My home state of West Bengal in India has been voting in the second phase of civic elections today. The first phase and the campaign have been marred by violence and bloodshed. I dialed my parents to make the cursory Saturday call and inquire about their health, the heat and dust in a normally sweltering April, the political and social tension surrounding the polls and added to that today was how they coped with the tremor that shook large parts of India.
My parents in Kolkata, relations in North Bengal and the North East of India are all fine. Relieved, I switched on the television set and tuned in an Indian news channel not for the news on the tremor, but to keep myself abreast about the possible poll violence in West Bengal. Little did I know that large swathes of the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal were razed to the ground as tremors struck only to be followed by regular aftershocks.
Nepal earthquake: How you can help victims of the Kathmandu disaster
The heart wrenching footage of people running amok, cracks on multi-storied buildings, uprooted trees, broken temples and monuments and casualties came as a pall of gloom. Many faces crossed my imagination. My former colleagues in the BBC Nepali Service, many of whom were deputed to Kathmandu from London. My good friends Rabindra Mishra, Yubaraj Ghimire and Jitendra Raut - all former colleagues in the BBC.
I suddenly recalled 'Daiju' - an elderly person with wrinkles crisscrossing his face, who looked after us well at a guest house in Gaurikund on our way to Kedarnath in the late 1980's. Daiju then told me that after a few years he longed to retire in his home town in Nepal and spend a peaceful life with his grandchildren. Since we left Gaurikund, I was never in touch with Daiju, but somehow his affection crossed my mind as I imagined that he might be in Nepal now and feared about his well being.
The name of 'Sundar' also cropped up in my mind, although I have never seen or spoken to him in my lifetime. Sundar was a Nepali boy who accompanied my father to Kolkata in the 1960s. My father was visiting Darjeeling and poor Sundar wanted to travel to Kolkata with him. He stayed at our ancestral house in Belgharia for a few years, helping my late grandmother in her household chores and being like the fifth son in the family. In the process he grew from being a boy to a man. But as politics in Bengal became tense with the rise of the radical left, Sundar had to be sent back to Darjeeling for his own safety. Notwithstanding Sundar's departure, he remained so ingrained in the memory of our family that even I heard about him from my grandmother, father and uncles long after he was gone. I imagined that Sundar might be with his family in Nepal and feared that the high-magnitude tremor struck the place where he lived.
As the news of the terrible loss of life, property and heritage trickled in through out the day, the faceless number of hundreds of affected people was embodied in those I knew or was aware of. I was reminded of a comment made by one of our teachers in school. "Disasters happen when nature takes its own action", he told us quoting a German philosopher, whose name I couldn't remember. Taken aback by the extent of the disaster in Nepal, I tried finding out who the German philosopher was. And I did as the day unfolded and night fell in quake struck Nepal.
Wrote Frederick Engels in 1876 in "The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man":
"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves over much on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."The "victory" that Engels talked about might have added to the comfort of the rich and the relatively well off but it was the poor people of Nepal who were bearing its brunt.
Please donate generously to help the Nepalese people. I have done so myself.
Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant.
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.comAll comments are personal.
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