Mumbai Massacre

There is very little need to "protect" yourself from Mumbai style massacres. They're vanishingly rare, they're just extremely well publicized to billions of people, giving the impression of being a real and imminent danger to billions of people.While traveling, I'd be far more concerned with the mundane risks - road accidents being my no. 1 concern, malaria probably no. 2.

Yes, the most danger I encounter is cars and trucks. However over simplified, safety is the whole package, not only the specifics.How to hide in plain site from a car accident?Do not rent a car, be a normal person do not "make the choice" to be special.Busese and Trains are incredibly safe.Bikes are incredibly dangerous.Walking is dangerous.Renting a car is drawing attention to yourselve and quadruples your problems.

To be honest, Andy, it's hard for many travelers to fit in and not be noticed. A white person on a bus in Jamaica is not "normal". Everybody on that bus knows immediately that this person is not Jamaican. It would be very normal for a white person to be driving a car in Jamaica and so they wouldn't attract any attention to themselves at all. It might also be pretty hard for me to go unnoticed in India or China since I don't look anything like the people there.

Ann, your missing the point, of course there is no way to fit in 100 percent.I am saying, do not walk around carrying a 5000 dollar camera, and undestand that living in a five star hotel is a target.Crime and danger wants a obvious target.This is not a yes or no, on or off, 1 or 0 absolute thing. Danger is on a continuum, there is no way to stop danger, you can only minimize the odds.I enjoy and appreciate tourist who volunteer to be the soft targets, walking around with their cameras hanging from their necks. I know the crime will be commited against them and I will be ignored.

One must know the intent of these terrorists.This was the handy work of people within India and this time it was to get rid of the three Valiant police Officers. It so happens that the Pragya Malegaon blast case was on the verge of being solved and with this a good number of people from the Military Loyal to RSS(as the RSS has infiltrated the Military ranks) and Local Shiv Sena (i have my doybts on them, but then again, who knows?), the BJP (Pragya belongs to this group) and disgruntled police officers loyal to the BJP, RSS, Sangh Parivar, and Bajrang Dal would have been exposed and locked up. Hence the Military and the Opposition with the aid of the local police collaborated and created a mayhem. A diversion to take the attention off of the Pragya case. How could three top notch high ranking police officers who were involved in the Pragya investigations got killed right away. Where was the back up, was the back up itself the killers. A post mortem would have had established that but instead they hurried the last burial faster than expected. Modi the Hitler comes to offer condolences and prize money, which the families of the sacrificed police officers refused. The families know who the real killers are and some day they will open up to the press. These Great police officers had received death threats and what a scene to make it look like a terrorist ploy. Politics are dirty and the Romans, the Greeks, the Caliphate, the Americans and all played it well. One dosent come to live for over hundred years and in such a short life span, one does things we cant even imagine. What a world and what a fraud. My heart goes out to the ones who laid their life to serve justice. they will be remembered amongst the people who like a just society. The killers looked like they were a bunch of people trained to get them out as at their age they have no sense of what life is. They could be trained to commit suicide attacks as many out there from different faiths. They disguised it to look like a LET attack. They did it good, but there are people who are questioning this and some day the truth will come out. But it will be late as Prgaya will roam free and undisguised as it will be the BJP ruling from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

"Stay off the Moors" !

I'm sorry, but I find your premise very offensive. You are blaming the victims. Some people don't like to sleep in a flophouse. Some people are traveling on business and need to stay at certain hotels (when I travel for business I need to have a restaurant and other lobby meeting space to host clients--I can't stay in a $1/night hostel. I need wireless internet connectivity and good phone lines. I need to be located close to where I will be doing business--we all know how traffic in Mumbai or any other major city in the developing world can be. And moreover, my employer (an international NGO) has certain security policies that restrict where staff can stay--especially in the most volatile environments). I've traveled the way you do, I spent much of my youth traveling that way. I've lived and worked in refugee camps, flown on UN flights into remote areas of Sudan and traveled by donkey cart to my destination. I know plenty about "blending in" and being inconspicuous. In my many years living and working overseas I have never been the victim of a crime, and while I do credit much of that to my ability to adopt local customs, maintain relationships with people in the communities in which I live and work and avoidance of the most dangerous situations I'm also smart enough to know that a large part of it is luck.In the past 3 years I've lost more than 10 former colleagues--mostly in South Asia and Sudan--to terrorism. They were not dumb people. They weren't walking around with expensive cameras hanging from their necks. They weren't not "blending in." In fact most of them were nationals of the countries in which they worked--they couldn't have blended in any more.Their crime was working for an American or European NGO. It's obscene that you would pin the deaths of innocent people, on a business trip or vacation on themselves rather than on the perpetrators of the crime.

NGO's staying in 5 Star Hotel...

You entirely miss the point...NGO staff generally don't stay in 5-star hotels (although you'd be surprised how many in cities in the developing world offer "UN rates" that are 1/3 of what they charge everybody else), but they don't stay in bunkhouses either.I'm glad you think my colleagues deserved to die. For such a supposed open-minded "traveler," you are surprisingly self-righteous and unable to view things from the perspectives of people whose life experiences differ from your own.

"NGO's staying in 5 Star Hotel...." Reminds me of Paul Theroux's line: the rudest, least helpful people I ever met were the NGO workers in Africa in their white SUV's.

Nobody should die because they are stupid or smart, however trying to stop crime is more difficult than trying to be smart. Focusing on stopping the terrorist will not keep me safe.I have been in Africa three times, same as Paul...

The biggest myth is that "NGO"s are out to do good for the locals. If you want a good idea of how most "NGOs" actually operate, see Orson Welles' "The Third Man." The movie was made in 1949, so the term NGO was not around then, but the basic idea is the same: a western imperial agency goes out to make money defrauding the locals and exploiting the generosity of good samaritans and donors from abroad while spreading the myth that the empire does good work for the locals. The euphemisms keep changing, from "mission" to "aid agency" to "NGO", but the basic pattern is an agency that pretends to help the locals while really engaging in self-serving profiteering and softening up the target for imperial invasion and exploitation. Some of these are out-and-out GONGOs, Government-Operated Non-Governmental Organizations (front groups) that are set up, funded, and operated by spy agencies like the CIA. So it's hard to have sympathy for 5-star-hotel-dwelling "NGO" executives. Sorry.