Column

Every once in a while, along comes a tragedy of monumental proportions that shakes humanity’s soul to the core of its being. I remember arriving in Chennai on the night of December 25, 2004 — and waking up the next morning to the horror of the tsunami that killed an estimated 2,30,000 people in 11 countries. Travelling some months later to Sweden, beyond the Arctic Circle, I encountered a young girl from an indigenous community, aged eight years, who, upon learning that I was from India, made probing enquiries about the effect of the tsunami. Expressing profound empathy way beyond her age, she said, “I was saddened by the death of so many children. I felt your pain...”

A similar sentiment is sure to have overwhelmed anyone who has followed news of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, in south-central China. An estimated 50,000 people (so far), including tens of thousands of children, perished tragically; millions of others lost their homes and everything they owned, the fruits of their lifetime of toil snatched away in an instant. As China mourns in spirit for the dead (and the living dead), spare a thought for the thousands of innocent lives lost in Sichuan, and for the survivors whose lives have been wrenched all out of shape. Feel, for a minute, their pain — just as that eight-year-old girl in a snowy Swedish mountain agonised over the deaths of children she’d never met in a faraway land — and you’ll know that, in a larger sense, we’re all Sichuanese today. Or should be.

In times of crises and catastrophes, journalists in hot pursuit of stories may on occasion slip up on sensitivity. Edward Behr, a former foreign correspondent for Time-Life and Newsweek, recalls in his memoirs how, in the 1960s, a British TV reporter covering the Congo Crisis walked around the capital asking fleeing Belgian colonials if there was “anyone here (who’s) been raped and speaks English”. As a rookie journalist at the time of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and the anti-Sikh riots that followed, I recall that I was, shamefully, more excited by the drama than empathetic at people’s trauma.

But the Sichuan earthquake crisis and the soulful rescue stories appear to have humanised mediapersons in China. Chinese television anchorpersons and reporters, who normally exhibit about as much emotion as Madame Tussauds’ waxworks, have uncharacteristically broken down on live television broadcasts while narrating the stories of rescue workers overcoming personal tragedy to help others. A Communist Party leader whose entire family was wiped out was soldiering because his community needed him. A head nurse, whose own children were still trapped in the debris of a school building, was gamely tending to survivors....

Aquick check with the Indian Embassy in Beijing revealed that there were no known Indian casualties in the earthquake. About 750 Indian students are enrolled in various medical colleges and universities in Chengdu and Chongqing in Sichuan; there are also a handful of Indian teachers in these colleges. All of them have been accounted for and have returned to their dormitories and rooms. That, of course, is small consolation at a time such as this.