HUNT IS ALWAYS ON FOR HUMAN FACES OF TRAGEDIES

I knew my requiem for the tsunami victims would be the only time I would have …to revisit a tragedy that I saw laid bare before my eyes… TV channels across the country flashed the images of the tsunami then and went for an annual stocktaking, that sometimes…no, more often than not seems like a desperate attempt to latch on to something easily commercially exploitable….

I know it isn’t realistically possible to follow-up on every tear jerking story that we as journalists had scourged for from the disasters we have covered…Like they say, the golden rule is to look for a human face to a tragedy, to any story… If for many the tsunami was in its essence captured in Arko Dutta’s award winning picture of the anguish of a woman…the bomb blasts of July 2006 in Mumbai, yet another tragedy that I witnessed had a rather good looking young man with long curly locks looking dazedly into the cameras while blood continued to streak down his head… I also know one Kirti Ajmera, a man who was a walking corpse literally, with blood all across him as he bore the brunt of the bomb that ripped through the Bombay Stock Exchange in 1993, one of the many bombs that gave Mumbai, its first big brush with terror… They are forgotten in the hustle bustle of our daily lives..

But on the anniversary of every tragedy, we launch a massive hunt for those very human faces who made our story the top headline of the day….or the coverstory on newsprint…. Old scripts are dusted…search engines activated…vague keywords punched in…and the moment the results are spewed out, the telephones are activated… For those who lost a loved one, or who lost themselves in that tragedy, it’s a time to revisit their old wounds….pick at the scabs and grieve anew…

For in a country like India, tragedies are soon put behind, and normalcy restored at the earliest…We forget the dead…We forget the terror…What more telling imagery can there be than the fact that, on the 12 July 2006, a day after over 180 people lost their lives in serial bomb blasts across the city, many people dared to travel on those very trains, in those very compartments, with no surety that today, its not going to be their life on the line…

I want to know what happened to four year old Soumya who we had discovered in an orphanage run by Missionaries of Charity in Velankanni…a sweet little child orphaned by the tsunami, who the nuns there thought was from Mumbai…Her incoherent mumblings gave them that idea…That was till she met my cameraman, whose questions in kannada let out a torrent…perhaps, even the young child would have felt a gush of relief , at finally, finding an adult who understood what she was trying to say….We managed to locate her address on the outskirts of Bangalore, we even sent a crew there, only to know that the entire colony had set out on a pilgrimage and this child was perhaps the only one who survived the tsunami while attending Mass at the Velankanni Church.. For two days, my story made headlines on our channel, I felt, I had done my bit by bringing the story of this orphaned child to India…Then I moved on and so did the country…But Im sure, Soumya found it difficult to start anew…I wish I knew where her story stands today…For me too, its like an annual cleansing ritual…

Through the years, I have honestly never thought back about the little child, I said bye to at the orphanage, just under three years ago… But somehow today, theres guilt in my heart, that I never followed up on what happened to that child..Should I hope that it is this very guilt that makes media houses, television and newspapers alike seek out the men, women and children who had epitomized the tragedy to them? I hope that’s the truth…But I know it isn’t…Today, the channel I work for now, didn’t even think it necessary to put together a story on the third anniversary…Perhaps, because there are no personal memories attached to the tsunami…We after all launched over a year after the tsunami….

Or is it because, India would rather put its tragedies far behind and continue to forge ahead? Is that why the Tsunami’s aftermath was never a headline, all we wanted to know was how Anil Kumble’s men have the racist Aussies by their scruff, tottering at 330 odd for nine wickets at the end of day one of the Boxing Day Test in Australia…Or even more salaciously, if former Punjab Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh is indeed in love with a woman whom his detractors claim is an ISI agent…a new Pakistani Mata Hari luring an ageing stud politician? The woman is a gorgeous 50something journalist from across the border…and the man is an ex-Chief Minister who has power, money and the connections to make him a force to reckon with….the heady cocktail mix to trip the TRPs just right…

Well when you have ditsy slugs like Amarinder’s Muse and the Love Life of a Politician…who cares about Orphan Soumya of the Asian tsunami? Shes not even worth a mention in a news wrap…..