Traveling in the wake of an attack

When people heard about the attacks in Mumbai over a week ago, most were horrified.  Some were horrified to the point of canceling any travel plans to India.  On the surface, it seems like this decision makes sense.  In a recent article entitled “Keep on Travelin’–To India For A Start”, Elisabeth Eaves points out why foreign travelers are the target of terrorist attacks:

“To be sure, foreign travelers are usually targeted not because they are travelers per se, but because they are the most conveniently located citizens of hated nations, and because their deaths get more attention in the West than the deaths of Pakistanis or Egyptians or Indonesians.”
Source: “Keep On Travelin’–To India For A Start” by Elisabeth Eaves

If we are to fear international travel because of the possibility of an attack, at what point do we stop being afraid of terrorists?  If they can attack almost any place from Mumbai to New York, does this mean we should never leave the comfort of our homes?

When we make traveling decisions, we must make them with both our minds and our hearts, but we must focus on the former rather than the latter.  Canceling travel plans to India in the wake of these attacks seems more like a knee-jerk reaction than a logical one.  Elisabeth Eaves also points this out in her article:

“Hesitant international travelers should keep in mind that, statistically, danger to them increased on Nov. 26 by an amount so minute as to be irrelevant. The little decisions we make–no Delhi this year, the Bahamas over Bali, this airline over that one–are mostly talismanic.”

So what are we to do now?  Anybody with existing travel plans to India must move forward with them.  As Suketu Mehta wrote in an article for The New York Times, “If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the explosion. It should fly to Mumbai, and spend money. Where else are you going to be safe? New York? London? Madrid?”

Several travel writers are echoing this sentiment.  Beth Whitman recently gave a list of four reasons why we should still travel to India, and over at Matador Trips, Divya Srinivasan wrote an extensive guide on how to travel to India after the attacks.

In light of events like these, we must take precaution.  We must be thorough with our research and be prepared before traveling.  But this does not mean that we will live in fear.