Putting back the pieces

The Tsunami came and went taking so many innocent lives with it. Although I was in Chennai when the quake occured, it wasn't until that evening {when the screens on my TV started relaying images}, did I realize how devastating that quake turned out to be. Tens of thousands lost their homes and many more lost their lives. Its difficult to tell how I feel - lucky to be alive or otherwise. Maybe I can leave that to the abstract word we all love to hate - fate.

But after this incident, the one thing I keep thinking about is how insignificant our life is on this planet. We come and we go. Its very natural. But the fact that none of us know when and how we are going to die is quite scary.

Its pretty amusing to see how we react when we are stuck with disasters of great magnitude - like the war on Iraq or natural disasters like the Tsunami. It shows you the fragility of existence. You tend to be grateful for what you have. It makes you want to be a better person and to lead a more upright life. How long will these lessons that we learnt from such calamities stay with us? Or will it be a matter of days before we become tired of the same news and block out all those images returning back to our own greedy ways? And even if it does, can a miniscule of goodness remain and accumulate over time and make us *better* people.

Its nice to see so many people helping out with the relief activities. The private organizations and NGOs are doing tremendous amount of work, as compared to the government, to bring back normalcy to the lives of the survivors who once had that privilege. Although hoardes of people are contributing, it makes more sense in finding out what people need and getting those things rather than contributing whatever you can imagine of. As Amit Verma writes ..

We all have old clothes in our cupboards which pile up, and emergencies like this give us a chance to both get rid of them and to assuage our conscience. Giving old clothes is counter-productive, and they now constitute a particularly irritating form of garbage, lying in dirty heaps along most roads in coastal Tamil Nadu.

Its a sad state of affairs here. We have a government that isn't doing much. To top that we are still facing issues that we thought we were through with. However, inspite of all this, there is still hope. Hope for a better tomorrow and a better nation. From all what I've been following, I feel that the tsunami has created an enduring panorama of human spirit in a inhuman state.