Valley of Power

Last to last evening, I was watching an NDTV program on the quake victims. Basically, one of the worst hit areas In Pakistan - Muzaffarabad - is unreachable thanks to LOC restrictions and the phone lines are down, so this channel had arranged a tele-meeting of sorts for groups of people on both sides. Most people of course enquired about their relatives and they generally got responses on the lines of - no home, bad weather, no food, bad conditions, etc. One person however heard for the first time that his entire family was wiped out - this was a terrible moment and everyone on camera and off it got affected by this bit.

It was so frustrating to watch these two groups having to resort to a tele-meeting thing when they are probably a couple of hundred miles from each other ALL thanks to crappy political statements people are making. Is this the time to be making these?? What kind of people are they? What would they have been doing if any member of their family had been stuck in this sort of a situation or worse, had passed away and there was no way you could reach them not because you didn't want to but you COULDN'T for no ability-related-reasons? It was just deeply sad.

I had hoped to see this disaster becoming a leveler and maybe (miraculously) undoing all the strife and boundaries that have been pounded and propounded over the years. Sadly, nothing of the sort has happened and it's almost seeming like a curse someone has cast (do you cast curses like you do spells?) over the people of Kashmir and thereabouts - you either die by bullets or by disasters such as this...or worst of all, you live days full of terror, hunger, pain, and insecurity for the rest of your life.

Even the militants are doing their bit - soon after the quake - that by the way was supposed to have wiped out many many militant camps - they announced how this was the time to help their 'brothers and sisters' and not a time of violence but fog social work and upliftment. How do they go about dong this? By storming into a Jammu and Kashmir state minister's office and shooting him dead and injuring everyone else there. Social work indeed.

Then I read this article on NYT that someone sent in – It managed to deepen this feeling of sadness and introduced the new feeling of cringe-y embarrassment/shame at a country who is making points at a time it can ill-afford to do so. As a citizen of that country it tells me what my country's priorities are and will be should I ever be in any sort of trouble.

On an analogous-with-parenthood note, this action leaves an indelible scar. On the regular note, speaks eons of the maturity levels that led to this brilliant decision. The irony is that this purportedly roots form aspiring for a seat in the UN Security Council. Is a country that neglects the security of its own country in such a callous manner worthy of it? 'worthy' is stretching it. Does it even deserve more than a snort for this? Come to think of it, I don't care half as much for the reaction to the country as much as I do for those poor people who have got the worst of it - they survived the damn earthquake.