We are Sorry, Chennai-ites
About 5 years back, due to kind of a
cloudburst phenomenon, my city in Kerala received torrential rainfall. It was
so heavy that water started rising in all the water bodies. I was sleeping
upstairs in my house. At about midnight, my parents woke me up saying there was
water inside the house! I went down to see ankle deep water in my house which
kept on rising. Adding to the chaos, power was gone. My father walked through
the water to reach the inverter. He got a severe electric shock. Thankfully, it
did not turn fatal. But the whole experience was traumatic for all of us. After
a while, rains stopped. The drainage in my small city is very effective. By
about 10 in the morning, water had receded from almost everywhere except a
couple of residential colonies like ours. For the rest of the city, life was
back to normal.
Water inside the house for me was
like wearing wet socks. It was discomfort at its glorious manifestation. Add to
this, the trauma of my father having got an electric shock the day before. But
there was nothing to do to improve our situation. The water had to recede by
itself. I was a student at that time and went for my afternoon class. I
distinctly remember my jeans being wet till knees, having walked through water
clogged around my house. My friends were being their usual self – laughing,
talking and making merry. The first thought that hit me was how these guys can
be so happy! Don’t they know what I am going through? To be fair to them, they
did not know. All they know was that there was a heavy rainfall the night
before which is not an unusual thing to happen in Kerala. Water logging did not
happen in or around their houses.
I told my friends what happened the
previous night. They listened to me patiently and empathized with me. They were
concerned for my father. But then, someone cracked a harmless joke about water
entering my house. In other times, I would have laughed along heartily enjoying
the humor, but that day, I wanted to feed him a croissant filled with cyanide!
I remember being angry, frustrated and feeling helpless. I failed to understand
why others were being so normal going about with their lives.
Yesterday, I visited my office in
Chennai. I talked to a couple of friends. Only then, I realized the ordeal that
they had to go through. Being displaced from one’s own home for whatever short
duration is very unsettling. Being served food of the same kind and portions
for days together can be very saddening. I am not talking about choice or
quality of food here. I want to draw your attention to the situation that one
finds oneself in. Having to face losses, person and material is difficult. We
overcome material losses over time even though it is not easy or simpler in any
way. Personal losses makes us deal with the heartache which comes with the
reality too.
One of the reasons why many of us couldn’t
relate to your hardships was because we were not physically present in that
situation. Thanks to social media, we did read about many heartbreaking stories.
But there is power in visuals. This was the reason why when Kargil war was
taking place, the then army chief wanted the nation to see visuals of the war
and the people to understand the hardships and sacrifices that our soldiers do
for us. This is also the reason why US defense forces rarely allow coffins to
be shown on television in an attempt to show that whatever wars they are
engaged in are 'strategic' ones with no human loss at all.
So to all my friends in Chennai, if I
haven’t called to check on you, if I joked unknowingly about any situation
which you had to go through, if I was not sensitive enough, with folded hands,
I extend my apologies. I want you to understand that you were always in my
thoughts and continue to be.
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