Today marks the second anniversary of the Tsunami which crippled our coastlines and caused enormous destruction to life and property. I'm posting an article I had written about a week after the Tsunami on the dangers of us getting desensitized to natural disasters.
ONLY NUMBERS
- 11 countries affected by the Tsunami
- 150,000 victims mourned
- 1.8 million people in need of food
- 2 Billion USD promised as aid
These are the figures that the media is throwing at our face ... We're all numb at the magnitude of the tragedy ... It's not always that we see so many zeroes at the end of a casualty list ... We talk about what could have been done to warn people ... About who is giving how much ... About the effectiveness of the relief efforts ... About the benefit concert being performed ... or cricket match being played ... About the origins of the word Tsunami ...
And we don't just talk ... We donate a part of out earnings to a relief fund. Our conscience thus appeased, we forget about the tragedy and carry on with our daily lives - Going out for movies, dinners and even celebrating the New Year with undiluted noise and pomp ...
How many of us have bothered to look beyond the numbers? ... At the pain and suffereing that people have actually undergone? ... The numbers given by the papers mislead us all ... And I'm not just talking about accounting for missing people ...
An estimated one third of those killed in this tragedy were children ... When even a single child dies, it's not just the parents and relations who are affected ... The pain is felt by many more people ... The child's close friends, their parents, classmates, school teachers and more or less all members of the community ... They all share the grief ... Hundreds mourn for a single little flower taken before its time ... Now take the agony of all these people and multiply it by a hundred and fifty thousand ... THAT would be a closer figure of those affected by the disaster ...
90% of the people killed in India were fisherman, sole bread-earners for their large families ... Go and tell their orphaned children and their aging parents that they are not counted as the "victims" of the tragedy ... Millions of others in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand lost their homes, shops, boats and only means of earning their livelihood ... Everything that was familiar to them vanishes in a few hours ... Refugees in their own countries, with nowhere to go ... Are they any less affected than those who lost a loved one? ... Numbers are indeed misleading ...
Among the many tales of grief and heroism that are emerging in the papers, there was one which touched me ... A mother in Thailand was caught in the swirling waters and held onto her two little sons ... One was aged five and the other two ... She knew that they could not survive if she held onto both of them ... She had to choose between her sons ... Ultimately she chose to let the elder one adrift, and held onto the younger one ... Luckily the elder boy survived , and was found two hours later ... But just think of what could have been going on in the mother's mind when she was forced to choose ... The decision to give your own flesh and blood up willingly is a painful one ... Even more painful for her would be facing her elder son and living with the fact that he knows she left him to die ...
A policeman in South India was approached by a couple for help ... Their son had been missing for days ... They were not ready to accept the inevitable, and were hopeful of finding him ... The policeman later told the media, "How can you tell a parent to give up hope?" ...
Indeed ... How can you tell a mother that she'll never cook her son's favourite dish for him again? ... How can you tell a father that he'll never attend his daughter's marraige? ... How can parents be asked to bury their own child? ... What fate could be more cruel? ...
Individual stories like these bring out a true picture of the magnitude of the disaster ... Huge numbers merely trivialise the value of individual lives ...
As a tourist in Phuket put it ...
"I would like express my extreme sorrow for all affected. I arrived on Phuket three days ago and am impressed to see how the island has recovered. Isn't it time to show some good news? Phuket is a miracle island with only a few hundred casualties, not to be confused with other locations on the mainland who were less fortunate. Phuket's infrastructure is 100% intact. The best way of helping the local people is by spreading the good news instead of repeatedly showing week-old video clips."
ONLY a few hundred casualties? ... Good news? ... How can you use the word "only" when you're talking about human lives? ... Even a single life taken is one too many ...
The Tsunami has been a disaster of enormous magnitude ... But the bigger disaster lies in the fact that humanity has become desensitized to the horrors of the loss of life ... When a tragedy is reduced to an opportunity for news channels to improve their ratings ... When gory pictures of death and destruction simply make interesting forwards ... When US Congressman view the disaster as an "opportunity" to show the Muslim world they care by giving donations to the largest Islamic nation in the world ... And when human life is just reduced to numbers on a piece of paper ...
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More Crocodile Tears shed
Year after Year
Meet Bono the boner
Sheds tears and concern
Rubs shoulders at G7 summits
A kind of traveling minstrel in a one-man mistrel show.Niger
He knows the folks in
He knows the local customs and he drinks a lot of tea,
So tells world Leaders that he’ll go,
He wud ask on bended knee
Aid & Charity
Mostly used for War and Tyranny
By African warlords
Who like Tsunami
Knows how to phantom strike
In theDark Continent
Spreading death disease
Now we have a new baby faced Bono
Who deletes those who can’t?
Be charitable with
His long winded takes
Bacha prose evoking sympathy
Oh here he comes with a sycthe
Cutting Weeding Chopping deleting
all that is not for him
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The Africa Malaria Report estimates that $ 1 Billion a year is required to significantly reduce the problem of Malaria ... Currently approximately $200 MM is being spent annualy to combat malaria in Africa (a rise from past years, but still not enough) ... The US spends $1.5 Billion dollars a week in Iraq ... What this means is that the most powerful nation in the world spends more to kill people than to save them ... If it gives to Africa what it spends in Iraq for 2 weeks, within 3 years the problem of Malaria will be significantly reduced ...
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