Tears, silence and some pessimism

On October 5th, 2009, I  woke up to the terrible news of  a huge flood that badly affected Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.  The photograph in the front page of The Hindu daily was very much disturbing.  No other photo of any calamity or anything else has ever wounded me so deeply before.  Expressing courtesy to The Hindu, let me add a copy of the same here; it is small and of low resolution, unlike the one in the hard copy of the newspaper.  The same, along with that day's news is available here: http://www.hindu.com/2009/10/05/stories/2009100557090100.htm.
The caption reads like this: "SHATTERED HOPE: A woman cries on seeing her submerged house at P. Garlapadu village, about 180 km from Hyderabad, in Mahabubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh on Sunday".

I invite you to take a close look at the picture, see the heartbreaking sorrow on her face.  This is not from a movie that I watch sometime: this is real, so chillingly real.  I don't know why I was deeply hurt by it...  I sat on my bed, wordless, looking at the picture for quite a while.  My mind was trying to imagine what all agonies were going on in  that poor woman's mind.  She must be one from that vast majority of the Indian population who struggle for their everyday meal, who don't have time, knowledge, patience and privilege to think about what people like me are worried about: faster internet connection, technology revolution, IT parks, economic recession, the poor quality of roads, whether Shashi Tharoor was right to use the word "cattle class", whether drinking coco-cola was unhealthy, if Indian movies are up to the mark from the international perspective, whether "The Name of the Rose" is the best novel I've ever read, whether ancient Indian contribution to science and mathematics is rightly acknowledged, whether finding water in moon was important to science at all, what are the best skills an engineer should possess, and so on.  All she used to worry about was just the everyday meal, not even about her children's education or diet, for they were too luxurious for her to afford.  Now, she has lost everything --- everything she has built on through years of hard work, which she can't even dream of doing again.  The loss of all hopes, all dreams, and the knowledge that she has no chance of being happy ever again... a bunch of emotions this emptiness can create in you --- this is what I can read on her face.  She, as her belongings, is encountering a horrifying state of oblivion from which there is no escape.  All she can do is just cry helplessly --- and that is what she is doing.  I feel deeply wounded, very deeply wounded....  I am more and more ashamed thinking of the privileges I am enjoying in this world, and all my complaints, anxieties, self-pride, self-esteem, self-respect, are belittled and silenced at once in front of her tears.

Time and again, we have said that India is yet to grow like the US or UK or France or Malaysia etc., that we don't have good facilities, that our people have no civic sense, that we have no self-respect and so on.  Now I understand the cold reality of the Indian situation, or broadly the human condition on earth.  And I understand my nation, its limitations and its poverty unconditionally.  I am just silenced, and I have no more complaints but only an inner awareness of a new enlightenment on the need to make India, not a super power, a hub of technology and science and business, but, at least, a place for humans to live, loving each other, without the need for  an unjustifiably herculean effort to do so.  She will be (is already) an inspiration for me throughout my life.

--Sandeep Palakkal