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…..

3 YEARS AND THE HORROR STILL REVISITS

Its three years to that fateful Sunday morning….one that started unlike many others for me…Considering that I was tracking a rather controversial case, and had been, just for that sake, camping in Kancheepuram, for nearly a month then…the Kanchi Shankaracharya case…Just as I was thinking about tucking into some breakfast, I saw our driver, rush in, anxious…His parents were uncontactable, and there were news flashes on a local Tamil channel that high waves, some over two storeys had crashed against buildings along the Marina beach side… Was it a rumour or a false scare? The TV was turned on..and the anchor looked unsure…Bad sign, for that meant he hadn’t encountered a situation like this before..and he was going on and on, in that rather excited tones which becomes rather difficult to control when information is constantly filtering into your ears from your producer, so even as you are talking you need to be formulating it into coherent sentences for your audience…I switched on to national channels and they hadn’t latched on yet….10 minutes of flicking channels…and the first bit of information filters into the tickers…BREAKING NEWS…Earthquake off the coast of Sumatra…epicenter near Banda Aceh.. Huge waves reported to be formed as a result….. In another half hour, it has been identified as a Tsunami…just like the ones, we read about in geography textbooks, that is said to be the bane of Japan….But tsunamis aren’t anything to be scared of, are they? The mind questioned…and then started reports of people gone missing in Chennai… Alarm bells are by now ringing like fire engine horns in my head….Reporters are already on air, speaking excitedly about water entering first floor and some ‘exaggeratedly’ about second floors of building by the beaches…… My first brush with the deadly Asian tsunami that wiped away lakhs and lakhs of people in just under 5 minutes….A watery grave for many, some just disappeared off the face of the earth…poooof…. Theres a question that worries me till this date… When I was reporting on the tsunami, and I was traveling to Nagapattinam and Velankanni, had seen families fleeing inland…away from the seas which had turned on them…And just a couple of days later, I also saw huge mass graves being dug in a small corner of the earth and bodies, randomly dumped into them…brought in trucks and pushcarts and jeeps, barely covered, and just DUMPED into those graves…not even photographed.. Who were they? What were they doing when the waters just pounded the life out of them? Did they have time to panic? But that’s not the question that keeps coming back to me on every anniversary... Did anyone come back for these people, did anyone try to locate them? If they did, would they have known that their loved one lies buried in that non-descript patch of land far off the beaten path between Nagapattinam and Velankanni? I have never got a chance to go back there and check if the Church put up some epitaph…like a mass gravestone there…Some evidence that here lies buried many hearts, unknown, unsung…