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Give Us This Day... Our Daily Disaster |
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No lowered thumbs: a grin's enough. Everything, the burgeoning smile, astonishment, consternation, fright, the hard lines of grief Everything curdles-even shame. …… Or the fear of being recognized. Or the embarrassment of a naked face: a grin as clothing. Gunter Grass DID YOU contribute to quake relief? Of course. What a terrible thing to happen. Yeah, all those people, suddenly... What a terrible terrible thing to happen. Imagine! Imagine. Imagine there's no ground beneath your feet. Imagine that empty feeling at the wrong end of your stomach while you missed the step while stepping down. There's very little left to imagine though. Natural disasters cannot very well be left to chance imaginings. Morning TV does it for you up front, in-your-face (WE got there first) reality. All that devastation and debris, enough for lips to miss their sip of the morning coffee. The consternation, the welling up of grief, the overwhelming rush of sympathetic commiseration, it could have happened to me. What would we do without a disaster or two to sadden our day and feed our insecurities? How else does my child get that extra special tender kiss on the way to school instead of the daily drag to the bus?  Calamity's cool. As long as it's on TV. As long as it gives the high of commuting with community, the oneness with suffering humanity. Long live vicarious sorrows. How else can the milk of human kindness flow in this day and age? Between existence and prime time, falls the shadow.And the frenzied response, appropriately of course, of civil society, the vast outpouring of public grief, the breast beating and keening of all too earnest talking faces on the tube, the digging up of old clothes to give. What would we do without a calamity or two? When history demands. When the cloak of history swishes past. When history rolls over us. When history rolls us over. When history confronts us with great tasks. When history, which (as Hegel says) is concerned with the state-constituting peoples, measures us by the sacrifices that we… Dig all those old clothes out. Better dig out the tuxedoes too. Got to go to the charity ball so that those poor dears get a roof over their heads. Till the next quake quakes everything out of shape again. But that's silly, quakes never strike the same place twice. Or is it lightning? Whatever, not to miss the point. The quaked always get a second chance. Or haven't you heard of afterquakes? Quakes do happen unfortunately at the right time, the unfortunate right time for even a beauty queen to show her moral stuff to the two-legs-broken man walking up to her for reassurance. Needless to say, all proceeds from the spring-summer collection goes for quake relief. Strange how a shake, I mean a quake, can fill up the emptiness of our evenings. There's so much you can do. Time to set up a relief fund. Time to seize the main chance to ask for money without feeling embarrassed, wanting to be someplace else. Time to stand up and be counted: I did my bit. Time to wake up suddenly at night: did it shake or is it only the wind? When a quake strikes, can the state be far behind? Slow as a snail it might be, but catches up it does, like some bad dream that catches up with us, after the shattered cement soaked in the rotting flesh, after the people have fled the fractured place, it arrives like dreams that arrive after their day, too little, too late. The neighborhood newspaper bears witness: After brief and fast discussion (and hearing the testimony of mutually contradictory experts), the government has decided unanimously (for reasons of political stability) to keep up the grants for the sub-committee of the review committee set up to investigate why the committee on disaster management got caught in instability. In such a great country, it goes without saying that builders build, nature destroys. Of course, being the great country that we are, we help nature along the way. Quakes do not kill any more, content merely to shake things up a bit. What are fragile foundations and crumbling combos for? Building a nation is anybody's task, we specialize in rebuilding. And didn't someone say being indignant is good for the soul? How dare builders and bureaucrats bamboozle minimum safety rules? Indignation indeed is the spirit standing on its outraged toes. A trifle unsteady, but elevating. Have you tried a quake for elevation today? RECENTLY ON JAAL: A Dip Into The Kumbh Hype Hype Hurray The A 2 Z Of Y2K What's Behind Bush? The Florida Ceasefire The Damn Dam Controversy A Weak-Kneed Operation Faster, Higher, Stranger You Have The Right To Be A Volunteer The ICE ICE Baby A Tale Of The Jungle King The Secret Autonomy Report Report When Batsman Became Betsman India's Human Genome Projectile Stone Age Flaws In ICE Age Laws A Dry Spell For Policy Planning Lara's Theme Dotcom Bubble Gum: Burst Or Bust Inside A VIP Cell A To Do About Dos A Dress Code For Klintonji Soumya Sarkar is a development analyst SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK ABOUT THIS ARTICLE:
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