The authorities have recently lifted the steel barriers and barbed wire that clamped down on Abdullah Haroon Road from Sindh Club to Clifton Bridge after the American Consulate bombing in Karachi on June 14. But I have decided I am still going to take the temporary route past the back of Hotel Sheraton, which Karachi traffic had been forced to temporarily adopt. I can’t bring myself to drive through the bombsite where 10 people lost their lives.

The terrorists had calculated their move well. They knew their plans would roil the already muddy waters of the political apparatus and push underwater a business community that has been fighting for air since September last year. But crime is inevitable because not every member of society can be equally committed to the collective sentiments or the shared values and moral beliefs of society, according to sociologist Emile Durkheim in "The Rules of Sociological Method".

I’ll never forget the scene I witnessed that day. The bomb blast had blown off many leaves from roadside trees. Curious blackened, twisted and unrecognizable pieces of car engines were scattered across the gardens. As I walked back to my car I passed two dead bodies lain out on the grass. They were covered with white sheets. I stopped for a second. Suddenly a light breeze coming through the forlorn trees silenced the wailing sirens and frenzy of police activity. The breeze brought with it tiny oval shaped leaves that gently sprinkled the white mounds of the two victims.

The immediate and obvious mark left by the hand of terror has been ploughed over like old ground in the print and electronic media. But perhaps on a subtle level May 08 and June 14, if examined in another light, can be seen as a trespassing or invasion of privacy into the lives of the victims’ families and to a lesser but still notable extent into the lives of the people of Karachi. The question arises: Should we be worried about the seemingly trivial theme of privacy when the city is being held hostage?

A patchwork of at first unrelated themes of privacy, autonomy and, identity started to shift and move around in my head over the past week as I tried to make sense of the recent bomb blasts. Will the events of the past two months have any effect on the person I am becoming? Surely it means something to be 25 and living in a city where you never know if you could become the next name on the list of dead arriving at Jinnah Hospital.

This is what served as bait: "Philosophers and jurists characteristically posit the capacity for action in an autonomous, free-standing model of selfhood," says Paul John Eakin in his 1999 book "How our lives become stories: making selves". "Defining agency in this way helps both to identify the individual in whom privacy is vested and to assign responsibility for violations of that privacy."

After June 14, I decided that perhaps it is time to gently let go of the perception that I am an autonomous individual. In simpler terms, what I do will have an effect on the people around me. Do I dare draw a distant parallel with what the terrorists did on June 14 and May 08?

However, as I contemplate this deconstruction I stumble across the bones of an old paradox. I was led to believe from childhood, and I am sure many of you will agree with me, that on one hand we are told we are the masters of our destinies and if we turn out to be failures it would be no one else’s fault except our own. And on the other hand, when we set out to conquer the world, armed to the teeth with bravura and ambition, we are pulled back by the very same people who pushed us forward. No man or woman is an island, they say. Your success will be at the cost of others. How selfish can you be?

And so from childhood we labor under the paradoxes of the illusory nature of autonomy and never come to terms with the hidden reality of relational identity. We have a supposedly self-determining model of identity that autonomy predicates but in contrast there is a relational concept of selfhood that stresses the extent to which the self is defined by and lives in terms of its relations with others. For is it not true as Jessica Benjamin says in her 1988 book "The Bonds of Love" that "at the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are dependent on another to recognize it."

After my trip to the bombsite I rushed off to Jinnah Hospital where the dead victims’ bodies were set out in the casualty ward. Dr. Seemin Jamali, who runs the ward, told me some of the victims were so badly disfigured that they couldn’t be identified by face. How ironic the terrorists sought recognition of their identities and their cause through the destruction of the identities of their victims.

The men and women who made those bombs worked with their own selfish autonomous interests at heart and yet cleverly banked on the intertwined fabric of society to wreak their vengeance. We might live and behave like autonomous persons in this culture of individualism, and hide behind justifications based on theories of autonomy and a Nietzchean ‘will to survive’. But in reality we are relational human beings with identities drawn from models that society has provided us and the choices and decisions we make, on some scale or another, at some time or another, do impact on the lives of our fellow human beings.

Amongst other reasons, the terrorists used bombs to draw attention to themselves. And what better way to gain recognition, or in their case notoriety, than to bust through a wall of the American Consulate and send human body parts flying across the green grass of the Frere Hall gardens? Pen and ink or even street demonstrations didn’t make the cut when they wanted to make their presence felt. That could only have been done with their display of black fireworks and carnage. They knew bombs and blood would make us sit up and take notice.

"If our identities and lives are more entangled with those of others than we tend to acknowledge in the culture of individualism," Eakin says, "then existing models of privacy, personhood, and ethics may have to be revised." At the very least, perhaps now is the time for all of us to reconsider the myth of autonomy.

This article previously appeared in 'The Friday Times' on Friday, 12th July 2002.