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28 December 2004
The call of the sea
We are in for a week of winterstorms in Pasadena. It has been raining nearly incessantly since yesterday. The system as our weathercocks on network television are wont to put it was widely anticipated and well advertised in all major newscasts, newspapers and news sites. Besides, it is here to stay for a full week.Somewhere else and a few days ago, there was another water dynamic in play. A couple odd hundred kilometres of earth dipped a little under an ocean. The system moved in to restore the balance and water moved from higher elevation to lower elevation. A simple inevitability from physics as that was enough to cost, at last count, 68000 lives.
The water came to the coast with calm, reflective and deliberate might. It journeyed 600 kilometres an hour to reach far lands that were wedded to the ocean. There was this unwritten alliance pact in observance: a line that both sides had agreed not to cross. On one side lay the water and on the other humanity that thrived on it. Granted that it was the unlikeliest of marriages but the water with all its insuperable might has always acted with restraint. But for that one hour on Sunday, the truce was broken. The sea with irrepressible power and oppression swallowed its meek, unsuspecting brides and spat them out. It mocked at our presumption and gullibility as it flicked boats off its salty breeches, laughed trains out of their destiny, filled through every open door and broke through every closed one. It gave in exaggeration what many sought in parts and took away their whole. The fisherman got his morning catch at the doorstep but lost his door, his boats, his need to fish and his meaning for life. The tourist got his share of the sun and the turquoise shimmer of shallow, glistening water but forever lost his pining to seek them. The mothers got pails of water to cook two meals but lost the children that would eat them. It was an uneasy and unequal transaction at best. And it was all over in minutes.
* * * * *
The tsunami brings news in its wake
For the past three days, I have spent the major portion of my time in thought and in voracious consumption of what little news comes my way of the tsunami disaster. It started out with patient explanations of what a tsunami really was for the benefit of those who lived fortuitously and those who lived in the death of others. The Times of India even paused to reflect on why the word was so familiar to us from before. But as the death toll kept rising meteorically such levity gave way to a state of shock and a sudden cognisance of its responsibilities as the bearer of bad news. Still, the Times of India and Rediff never shirked from indulging in a little sensationalism now and then which I think was condonable given that the need was to keep the spotlight of the world fixated on South Asia. There were tragic personal accounts which were all the more stirring for the emotion and trauma that they never failed to convey even though those narratives passed through filters of a reporter, his editor and the black and white symbols that muted the wailings, the sound of broken bangles, the smudging of vermillion, the banshee cries of a man beating his breasts by affixing periods, apostrophes and necessary punctuation. I read of chilling tales of balance-sheet arithmetic where the survivors stoically and dispassionately weighed the death of a son with the life of a daughter, the death of an aged mother with the life of a husband and the death of a brother with their own life.Within a day of the disaster, there were heartfelt outpourings of sympathy and fraternity that transcended national and regional borders. A ceasefire was announced in the Aceh province of Northern Indonesia, the LTTE agreed to cooperate with the Sri Lankan government while Pakistan issued a clarion call to all "rich countries" to do their utmost to help alleviate the suffering. In a disaster as sweeping as this that consumed as many as six countries in Asia alone, there was bound to be sensitive political manoeuvring. Without a doubt, within the region India is the dominant player and claimed the moral ascendancy by also being one of the stricken parties. To Sri Lanka, India showed especial munificence. Soon after the tsunamis abated five warships packed with food packages and other relief material were deployed to Sri Lanka. In addition, Indian warships combed its own ocean territory for bodies. So far, the Indian government has sanctioned approximately $24 million for relief operations in Sri Lanka. Operations in India alone are expected to cross $120 million easily. By and large, the central government has been very swift in responding to the broad exigencies of disaster relief although some inefficiencies are inevitable when it comes to actual ground zero execution. The friction between Jayalalitha's Tamil Nadu ADMK-run government and the central government of which the DMK is a part was nonetheless played out in the open with Dayanidhi Maran quick to defame the state government for inadequate efforts within a day of the disaster and Jayalalitha equally vindictive in ascribing ulterior motives to Karunanidhi's sudden sickness.
As usual however, the NGOs are perhaps going to play the most significant role in co-ordinating relief efforts and mobilising funds. As it has been throughout this year and the years past, the medium of weblogs which is being heralded as the Fourth Estate of the Fourth Estate came through spectacularly not just with stark depictions of scenes in Sri Lanka, Thailand, India and Indonesia but also with reinforcing much-needed global focus on the disaster, disseminating live updates on the long list of missing and the presumed-dead and directing all the sympathy into real contribution before it dissipated with time and distance. The photographs posted on these weblogs catalogue both the ferocity of the sea's siege as well as the ghastly aftermath in mind-numbing and dispiriting detail.
Within the American media, the online sources at least have completely switched off American post-Christmas paraphernalia and have given the relief efforts and the present conditions a lot of coverage. Amongst the mainstream US media, I found the Wall Street Journal's and the Washington Post's coverage particularly compelling. While the former had typically cynical and perverse thank-God-they-were-poor coverage laced with smart editorials, leading personal-item stories and science articles on the quake efforts, Washington Post's coverage was a little more, shall we say, compassionate and much more exhorting of Americans to respond. But nobody could possibly have trumped BBC's and the Hindu's coverage. The former was easily the richest source of news, most of it grim, and reactions while the latter being on-location eschewed fiction and fictionalisation and delivered news that was most purposeful.
Within the two hours that it took me to write this, the death toll rose from a shy above 65000 to a feared estimate of 100000. The damage is being estimated at close to $13 billion. There seems no better way to conclude than to hope that those who survived make it past this difficult passage of time and that those who died will have forgiven the folly of the sea.
