Death in Kolkutta

When I look at the world’s headlines, sometimes I am moved to stop, other times not because it feels so foreign or so flippant, or too much to bear. Sometimes, I can’t see what others around the world see, when I look at the world.

However, now, having been to India, when I see a headline about it, things are indeed different. I have new perspectives and new experiences, new pairs of glasses to view the world.

When I saw the headline about the fire in Kolkutta, this was such a case. Six months ago, before I had been to India, this headline would have been just another case of many people dying in a country that I could not fathom, nor imagine, even in my wildest attempts.

I remember going to listen to Noam Chomsky speak at The University of Texas at Austin many years ago, and he brought in an example of the floods in Bangladesh from years before where some 400,000 people perished. We saw those headlines, but what did that mean, 400,000 corpses, bloated and bobbing in the waters of Southeast Asia? It meant nothing to me then, really. And, that was Chomsky’s point, the detachment that we have on a global level when it does not affect us directly, no matter how much we hear about it.

As I have posted earlier, I visited the site of the Indian Ocean tsunami where thousands upon thousands of people had literally vanished under the Earth’s watery wrath, being sucked out to sea, children ripped from the hands of mothers and fathers, never to be seen again. I remember reading about that, seeing pictures, but it did not “move me.” However, when I was just there, even though Kanniyakumari is completely rebuilt and life does go on, I felt more just thinking abou that event as my friend Handel described the scene when he and his mother visited just hours after the waters receded with their human sacrifices.

It changed me, at least as far as the headlines go when they are about India. For, although I did not go to Kolkutta, when I read about it and see the images, I can only imagine all to well what it looked like, the Chaos that would have reigned supreme, the catastrophe at hand.

Does this make me a better person than before? To be more attuned to what is happening in India? In a word, No.

I’m not sure what it does in all honesty, something that I am trying to puzzle through, inter alia, of the things that I left behind  and those that I brought back with me, and those that I may yet to learn I always had . Do we have to know the victims for it to be a human tragedy? If 400,000 people drown and nobody hears them scream, does it make a sound?