The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Wednesday 3 December 2014

THIS NIGHT 30 YEARS AGO, AROUND THIS HOUR: BHOPAL DISASTER

This night 30 years ago – the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984 – around this hour (around 2 AM), the disaster was fully out to engulf lives.

Thousands were killed in the gas leak (Methyl Isocyanate – MIC) from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal – some 4000 to 16000 killed, depending on which report you want to believe in – and hundreds of thousands were crippled – around this hour of the night 30 years ago – generations were left ruined, reeling from the chemical effects of gas and their physiological impersonations.

Bhopal Disaster is an unmatched tale of unison of corporate greed and government apathy that polluted the thinking of the then ruling regime in the Mahatma’s land to the extent that they colluded with the perpetrators of the Disaster to ship the main culprit, the then Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson, out of India, never to return again.

30 years later, the rehabilitation process is still not complete.

30 years later, there are victims still awaiting the compensation.

30 years, it is still an unending nightmare.

To make the circus of governance and accountability more obnoxious, 26 years later, in 2010, the then India CEO of Union Carbide and some other employees were sentenced two years in jail with a fine of $2000, for causing ‘death due to negligence’ - the maximum possible sentence as the extant Indian laws.

‘Death due to negligence’ had never sounded so crippled before it.

Shouldn’t the whole System including its top leadership be tried for the negligence that brought this disaster to us?

Shouldn’t the whole System including its top leadership be tried for the negligence that made the rehabilitation process an endless humiliation?

Shouldn’t the whole System including its top leadership be tried for colluding with corporate greed and being a party in Warren Anderson’s escape?

30 years of the tragedy – Bhopal Disaster – one of the worst man-made industrial disasters killing and affecting scores of human lives – the questions remain – waiting for answers – in Delhi, in Bhopal, in India, even in the US (even if Warren Anderson is no more) – for the last 30 years..

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/