Three days after the weekend serial bombings that killed 22 people in New Delhi, I find the general atmosphere of the national capital almost abnormal in its normalcy.

One of the blast happened right across the street on which the Reuters office is located.

Colleagues who were working on September 13 told me the impact of the blast at Barakhamba Road shook the building and unsettled flocks of pigeons nesting on rooftops of adjoining high rises.

The sirens of police cars, ambulances and fire brigade vehicles soon shattered the tense silence of the otherwise bustling commercial district, as people rushed to help the injured.

As I walked into the office a day later, I expected to see chaos, panic, and a heavy police presence all around. What unnerved me was the resilience of people who owned small shops, ran taxi services and sold goods on the sidewalk at the blast site.

Men were busy sorting out wares, erecting makeshift shelters against the sun and sprinkling the usual vile coloured water on tropical fruits to give them a fresh look.

Other than being probed with a metal detector, there was little or no disturbance in my daily routine.

Is this what Mayor Arti Mehra was referring to as the “spirit of Delhi”? The determination of Delhi’ites to smile and go about their usual chores to defeat the very purpose of extremists - that of creating panic and disruption in their daily lives?

Of course there were the visuals of youngsters jostling to be seen on national TV, crying out “we will rise above terrorism, Indians are united and nothing can break our spirit”. Like an eerie scene-come-alive from the film “Rang De Basanti”.

There were also shots of local heroes - the passersby who ferried the wounded to hospitals and rag pickers who found unexploded bombs and helped the police defuse them.

Some of them appeared distinctly bemused at the sudden media attention on what I think were their unselfish and exceptionally courageous acts.

As for the “spirit of Delhi”, it was a 70-year-old Muslim shopkeeper at Barakhamba Road who put meaning to those words better than I ever could, with an enviable nonchalance.

“So what do you expect me to do? Shut my shop for a week fearing more blasts? This is the festival season and I have already lost a day’s earnings by being forced to close on a Sunday. Blasts keep happening these days, can’t lose customers over them.” (Translated from Hindi)

Take the case of 38-year-old Jamyang Tsering, who was critically injured in the blast at Central Park in Connaught Place, possibly the first ever Tibetan victim of a terror attack in India, according to his brother Thupting.

Jamyang is at the Intensive Care Unit of the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, where most of the blast victims have been admitted.

The owner of a small eatery at the Tibetan Colony in north Delhi, Jamyang still has shrapnel from the bomb embedded in his body and faces at least two more surgeries on his painful road to recovery.

“For three days and nights I was at the hospital. I came home only today when the doctor said he was stable,” Thupting said. “Actually no one understands our Hindi at the hospital. We Tibetans don’t speak good Hindi… language problem. It is very difficult to convey to doctors or nurses what we want,” he said.

I feel almost ashamed to ask him how he is coping, now that things are gradually returning to normal.
“Not for us… Jamyang is still in pain.”   
“But still…he is at least alive,” he says, and almost as an afterthought adds, “yes, yes, I see it’s almost normal now.”

Since 2003, over 10 major terror attacks have left India shaken. Till September this year over 120 people have died in terror strikes, some within months of each other.

What in reality is the “spirit of people” then? Are we heading slowly to the same general state of numb indifference to death and destruction that is now a part of everyday life in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Here is how I see it. For the section of society that watched the weekend tragedy unfold on their TV screens, safe from the pungent smell of smoke and blood, the spirit is there, in true honesty, not to get cowered by acts of terror.

But for the daily wagers, labourers and small business owners for whom losing customers and work is as fatal as an explosive device, it is just shrugging off tragedy and moving on.

Sometime ago a passenger in the United States was off-loaded when she jokingly asked the cabin crew if the pilots were sober.

But as a frequent flier I wonder if it’s an impertinent question to ask Indian pilots.

Why? Sample this: Around 50 pilots each year in India are grounded because they had consumed alcohol before flying, the country’s civil aviation authorities say.

This year around 20 pilots have already been grounded for a brief period.

As if pilots who love their bottle were not enough, last week we had a gaggle of monitor lizards, jackals and birds saunter on the Delhi airport runway, delaying around 100 flights.

And not to speak of mid-air near-misses that we keep reading about in newspapers because of cramped airspace, lack of runways and increasing air traffic.

Then there is poor maintainence of aircraft that result in frequent flight cancellations.

A pilot friend says he often gets requests from his company to fly at extremely short notice. “I have often refused if I am partying and they ask me to fly out of turn,” he told me.

But wait there is more.  Forget flying, earlier this month, a Ukrainian tourist found out how unsafe was walking, when his father died after he was hit from behind by a bus carrying crew members inside New Delhi’s airport.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the civilian nuclear deal with the United States is all about whether India holds early elections or not.

Every newspaper is speculating if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has staked his personal reputation on the deal, will resign to disassociate himself from an administration that failed to save a pact keenly watched by the world.

But are these the arguments India should be debating in the short-term or should we be discussing the real benefits and drawbacks of the deal?

The communists oppose the deal, in large part because they see it as a front for Washington’s strategic bulwark against a rising China and increasingly unstable Pakistan.

Besides, they say there are many holes in the deal that Washington will use to manipulate India’s foreign and strategic programmes, and that nuclear energy is not a solution to the shortage of electricity in the country or rising oil prices.

Why? Because nuclear energy can not meet India’s huge oil consumption in the transport sector, is expensive to produce and will expose India to manipulations by a small international cartel of uranium suppliers.

But most Indians feel, if straw polls by newspaper and television channels are to be believed the nuclear deal is good for India: The agreement is meant to provide India with the means to produce clean energy — a key constraint to economic growth. And the rise in crude prices underlines need for diversified sources of energy (even if nuclear will take ages to fill the gap).

Internationally, the accord represents a long overdue acceptance of India as a responsible nuclear power.

From the pro-deal camp here are a few points to ponder:

* Even if relations sour with the United States, India can turn to France, Russia, Australia or other uranium producers for supplies, courtesy the waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group which is independent of the deal with Washington?

* Why should India not use the deal to get a waiver from NSG and the opportunity to clear its name as a nuclear pariah state?

If the deal falls through, it is unlikely Washington — or any other nuclear nation — will broach the idea of selling nuclear fuel to India anytime soon.

But will that outcome make India more dependent on outside sources for energy, and weaken its own economic prospects against the growing clout of China?

This is the kind of debate that India would benefit from. Focusing on elections may only reap short term political benefits.

For those Western critics that say Islam does not enough to to condemn terrorism, perhaps they should look at India, home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations — around 13 percent of mainly Hindu India’s 1.1 billion people.

 On Wednesday, it was the turn of Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa in the northern city of Lucknow — a traditional centre for Muslims and religious scholarship. He rejected terrorism as anti-Islamic after he and his colleagues had been accused of apostasy over their pacifist stance by at group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen.

Indian Mujahideen made threats against the madrasa in which they also claimed responsibility for last week’s bomb blasts in Jaipur, western India, which killed 63 people.

“The reaction of terrorists to our stand against terror has shown that we were moving in the right direction,” Rasheed said.

   Apparently a “Movement Against Terrorism” has been created by clerics to exhort imams to use Friday prayers at mosques across India to speak out against terrorism.

This was no flash in the pan. Earlier this year, tens of thousands of clerics and students from around India attended a meeting near Delhi at the 150-year-old Darool-Uloom Deoband — whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan — and denounced terrorism as against Islam.

It is not surprising that Rasheed said they had received support from Darool-Uloom Deoband, Indian clerics appear to be increasingly outspoken, perhaps not surprising in a country where there is a centuries-old tradition of preaching religious tolerance.

How much is this outspoken criticism happening in other Muslim countries? And how much is being reported in the Western press? I would be eager to know more.

 Despite a history of religious clashes, India’s tolerance often seems to win through. It was the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who was famed in the 16th century by many for his religious tolerance and who initiated scholarly debates with Muslim, Sikhs, Christians and Hindus.

Many of India’s bombings are blamed on Islamic militants, although few groups every claim responsibility and few people are ever arrested. The attacks have mostly failed to incite Muslim-Hindu tensions.

Here in New Delhi, I always enjoy taking foreign visitors to India to the Sufi shrine in Nizamuddin. My latest guest was a U.S. diplomat based in Pakistan. Hardly allowed out in Islamabad - let alone able to visit a mosque — the diplomat wallowed in the warmth of the visit and the relaxed atmosphere of the Qawwali singers.

First impressions count. That’s true no less with airports, the gateway to a globalised world for any country.

Which is why the United States and India may have more in common than they like to think.

I have been one of those thousands that have spent three hours in Delhi International Airport making it from check-in though to the boarding gate. Which is why I read with interest the recent spat between deputy planning chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and civil aviation minister Praful Patel over who is responsible for the chaos.

But this kind of controversy is not just confined to India. I read this piece in May from Thomas L. Friedman, the author who coined “The World is Flat”. The full article is here. But have a look at this paragraph.

“A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.”

Having lived in Washington DC before moving to India, I can sympathise with Mr. Friedman. Some of the worst queues outside India, I have seen at airports was at Dulles and JFK airports.

Are India and the United States two sides of the same coin?

I think one can draw up correlations between the state of a country’s main airports and its attitude to the globalised world. Travel to Chile and it capital has Latin America’s best airport, as befits a country that also leads Latin America in embracing globalisation.

Then look at Singapore, a country that depends on international trade for its survival. Or Beijing’s new airport, not surprising for a country dependent on export-led growth.

Which is why India’s airports, despite some improvements, show its ambivalent attitude towards globalisation. Whether its retail or financial services, India still feels it can shun the world. As my colleague Simon Denyer recently posted, look at how little media coverage was given to Myanmar’s tragedy. Perhaps U.S. airports, and the controversial immigration treatment that scares many travellers, also underscores how this country feels it does not need the rest of the world.

While there are improvements in India — Hyderabad, and perhaps Bangalore, it’s been late in coming. Some may be half-hearted. Bangalore’s new airport has no new access road, angering business leaders.

Rather like the United States, India still is a huge federal country that still looks into itself. Indeed, India has so many challenges for itself, from caste violence to separatist insurgencies, it may be understandable. For both countries, the outside world still isn’t top of the agenda.

Which is why global travellers here, like global business, may be in for a long haul.

An Indian friend of mine arrived late for dinner the other night, with a curious tale.

Seeing a woman, apparently drunk and ill, almost falling out of a cycle rickshaw, she had asked her own auto driver to stop and tried to help.

A crowd of men had quickly gathered around, and my friend was worried what would happen to the woman in a city sometimes known as India’s rape capital. A sex worker, the woman had been seriously abused by her last client.

For four hours, my friend, who comes from Shillong, sat with the woman, trying to get her help or just somewhere to go. A women’s helpline did not pick up the phone, nor did two hostels she called.

Eventually, another middle-aged lady also stopped to help, and with managed to disperse the crowd with a few well-aimed Hindi words.

After sobering her up, they tried to put the woman on a bus to her home district, a remote Delhi suburb. But the occupants of the bus, led by the women, did not want her onboard and raised such a ruckus she had to dismount.

Eventually, a traffic policeman helped them put the woman on another bus.

At the end of last month, the Times of India reported that a man bled to death at a busy junction in Delhi, after his motorbike was hit by a speeding van and he lay for an hour without any help.

A neurosurgeon apparently stopped, by was rebuked by other motorists for abandoning his car in the road for “a dead man”, the paper reported. His comments are worth reprinting.

“When I tried to stop a few cars coming from the opposite side to take the victim to hospital, they just refused saying they did not want their seat covers ruined. When I got back to him, the man had died. He could have lived if help reached him in time,” Dr Anil Sharma was quoted as saying.

It was also reported that two other motorcyclists had called the police half an hour before, but no one had turned up.

A similar thing happened to another friend of mine last year. Knocked off his bike by another reckless driver at around 11 p.m., he reckons lay by the roadside unconscious for two hours before being woken by some kids who were laughing at him.

The Times of India called Delhi “a callous, heartless city”. I think that is too strong.

Capital cities around the world all have their ugly sides, but I like Delhi. And I wanted to applaud three Good Samaritans, the doctor, and especially the two women, who did stop to help their fellow citizens in trouble.

When there is so little official help on offer, and the rule of law is applied so intermittently, it sometimes takes real bravery to stop and help.