Witness to tell

As my bai who was devotedly moping on the floor looked up to tell me something, I hurriedly blinked away the tear drops that were swelling up in my eyes. She has a score of horror stories in her stock which she once in a while takes out in her attempt to entertain me; the Agarwal bahu who jumped into the well next to the water tank with her two kids and one in her womb, the drunkard maid who boiled her master’s baby in the cooker in order to vindicate her being stopped to drink, her own husband lurking around to hit her whenever the opportunity strikes and so on.
I was watching one of the news channels which was continuously showing the flood victims of Bihar. The river Kosi or the ‘river of sorrow’ as it is notoriously called had changed its course again to wash away the simple and humble dreams of thousands of human beings. The channel was continuously showing people begging for help and wailing, unable to find their families, successfully projecting the helplessness of the distraught. I am reminded of the 2001 earthquake which hit Bhuj. My husband was posted in Nalia that time which is just a 100 km from Bhuj. He had gone on a course to Hyderabad and so I had gone home to Kerala with my son. I witnessed the devastation when I went to Nalia a month later. A cousin of mine, who was in the US that time, told me that the US media reported the earthquake in Bhuj as if India was yet another country in the African continent. She felt humiliated at the thought of her country being treated as underdeveloped undernourished underprivileged and under what not..

Truth is always painful. Our media was not so advanced seven years ago to dramatize whatever was happening in our vast subcontinent, but now; they are.
With at least half a dozen news channels in every regional language they reach everywhere and what they show though sensationalized, is or should be, true. The flood in Bihar has been declared as a national disaster and a thousand crore rupees has been declared as aid. As a common citizen of this mighty nation and a silent witness of our degrading corruption I could only imagine the celebrations and joy that would immediately fill the minds of a certain group of people who would definitely benefit from the relief money. But I could not imagine a smile on the faces which I saw on the television; a young girl who was crying for her mother who could not be rescued and a man who with folded hands was begging to god to see his family alive. We are only pathetic watchers of the media; who are aware of what is happening and what is to happen; given the general behavior of our bureaucrats and politicians. Again, why blame them when we as citizens are their creators as well.
A week before, when the nationwide strike proudly organized by some of our leading political parties brought all transports to a standstill, the media found an unlucky mother who lost her two year old son and was not able to reach her son’s dead body as she was more than 200km away stuck in the nationwide strike unable to find a transport. That wailing mother, clutching her mobile phone in distraught must have made all mothers who were watching her cry with her as I certainly did. What else is the Indian population supposed to do? Silently watch the atrocities of a minority of the population and then cry, cry with all one’s heart at ones helplessness in an age where all one can become is a very able witness.
I switched off the television and turned to my bai. She has recently come to know about a man in Pune who roams around with a knife, ready to strike and kill to steal watches and purses. Won’t anybody give up their watches and purses in order to save their lives? Why would anyone need to kill them?