There are two ways to confront a tragedy, especially one as immense, destructive and painful as the Mumbai blasts of July 11, which claimed 187 lives. Either one succumbs to the grief of it and gets defeated by it. Or one rises to confront and expose the diabolic perpetrators of that terrorist project, and to remember the dead. Mumbai, true to the courage and resolve that has always marked it, chose the second option.

The Indian Express decided to acknowledge that rare spirit of a great metropolis by celebrating the lives of those who had perished in the blasts and reaching out to their families by carrying their stories on the front page — every single person who perished. The attention span of newspapers is notoriously narrow. In the eternal chase for news, they quickly move on to Next Big Story, without so much as a backward glance. We felt a tragedy of these proportions required a more substantive chronicling. The ‘Mumbai Life Stories’ series was an attempt to do just that, so that the dead are not just a number, and the living, not forgotten in their private trauma. Amazing things began to happen. People far removed from ground zero were moved to respond, to reach out. A small sum of money here, the present of a bicycle there and, yes, the gift of a few words of empathy. The newspaper now has a corpus of about Rs 28 lakh, which will help in the continuing process of rebuilding the lives of those who most need financial assistance.

The series is not over. We have still stories to relate. And in their telling we will try and continue to reach out to more lives. American artist, Arthur C. Danto, learnt something from 9/11: that everyone is capable of heroism. This series reflects the truth of that observation.