TSUNAMI...

I thought it was my head spinning soon after waking up. But unfortunately, it turned out to be worse than that. The tsunami has wrecked India. Nature unleashed her most ferocious whip yesterday and my… it was frightening.

Imagine, waking up to find the world trembling furiously…
Imagine, finding huge waves that look right out of a Hollywood movie, breaking upon you all of a sudden!
Imagine, all your properties being washed off, you have no place to live, no place to go, no one alongside you…

Oh my god… life is so uncertain…
This second you are safe. Next… no one knows what may happen.
It is so sad to see so many fisher folk dead and others- with no catamarans, no family, no home.

We had, after having woken to the tremor, gone off to Satyam at 9:00 to catch the morning show of Swades. There we saw the fisher folk running as far away as they can, from the sea. The very sea they worshipped had swallowed their near ones! The frightened eyes told it all. They told us that the sea had come as near as the Icehouse police station and that it was slowly entering more into the city.

Oh… it was so sad to see them all carry their left over possessions and run off. I felt quite guilty to be watching a movie when so many people had losttheir homes. But then we hadn’t known the extent of the damage… all thanks to dear old Doordarshan, which had after nearly an hour and half later only, eported the tremor we all felt! So like it!

Think of that… DD is the national news telecaster. It is the only source of information for so many people even today( me, sadly being one of them!). Isn’t it the prime duty of the nation-level telecaster to report a disaster of such a magnitude immediately? If not as a special bulletein, I think it should have at least flashed the news. But oh, since we are discussing about DD, could that be expected? I really got BUGGED! I was so terribly angry with the channel! 1.5 hrs later, at around 8, it slowly informs… “Chennai mattrum suttrupura nagarangalil nila nadukkam.Makkal ellam beedhi!”(Earthquake at Chennai and neighbouring places. People tensed and frightened.) To top the fact of delayed news, they don’t report that the ‘quake’ was actually an undersea earthquake that originated off Banda Aceh,Sumatra and that what we felt here was just a tremor of that 8.9 on the Richter quake.

It is so sad to think that so many people have lost their lives due to the tsunami. Another sad fact is that people have, out of curiosity, crowded the beaches and hampered the rescue operations. If we can’t help anyone, we should at least not hinder anybody trying to help. The only thing we can do now is to pray for the departed souls to rest in peace.
Nature… nevermore unleash your strongest whip on the human child!