Tusnami leaves legacy of crushing ruin (China Daily) Updated: 2005-01-09 22:33
Tsunami is never out of sight, or mind, in
India
by Rajat S Bhattacharjee,
The Statesman/India
NEW DELHI: I was neck-deep in work and had never dreamt of
going out on the New Year's Eve. And yet, family commitments called and I headed
out to the districts, away from the bright lights of Kolkata. The tsunami of
course was never out of sight -- or mind, for that matter.
On the road and in trains, the predominant discussion verged on how
the entire country can become a feast for the giant killer anytime, anywhere.
Middle-aged women in the train speculated on how the end of the world is near
and how much they wanted to see their kids having kids before such a
catastrophe.
Men were less keen -- from the conversations I was privy to -- on the kids'
front, but there was a great deal of introspection on how the disaster could
have been averted if the old dirty politics of this country and even grubbier
record of governance finally stopped. And, of course, if the American agencies
monitoring tsunamis had informed New Delhi about the imminent wave of death.
Eishitany, 63, a
Buddhist monk, conducts a two-day fast to pay homage to the tsunami
victims at Seruthur, 380 km (238 miles) south of the Indian city of Madras
January 9, 2005. The December 26 tsunami, triggered by an undersea
earthquake off Indonesia, has killed about 150,000 people across south and
southeast Asia, with more than 15,000 in India alone.
[Reuters] | Going to a satellite town near
Kolkata by train does not take much time nowadays, of course. Just four hours,
but it seemed like eternity, especially when we passed by the coal heartland of
Bengal.
And there the discussion again turned to Nature's fury and how man, unmindful
of the endless exploitation of natural resources for centuries, has rendered
Mother Earth hollow to the core.
Fury of Mother Earth
The tumult in the ocean's underbelly, even if it had nothing to do
with all that, was made sense of in such terms.
For people living near abandoned mines, it's a perpetual wait for disaster of
one kind or another; for those who live along Bengal's coast -- spared by the
tsunami, luckily -- the fear is the next time they will not be so lucky.
"It's coming, I am sure it is," warns a matron. The children, unmindful of
the raging discussion, eke out space near the window of our compartment to play
games of their own devising.
Many had foregone celebrations remembering the countless thousands who
perished and in the Bengal countryside, it was quite subdued.
Yet, once in a while, passing through a hamlet, we did come across Bollywood
films blaring at impromptu roadside parties. Except there were hardly any people
there apart from a few obviously drunken organizers.
Cry, beloved city
We get down at the station and pick up some food. The evening news
on TV shows more bodies being fished out of our oceans. I push the plate away,
not even half-eaten.
My brother is with me, and we go out for a drive to see the town. The biting
chilly wind reminds me of the cold, watery grave that the oceans had become for
thousands of innocents. With tsunamis on our minds we head back home for a
subdued dinner.
The party animals amongst us even more subdued than the rest.
Next morning, I catch an early morning train to get back to work. All along
the way, the mist never disappears. A hawker comes with the morning paper. I
skim through the pages and the disaster that we have got so used to in the past
few days still dominates. And Kolkata seems to have lost all sense of proportion
as it partied whilst the world -- and more metros in the rest of India --
mourned. Cry, beloved city.
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