New Year in Madras
It's been a pretty sedate and somber New Year here in South India. All celebratons were cancelled. The usual barrage of fireworks never ignited. People are still tense and sad.
We had a quiet dinner with family at my uncle's place. We had hoped to watch the annual BBC New Year around the world thing. But BBC was too busy reporting on death and destruction to break for celebrations.
We spent the day checking out how Madras was dealing: Quite well, considering. We saw many small crowds of people waiting for relief supplies. And at St. Thomas Cathedral we visited with some newly homeless children who had received new clothes. Marina Beach cleanup seems to be going very well.
Still, everyone has that dazed look and all conversation works itself back to Sunday morning.
Tomorrow we will visit some temples. Sunday we will drive down the coast to check out more sites and more tsunami damage in Mahabalipurum and Pondicherry. Things are much worse farther south.
2004 is over and good riddance. Outside of Ukraine, Spain, Afghanistan, and India the world got a lot worse. My country led the way with irresponsible and short-sighted leadership. The scars are everywhere.
2005 offers us a chance at redemption. Can we move from this horrifying end of a year to an inspirational beginning? Can we move beyond the provincial, bigoted, and superstitious to a place in which the whole specied comes together for common purposes? Can we recognize that these huge deadly oceans connect all of our fates? Can we be a little less arrogant with each other and with our planet?
Let's bring a little peace to our lives this year. Let's spread love and hope.
Let's be better.
Comments
Forty years ago, the beaches around Besant Nagar, the area south of Madras where Siva and Melissa are staying, belonged to the sea. You could walk down on the hot, pristine sand beach and not see another person for half a mile. Now Besant Nagar Beach is home to fishing villages and many small businesses that cater to tourism and the delights of a city of tens of thousands of homes and condos that line the shore and go inland for miles. Fortunatly, for those living beyond the beach itself, the tsunami was not so powerful when it hit the coast of India. Most of the people living by the beach can look at their television sets, and see the damage and watch the local rescue mission on their televisions, just like we can here in the U.S. That makes it easy to say 'cheer up.'
But having the means to know that our fellow humans have suffered dreadfully opens us to other senses of our world besides the 'longer view.' It lets us know that immediatly, people need help. Perhaps it isn't necessary to respond to a villager in Sri Lanka. Perhaps a helping hand to a person in our own apartment building, or a kindness to an elderly person who can't see or hear well, would be an appropriate 'shorter view' response to a world in need of care and kindness.
Posted by: Gini | January 1, 2005 05:13 PM