Another Tsunami Blog Entry

Today, a day that was supposed to be another typical tropical summer morning, a tsunami triggered by a massive underwater earthquake (“with a power equivalent to that of a million atomic bombs”) hit the shores of many South East Asian nations. Tens of thousands of coastal dwellers including fishermen, tourists and beach trotters were rudely ambushed and dragged instantly to their watery graves.

“Death roars in from the ocean”, screamed one daily. The headline’s chilling image haunted me all morning. Like many others, I searched for more news and information on the mechanics of a tsunami. An expert, watering it down for the dumbest of the readers, described a tsunami as “scooping up a great volume of water with a giant paddle”. For a minute, I pictured a mischievous kid wreaking havoc on smaller helpless beings. The devastating scale of this simple maneuver reminded me of a scene from the movie “Ants”. In the scene, two bugs drunk on an extract from a nearby flower, display casual yet inspired profundity (the kind that is commonly engendered by alcohol) when one asks the other, “Dude, do you ever wonder if we are just a teeny-weeny, insignificant part of a much greater scheme of things?”.

Not so long ago (about ten years back), I watched the movie “Volcano” with some high school friends at Sangeet theater in Secunderabad. At the end of the movie, we made our way through the crowd waiting for the next show, pillion-ed on our Kinetics and Suzukis and headed to the Universal Bakery near Wesley’s Boys High School. (It just gives me a weird kick to record these details.) Anyway, the movie predictably dominated our conversation. One friend dismissed the movie promptly. “Hollywood is always on the lookout for an adversary”, he theorized. “If it isn’t the Russians or the Germans or the Aliens then it’s the Nature”, he said. Another friend who had the unfortunate nick name - Bum Rao (because he had a knack of bumming off other people), readily contested his views. “It is less about a triumph over nature and more about managing the unexpected”, he stated. As aspiring engineers, he wanted us to appreciate the systems (and the thinking and effort behind the design of the systems) that help man to protect himself from natural calamities. “When there was an earthquake in Tokyo, Doordarshan showed Japanese people forming disciplined human chains to clear the debris brick-by-brick”, he told us. “Every society needs to inculcate such a mindset, build warning and response systems and be prepared. Come on guys, don’t you want to see India react with such discipline? I definitely hope to be part of such a response”, he said before thanking us for the “treat”.

Sitting at the other end of the globe, in another country, I watch India caught unawares and putting together a haphazard response. The cabinet minister deputed to handle the crisis complained helplessly against the hordes of spectators and onlookers who have descended on the disaster sites in spite of warnings of possible after-shocks.

I can’t help but feel that I myself am, virtually, an onlooker. My guilt has further led me to believe (I do this occasionally), that I too am obstructing the response by contributing to the babble of write-ups that are ultimately of no real consequence. There is lot of text out there – news, articles, commentaries and the large number of blogs, team blogs, blogs on news, and blogs on blogs. They are all replete with phrases reserved for these times - Black Sunday, Relief and Rehabilitation, Armed Forces, Full Alert, Aerial Evacuation, Aerial Survey, Prime Minister’s Relief Fund, Ex Gratia, Food Packets, Death Tolls, Affected Areas - none of which I wanted to use in this text.

But, in this mind boggling heap of banal blogs, I did find something worth highlighting. In response to a largely redundant entry titled, The Freak Tsunami, in the Zoo Station blog, Sumo (a senior from my undergraduate school) wrote from Madras, “Later in the afternoon, I headed out there with some colleagues to see if we could help”. I haven't been in touch with Bum Rao for a long time, but I know he would approve. I just hope that at least he was in a position to really help.