Last night, November 26 2008, Mumbai was attacked. Mumbai is not just where Pinstorm is headquartered, but it’s a city that all 100 or so of us in this office love truly, deeply, madly.

It has turned out that the attack was a well-funded, well-trained effort. One that killed innocent guests and employees at one of our clients’ hotels – The Taj. In addition to horrors at another hotel, The Trident and at a building called Nariman House. The attack eventually ended up killing at least 100 people, and left at least 3 times as many injured. And the toll rises as I write this.

We were extraordinarily fortunate to find out that none of our people and their immediate families was affected. Many others, we know, are not so lucky. Our heart goes out to them.

We followed the news closely. While the news TV had sketchy or downright wrong information, we noticed that some of the more reliable updates on the #Mumbai Twitter stream came from two of our own people- Netra and Asfaq.( I added a bit.)

Both worked tirelessly through the night updating the planet on what was going on. Netra in fact was interviewed by several international news organisations.

We figured out this morning- the 27th, that our co-citizens in Bombay perhaps could do with a simple, reliable source of important information. While the TV channels did their canned-panic-overkill-designed-for-rating, we felt there was a need for basic, useful information: how to contact the hotels, the hospitals, the authorities, or the right people at the blood banks and the embassies.

So we decided to put it together. In another superhuman effort, Netra and Asfaq, along with Vikas, Naman and Sanjeev put together a page rather quickly to serve this need: http://helpmumbai.pinstorm.com .

I write this while many of us have not slept in 36 hours.

To the Pinstorm team and to everyone else in Mumbai, you’re the real heroes. We’ve been through crap like this before – and we’ve fought it together. We’ll fight this one with everything at our disposal, and we’ll get through this too.

And all I’ll say is this – let’s keep calm, let’s not descend into terror. For if we do that, then the terrorists will have won.

- Mahesh