KEY POINTS:
Once, I suppose, if the world had watched on television a prolonged, murderous atrocity in a major city like Mumbai, we would have talked about it for at least a week. If it were really bad it might have been high in our discussions for at least a fortnight.
The World Trade Centre attacks kept us going for a couple of months, but then that particular mass murder had people jumping 80 floors to safety and two of the tallest buildings in the world collapsing in a shower of glass and steel, flame and dust.
So before this week had gone by we had stopped talking about Mumbai any more. At present, 188 people are dead and 300 are wounded. That is a lot of people, those are a lot of bodies lined up in a morgue, yet by the end of this week, no one was really mentioning Mumbai any more.
Noticed that? Not round here, anyway. I suppose this is because we have never seen the like in New Zealand and Mumbai seems unreal to us, not only because of distance but because of what a teeming place of wealth and poverty it is.
And in any case, attacks like that in Mumbai are the way of the world now. This is what happens these days, fanatics from out of the blue tearing people and cities apart in the name of God. New York today, Madrid tomorrow, Bali Wednesday, London by the end of the week, if we can fit it all in, but no promises. We are snowed under at the moment, so it might have to be early next week.
However, the international media are full of Mumbai still, in particular the leaks and mutterings coming from the intelligence services. The Indians pointed the finger at Pakistan. Funny that. Identifying Pakistani origins was not, as my NewstalkZB colleague Willie Lose might say, rocket surgery.
But the Indians are also pointing their fingers at each other. Their two intelligence services, the internal and the external, are at war, one accusing the other of blame for not acting decisively on intelligence received that an attack on Mumbai from the sea was imminent.
But a British newspaper reported the Indian intelligence services are blaming the Indian navy for not intercepting the fishing trawler that brought the 10 gun-crazed designer-jeaned killers to shore within 8km of Mumbai. The navy struck back saying all it got was a general warning, which was too vague to be of any use or to allow them to take action. The intelligence services then replied that they gave the navy the navigational co-ordinates of the boat.
The co-ordinates? If that is true, it represents vast intelligence progress. A vague warning is one thing, but co-ordinates are right up there. Then late in the week, the New York Times carried a story, sourced to someone it called a "a former Defence Department official", claiming that "American intelligence agencies had determined that former officers from Pakistan's army and its powerful Inter Services Intelligence Agency helped train the Mumbai attackers".
A "former" Defence Department official? Why "former"? Perhaps the source is just trying to big-note, to pretend he knows something, but more likely this was a genuinely subtle bit of leaking. Probably this is how the United States chose to finger Pakistan without looking like it is what the United States was actually saying. Probably this is the United States letting Pakistan know it is not silly and it knows more than it is letting on.
So Condi could schlepp round the sub-continent this week like a benign big sister and plausibly deny that the United States is convinced that the terror machine has tentacles extending deep within the Pakistani military and intelligence establishments.
The Indian police, who will undoubtedly have given the one surviving attacker a good roughing-up over the past week, say he is not only Pakistani, but have named the village in Punjab where he comes from. The Pakistani President says he will need to see proof the boy is Pakistani so the Indians are about to give the boy a truth serum. That will do the trick.
But it gets murkier. London's Daily Telegraph says the Indian police may also be looking beyond the initial suspects, the Kashmiri group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, towards the good ole' al Qaeda boys themselves. Well, it has to be al Qaeda, doesn't it? Al Qaeda are the event managers supreme. Lashkar-e-Taiba might simply have been the proxies, the mechanics.
It says the Indian police believe that the Mumbai massacre may have been planned by a man deeply involved in the carnage of Bali. This man may have drawn up the plans for Mumbai from the sea when he visited the city with a second man last year.
The Indian police say the two men may have initially discussed attacking the American consulate by ramming an explosives-laden boat into the sea wall near the building. The police are on to this because they had an informant, but this informant has since died in a "mysterious car crash". Funny that.
What a wonderful city it is said to be, Mumbai, the great Indian city of business and dreams, of muck and brass.
"My bleeding city," writes former Mumbai man, Suketu Mahta, this week in the New York Times.
"I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. 'Mumbai is a songbird,' he said. 'It flies quick and sly, and you'll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you.'
"The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird."
Sounds like my kind of place. It is the home of Bollywood, after all, beautiful women, glamorous princes and mansions of gold.
Liz Hurley married some fabulously handsome Indian tycoon in Mumbai last year.
I noticed recently, as I treated myself to the pages of the latest Hello! magazine, the first magazine I pick up at Marilyn's hairstylists, the hair Mecca for Remuera, the one where Rosie goes to, that Liz chose the more restrictive Rajasthan to be photographed in sporting her new bikini range.
On reflection, Liz might have endangered everyone.
Liz's wedding and Liz's bikini shoot might just have been the sparks that inflamed the 10 terror boys, of whom nine are dead.
Upstairs, they are desperately scrambling round to find 630 virgins. What is with that nonsense, anyway?
