Tsunami
The quakes and tsunami in the Indian Ocean remind us of the fragility of life, and the will to go on. Its difficult to write anything without trivializing such a widespread, sudden and massive catastrophe. Words fail to express but still are our basic expression and gesture of hope, prayer - solidarity.
In its inclusiveness of tourists and locals, wealthy and poor, global elites and those trapped in local circumstance, the waves and quakes are a ’spectacular’ example of the how our fates are shared, one with another, in a global theatre of environmental and natural risk. The jaw-dropping devastation and indescribable heartbreak forces us to see ‘their’ tragedy as also ‘ours’. Shortly after the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, this new disaster presents an ethical demand that we see the distant and different as close at hand. But as the disaster unfolds as human and social suffering, its treatment as a media spectacle transforms tragedy into a form of action-adventure and tales of close calls and miraculous escapes. A planetary event becomes a privatised horror flick on the TV news; carnivalesque diversion from post-Christmas shopping. The media story is too much about the reversal of the hospitality of leisure spaces by humanitarian aid. It risks becoming the story of ourselves, our ‘heroism’, when the truth lies on the other side of the hedonistic mirror, in the different situations, statuses and fates which are not shared at all equally.