… strangely I was in both hotels just hours before Wednesday’s attacks.

Heavy security at the Taj in place since Islamabad Marriot bombing had just been lifted. As I entered to pick up a cake at 6 p.m., I pushed my way around a metal detector. I was in a hurry, the security guard gave me a knowing glance.

At 6:30 p.m. I was at the Oberoi - I walked in for a haircut (I have a thing for the hotel’s traditional barber shop). In the lobby two heavily decorated Maharashtra police officers chatting. One carrying a wooden baton with shiny metal tips. How odd it looked - what would it be used for I wondered… a marching band?

As I waited for an elevator down to the shop, I listened in on three French women chatting about shopping - the barber shop was its usual calm - one of the quietest places in the city - and just 15 minutes in and out.

As I made my way home through Mumbai’s insane traffic I could feel my blood pressure rising… it happens every day.

Never mind. As this tragedy unfolds there is an image in my mind - the lobby of the Oberoi - bustling with foreign business people, tourists, and even police. Now that polished white marble floor is host to a different world.

Until now this has been about the “rest of India” - bicycle bombs in bustling vegetable markets, cinemas, attacks on trains. Now the nightmare on television screens is real.