Man is, perhaps, the only animal that can imagine. This is our greatest gift and, at times, our most profound curse. There are no limitations to the worlds we can conjure within the theatre of our minds. We can envision heavens and hells, build cities in the clouds, and converse with gods.

This boundless capacity is the bedrock of all our literary and sacred texts. The epics of old—the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bible, the Quran—are not merely stories; they are monuments to human imagination, where the moral and the mythical intertwine to explain our place in a chaotic universe. They allow us to live a thousand lives and die a thousand deaths, all from the safety of our own minds.

This same faculty allows us to project ourselves into the future, to hope and to fear. We imagine success, love, and triumph, but we also imagine loss, failure, and terror. In the quiet moments, our minds can become a factory of anxieties, constructing worst-case scenarios with terrifying ease. It is this darker side of imagination that grips a nation in the wake of a tragedy, a collective mind spinning with visions of what might have been, and a haunting replay of what was.

Four days after the grisly blast in a bustling Delhi market, I finally allowed my own imagination to take flight. Like millions, I had been numb, caught in the grim cycle of news updates and the chilling tally of the dead and injured. But as the initial shock receded, the mind, against its own better judgment, began to wander.

Deaths, however tragic, are often reconcilable when they come from natural calamities. A tsunami, an earthquake, a flood—these acts of nature shock us, but we accept, in our grief, that there was little we could have done to avert them. Who could have imagined the scale of the 2004 tsunami? We bow to forces greater than ourselves. Some call them God, while others call them Destiny.

But death by terrorism is of a different, more insidious breed. It is deliberate, human-engineered, and aimed at the very soul of a society. It leaves behind a unique poison—the agonising knowledge that it could have been prevented. This feeling is personal for me.

I lost a journalist friend in the Mumbai attack of November 2008. She was staying at the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, that grand old sentinel of Mumbai's heritage, which stands, proud and unyielding, preceding the Gateway of India. The Taj was more than a hotel; it was a symbol of the city's cosmopolitan spirit, its endurance, and its embrace of the world. To see it besieged, its windows blazing against the night sky, was to watch a cherished part of our collective identity being violated. And to compound my agony, my son was there, reporting minute-by-minute developments.

When the ten Pakistanis landed in Mumbai using a simple floating dinghy and unleashed hell at multiple points, it was the worst terrorist incident the country had ever witnessed. The Congress-led UPA was in power. On the first day of the attack, which would stretch for a gruelling 60 hours, the Bharatiya Janata Party displayed political maturity, openly declaring its solidarity with the government in that hour of profound tragedy. But a day later, the political climate shifted. The then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, arrived in Mumbai and began a scathing attack on the UPA government.

The questions he asked were, to my mind, reasonable and necessary. The Pakistani terrorists hadn't been airdropped by magic. They had come by ship, transferred to a small boat near the coast of Surat, and finally used an inflatable raft to land on Mumbai's shores. How did the Coast Guard not notice this? How did the combined might of the Indian Navy, the Army, the Air Force, and the police forces of two states fail to detect a slow-moving vessel packed with men, guns, ammunition, and even dry fruits to sustain a long siege? By the time Ajmal Kasab and his accomplices started their murderous spree, the entire nation was held hostage, watching in horror, our collective nerves frayed.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did an air dash to Mumbai, reassuring the nation with his characteristic quiet dignity that the perpetrators would be brought to book. True to his word, one terrorist was captured, tried under the law, and given capital punishment. The rest were killed in action.

The Home Minister at the time, Shivraj Patil, a man known for his fastidiousness and his frequent changes of attire, was forced to resign, atoning for the systemic lapses. Yet, Modi kept asking question after question, albeit with elections in the backdrop. For once, I found myself firmly on his side. If a group of men from a hostile nation could sail undetected to the heart of India's financial capital, it signalled a catastrophic, cumulative failure of our intelligence and defence apparatus.

I believed then that the Defence Minister, AK Antony, should also have owned moral responsibility, especially given his history of resigning on flimsier grounds.

This entire process of analysis, of holding power to account, rests on a foundation that is the very antithesis of imagination: factual, rigorous journalism. One critical difference between journalism and literature is that imagination has little role in the former. The journalist is a scribe of reality, a chronicler of the first draft of history. Where the novelist is free to invent, the journalist is bound by the sanctity of fact.

Our writing must be anchored in verifiable truth, not fictional flourish. Our task is not to imagine what might have happened, but to report, with unflinching accuracy, what did. We are the filters through which the chaos of events is translated into a coherent narrative for the public, a narrative that must withstand the scrutiny of time and truth.

And yet, there is one maxim I learned from my professor, Samuel Thomas, who taught me the appreciation of Shakespeare and everything good in the English language, that bridges this gap. He said that to truly understand a story, one must often "step into the shoes of the man" to comprehend why he committed a particular blunder or crime. This is not an act of justification, but one of profound empathy and deeper understanding. It is an exercise in humanising the other.

If the mob that lynched Madhu, an Adivasi youth in Kerala, had stepped into his shoes, they would have discovered a mentally challenged man, driven by the most basic human need—hunger—to steal a handful of food. He did not deserve torture and death; he deserved a compassionate ear and a hearty meal. That simple act of imaginative empathy could have saved a life. It is this same principle that is absent from our political discourse today, where the 'other' is always a monster, never a human being.

This brings me back to my own flight of imagination, four days after the Delhi blast. My mind drifted to the recent terrorist attack in Pahalgam, the serene Kashmir Valley tourist destination that was transformed into a killing field. Four terrorists from Pakistan managed to reach deep inside Kashmir, far from the border, and, in a meticulously cruel operation, spent nearly an hour identifying and executing Indian Hindu tourists.

Now, I imagined a parallel universe. In this universe, the Prime Minister was Manmohan Singh, the UPA was led by Sonia Gandhi, and Jammu and Kashmir was a full-fledged state under a UPA-nominated Governor. Would Narendra Modi have remained quiet?

I imagined the questions, delivered with surgical precision and thunderous rhetoric, that would have dominated our television screens: "How did four terrorists cross the border and travel so deep into the heart of Kashmir without being detected? Where were our intelligence agencies when these killers were calmly identifying their victims? Why was there no security presence for a full hour, allowing this massacre to unfold? Does the Prime Minister not owe the nation an answer? Should he not resign?"

The questions would have been relentless, and in the context of that failure, they would have been justified. Today, the Prime Minister states that with 'Operation Sindoor,' we have avenged all terrorist activities planned from across the border. Yet, the fact remains that the four killers of Pahalgam are having their last laugh, somewhere in India, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, or Pakistan proper. The government reiterates that 'Operation Sindoor' is suspended, not ended—a phrase that sounds more like a political slogan than a strategic doctrine, leaving citizens to wonder about its real-world meaning.

Now, let us return to the blast that occurred this week in Old Delhi. The randomness of the tragedy is what chills the bones. A relative of mine from Mumbai had come to Delhi for wedding shopping. They could easily have ventured into the Chandni Chowk area, where everything except one's mother can be bought dirt cheap. Fortunately, they did not. Otherwise, they too could have been victims of the blast.

And here is where my imagination, trained on years of political observation, conjures a stark contrast. Unlike Modi in 2008, no one from the opposition today is asking the government tough questions. So, let me imagine how Modi would have asked them if the Congress were in power.

The questions would have been a volley: "Who was the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister when this blast occurred? Who is the Chief Minister of Delhi? Who controls the Delhi Police? Who controls Kashmir, from where the alleged terrorists originated? Who controls the ED, the CBI, and all the other agencies? With so much power centralised, how did this happen? Our internal and external intelligence agencies failed to intercept a doctor driving a much-sold-and-bought i20 car? What kind of security apparatus is this?"

What would Modi have asked if Manmohan Singh had been the Prime Minister? Would he not have demanded his resignation? What would he have said if the Home Minister had chosen to address the Croatian Parliament the day after the blast shocked the country? The media speculation and insinuations, without concrete evidence, would have been deafening. There would be outrage, not just at the terrorists, but at the government.

But today, a strange silence prevails. The Biblical saying rings truer than ever: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" We were once quick to point out the specks in others' eyes. Today, we ignore the log in our own.

The responsible citizen in me agrees that this is not the time for reckless politicisation. We must let the NIA unravel the truth and bring the perpetrators to justice. I want no leniency for anyone who seeks to disrupt our peace and destroy the fabric of our nation for any specious political or religious reason. No law-abiding person, from any community, should feel frightened or targeted. Demands to destroy a college or boycott a car manufacturer are the antithesis of justice; they are the mob's logic.

Yet, the journalist in me knows that accountability is not the enemy of security; it is its prerequisite. By refusing to ask the hard questions of ourselves and by failing to hold our own power structures to the same standards we once demanded of others, we do not strengthen our nation. We weaken it. We create a culture of impunity where failure is masked by rhetoric, and the first draft of history is written not with facts, but with selective, imagined silence. And in that silence, the echoes of future blasts grow louder.