It's been more than 10 years since I've been there, but at the end of a month in India, in 1988, I spent a week in Mumbai (Bombay), and now I grieve for all who were killed or injured or lost loved ones there last week.

At least 3 of the sites where assassins murdered were places I'd been, more than once: Victoria Station...intensely colonial and abuzz, the Taj Hotel, where we escaped the heat and saw sheiks with a half-dozen wives or daughters, saw the elegant life of wealthy locals and visitors...and finally, the Leopold Cafe...imagine a cross between a wild hippie coffeehouse and Rick's bar in 'Casablanca'...where I'd have chai (tea) or soda and lime, and then go back out to the streets.

It was a city of everything, beauty, squalor, lepers and lords, skyscrapers and hovels.  It was the essence of India, intense and asserting itself gradually toward the future.  (Still, 80%  in India earn less than $2 a day.)

Without Mumbai...maybe I would not be writing songs.  After all, it was an unexpected online friendship with Ehsaan Noorani, a successful Bollywood film music composer that sparked me to return to writing songs.  I watched and fell in love with the movie "Dil Chahta Hai" and wrote on its website that I thought the music was terrific.  I was happily surprised that one of the composers wrote back to me.  We had some things in common, we both went to music schools in the US (Berklee, me, Musicians Institute, him) and we got migraines.  He's a kind-hearted person.  (Also a great player and writer...they had the Song of the Year in India recently, and that's a LOT of people knowing your music.) Ehsaan is Muslim, his wife is Hindu, and his co-writers are Hindu and Christian...and yes, I checked and just got an email back from him, they're fine, at least physically.

But others are not.

What a waste, terrorism, war.  This world has sufficient resources.  Imagine one day, just one day, a day in which no one fought, during which we all sought to do what we could to better one another's life.


Peace is right, peace is powerful...but too rare.

This week, perhaps Gandhi wept.  I know I did.