Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy of Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Calm in the midst of crisis, or marketing in the midst of murder? Looking back, how the responses of city businessmen caught up in the terrorist atrocity in Mumbai tells us much about the media’s role in crises, about ‘city culture’ and about how individuals react to extraordinary events.

‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me’. In times crisis people look to many sources of comfort and strength. But the rod and staff of some seems to have been closer to home.

‘Fortunately, I had my BlackBerry’ said British lawyer Mark Abell, trapped in the Oberoi Palace Hotel until his release on Friday. ‘It was vital. You can go without water for a few days, but in that situation the one thing you cannot go without is information’. So city workers really are wedded to their phones!

Information; fair enough you might think. Barricaded inside his room from Wednesday night until his release on Friday he used his BlackBerry to follow events going on around him, to contact the British Council, to inform friends and loved ones that he was safe.

His name is more familiar than most since he was also featured on Thursday morning’s Today Programme on Radio 4. Still incarcerated Abell contacted the BBC in London and arranged an interview with Jim Naughtie on the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme to give an account of his experiences. Mark Abell, British lawyer, oh, and working for the law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse.

For the most part Mr Abell’s story has been portrayed in the press as a Brit keeping his cool. When the story appeared on the website of legal publication The Lawyer on Thursday however it had a somewhat frostier reception. ‘What an inappropriate time to try and promote one’s third division law firm’, commented one, ‘it’s a joke that someone who is in a life or death situation would take the opportunity to try to win some work’ said another. One lawyer even posted that he felt embarrassed for his profession.

The ‘incidental’ inclusion of the firm Mr Abell worked for might appear harmless. But some fellow lawyers saw this as exactly what it was, intentionally or not; product placement.

That’s ridiculous you might say. Who would possibly be thinking about work in that kind of situation?

But he wasn’t the only lawyer to drop work details around his story. Another lawyer, Jamie Benson, also posted a comment on The Lawyer’s website giving an account of the terrible events he had witnessed. After describing the events he then wrote that he was ‘working as a US corporate lawyer for Dorsey & Whitney’ and that he does ‘a lot of work on equity capital raisings for Indian companies, including for Central Bank of India, HT Media (publisher of the Hindustan Times), Jagran Publications Limited (publisher of Jagran Prakashan, the newspaper with the largest readership in the world)…’ and so it goes on. He told his story; then quite literally tagged his CV onto the end of it.

Furthermore consider that whilst incarcerated the BlackBerry-clad Mr Abell continued to attend Board Meetings being held by partners back in London. ‘Some of the partners’ he recounts ’said they would understand, given the situation, if I didn’t want to attend the meeting. I said ‘Why?’ You’ve just got to keep going”’. ‘Worse things happen at sea’ he later told interviewers. ‘I wasn’t going to let the terrorists put me off my stride’.

Catastrophes and atrocities are big media events and depending on our degree of attentiveness they imprint on our memory a whole series of names, places, facts and figures. How many people around the world had heard of Banda Aceh before the Tsunami of 2004, or of Rudolph Giuliani before 9/11? In a similar way it is the business of the highly developed PR culture in business to imprint products in our minds. What the house-trained Mr Abell and Mr Benson seem to have done, on thankfully only a small scale, is marry the two.

I do believe that the event must have been deeply unpleasant for Mr Abell and Mr Benson and do not wish to pour too much scorn on them individually. In a time of crisis one of the best ways of coping is to ‘keep going’ and generate as great a sense of normality as possible. But it is their normality that is so un-nerving. On some level everyday life, even in the most extraordinary circumstances, is not just lived, it is audited.

In their coping with the situation they seem to illustrate what a frighteningly inhuman place the world of 21st century work is becoming.

Filed under: al qaeda, business, india, mumbaiattacks, terrorism on December 4th, 2008