Colonel Shamrao Thatte and his wife Vijaya spent the last 10 years coming to terms with the loss of their son Harshad who was killed in the World Trade Centre (WTC) terror attacks in the USA.
Colonel Shamrao Thatte and his wife Vijaya spent the last 10 years coming to terms with the loss of their son Harshad who was killed in the World Trade Centre (WTC) terror attacks in the USA.
And when the Mumbai-based couple heard about the death of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden recently, they couldn’t help feeling that a lot still remains to be done.
“Terrorism will not end with the death of one terrorist, no matter how dreaded he was,” said Thatte who feels that bin Laden’s end should be the beginning of an intensified fight against fundamentalism. “There is a lesson in all this for our own government that seems to be sleeping on issues related to terrorism.”
Thatte, who had spoken on behalf of the bereaved families at Ground Zero a year after the attacks, recalled that the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had promised to begin a war against terrorism. “Unfortunately, it was all lip service considering that a terrorist like Ajmal Kasab is lodged comfortably in our jail and there is no clarity on when he will be punished.”
There were nearly 2,800 victims of the WTC attacks and another 200 of the Pennsylvania crash. Of that, 70 were Indians living and working in the USA. Harshad, a chartered accountant, was working on the 96th floor of the WTC on that fateful day.
For his parents, the nightmare had just begun. “We had to wait for 10 days before we could go to the US as no plane was flying in or out of the country,” said Thatte. Flights within the US were also put on hold, so their daughter-in-law Pallavi had to drive from Atlanta to New York to check if her husband was admitted in one of the hospitals.
The biggest concern for the family after that was to ensure that Pallavi and her one-year-old daughter came to terms with it and moved on. “They had their entire life ahead of them,” said Thatte who managed to convince Pallavi to remarry. They managed to find a suitable groom for Pallavi within the close-knit Maharashtrian community in the US. “We did the kanyadaan ourselves and luckily the couple is now leading a happy life together.”
Pallavi has two children from her second marriage and her new husband has legally adopted her first daughter.
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