First it was the tsunami, then came devastating hurricanes, and now the latest manifestation of Nature's wrath took the form of an earthquake in Pakistan and other parts of South Asia. Apparently, a village was wiped out and a building had collapsed in Islamabad. At least a 1000 people are reportedly dead.
More headlines run across the screen on Channelnews asia: i learned that Central America and Mexico are not spared either - flooding and mudslides have left hundreds dead. Then there are the familiar warnings about the spreading bird flu.
How does one react to all this? These are the sort of news, if you took notice, which make you shrug; they unsettle you a little, but it won't be for long before you clean forget about them. The news and especially its medium, the TV, do convey a sombre, proximate sense of realism and evoke feelings of poignant tragedy. But life is such that unless you are personally brought to bear the consequences of tragedies such as natural calamities, you won't be terribly affected by their occurrence or the immense damage that they wreaked on human lives - lives which are probably totally unrelated to your existence and never would cross path with yours. And so while mass rapes and unspoken atrocities were taking place in Sudan, while entire families are possibly destroyed by the earthquake in South Asia, while many Iraqis struggle daily to survive and not get killed by bombings and insane killings, and while many other atrocities are occurring in many parts of the world even as i am writing now, you and i - our lives just go on as normal. We have many burdens too, like coping with school and work stress, but surely they cannot compare in any degree to those implacable problems that are prevalent and ongoing in this world.
Yet the truth is, such is the the condition of life, that while we are aware of injustice, unfairness across human societies and both inevitable as well as blatantly wanton deaths in the world, many of us will not and cannot be made to confront our problems while keeping in mind that real life tragedies exist elsewhere which surely make our problems somewhat infinitely inconsequential. It just doesn't work that way. No one ever said that keeping a healthy perspective of our personal life and personal problems must entail comparing with people who are worse off than us. On the contrary, it is to those seemingly blissful/successful/beautiful/powerful people whom we look upon and contemplate our fate.
Poverty and suffering, as do illness and dying, are after all nothing new and have been ever present. When someone talks about such stuff, sometimes it can seem as though yet another person is romanticising about Life, life's tragedy and what not. Compassion is like a residual feeling which one musters only when one is not afflicted by personal problems or tragedies. All is fair game; men may be created equal but they don't live equal - you just have to live with that, without needing to feel guilty or responsible for the status quo, no matter its inherent flaws.
I know i won't be thinking about the earthquake in Pakistan, the suffering i see on TV and the insane devastating human conflicts i read in the papers when i start to panic about work deadlines or grapple with money woes. I think only of how terribly miserable i am; i think of how i can extricate myself out of my misery.
But as i am these days constantly deluged with fresh news of brewing conflicts the world over, i get really unsettled and think a little deeper about what all this means for me, a student troubled over what path his future should take even as there are others whose future confines only to suriving the next day.
And as i ponder how ironic it is that Nature alone creates so many problems for human beings - including seizing one too many life prematurely - while human beings create more problems for themselves through terrorism, nukes and power struggles instead of solving problems together, i realise also the futility, even the irrelevance of my thoughts.
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