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.

Sunday 23 June 2013

UTTARAKHAND DISASTER: SOME REAL GOOD JOB BY AN OVER-THE-TOP MEDIA

Right from the time when the enormity of the disastrous Uttarakhand flash floods became clear, the national media has been on it, 24/7. As the thousands trapped in the rough terrain of Uttarakhand post-floods were from across many parts of the country, the regional media, too, had a major chunk of their daily plans on it. And a human crisis deepening every day brought the international media on the scene as well.

And it has continued.

And it has torn deeply into the political doublespeak. Okay, the folks have flown unrestrained, blurring every fine line of decency in reporting a human disaster like this, but it is they only who didn’t give the politicians chance to manipulate the reality to hide the scale of calamity. The world now knows the scale of the disaster that, probably, has killed tens of thousands though the government is still hovering around a figure of 1000.

The raw reporting on the crude behavior of the politicos has forced the politicians to do more, though, even now, they are not looking sincere.


Reportedly, the former Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu is visiting Uttarakhand tomorrow (after 8 days!) His magnanimity has revealed its desire at a time when the delays in the relief and rescue efforts due to the visits (silly, worthless aerial surveys) of the political VVIPs like Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Narendra Modi and others have been a matter of raging debate.

According to some reports, during initial days of the calamity, when the government was still in a denial mode, almost 70 per cent of the helicopters, supposed to be used for evacuation and relief efforts, were being used to ferry the politicians.

Also, in order to stuff more in order to score over the completion, they have dug more and more on how the scale of the disaster is man made; on how the human greed, silly political considerations and unplanned development (owing to the political reasons of vote-bank politics and political corruption) contributed to make this disaster so massive; on how the government was trying to hide the facts by sending reports from the areas of maximum devastation like Kedarnath and its surrounding places; on how the relief materials like food items and medicines were in short supply at many places where larger number of people were trapped; and how the politicians went on scoring rhetoric while people were dying.

Yes, the political apathy continues even if thousands are dead and thousands are in imminent danger. The two biggest political parties, Congress and Bhartiya Janta Party, are playing politics over the dead bodies to score political mileage. The war of words is deafeningly ugly and certainly avoidable. But the folks would not let us give the leeway to look the other way.

There may be a silver-lining in this but only if we could read the message, something that we fail to read most often.

While the media carriers have their own interest in desiring for more intense war of words, the public has the opportunity, once more (like innumerable other times) to see the real character of the Indian politicians, on how insensitive and disconnected from the masses they have become to lead the Indians who vote them in the office.

Would they see it this time? 

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