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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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