Friday, May 16, 2008

Terrible, terrible tragedies

First the cyclone in Myanmar. Then the massive quake in China. And now the blasts in Jaipur.
Looking for pictures to print in the paper is becoming an increasingly tough task these days. I've seen a lot of deaths -- both in person and through the tragedies we journalists have to cover.
But the past few days have been unbearable. To give you an idea of what we look at day in and day out and try to bring the most telling, the most moving picture:

This woman's knees gave way the moment she identified her child's body.


Parents grieve over graves of children who died when a shool building collapsed after the quake. These people had been forced to adopt the one-child policy. Now they have nothing to live for.


And just to give you a sense of how powerful the China quake was:

This boulder, nay a hillock, came crashing down because of the quake.


And then there are images from Myanmar. I selected one of a woman who gave birth two days after the cyclone struck. Don't have the picture now, but essentially her story was this: She can't lactate because there is no food. And the baby is being fed contaminated water from a drain as there is nothing else there.
And the fucking junta is not letting in aid. Of course the fucking world wants to send in aid and take fucking control, that's why the junta is so fucking scared. But what the hell. Is this what children are supposed to eat. Is this how they are supposed to live?


The only saving grace is that we still have people like them who work for others' welfare till they drop:

1 comment:

Jagan said...

Am sorry for sounding like a cynic.. But, i can say from borrowed experience, if you are bombarded with these evocative pictures every single day then i get this feeling that you tend to be thick-skinned (or maybe insensitive).. I read this one article written by a Sudanese who said that after looking at those Dickensian surroundings every day he couldn't feel much and no one can blame him.. Take the zimbabwean crisis.. When the inflation is spiralling out of control, one of the newspapers said that the country doesn't have any calculators that could take the zeros.. What do you call that?