What can we learn from Uttarakhand?

When I asked about what we could to help Uttarakhand flood victims my friend said “Frankly I think we need more of these.  This dose is too mild. In the guise of development, we have defiled the earth in the last 4-6 decade. There is nothing left to pass on to the next generation. The Ganga which was brought down to earth to redeem Sagara's 70k sons, is again forced to teach the same lessons to the 6 billion population which is bent upon destroying earth for good.”

I thought my friend was taking an extreme stand on this but then it occurred to me that there was some truth to it. I have been following this national calamity very closely for the past few days with a hope that the casualty numbers don’t become too high but at this point my worst fears are coming true.  The enormity of this calamity has left people like all of us helpless and exposed. Each time I looked at  the picture (below) published in today’s Hindu newspaper, I imagined how it could have been my mom or her co-pilgrims who were just at this site a couple of

weeks ago asking for desperate help. Another person I know was stuck for more than 5 days and described her homecoming as a rebirth! I am sure hundreds of such survivor stories will soon be heard in equal numbers along with the ones about the unlucky ones who didn’t make it.  We have faced the wrath of nature several times over in the last 4-6 decades and it is now time to act! So, some questions come to mind….

1. Who is responsible for all this?
2. Can we really blame developmental activities for such a calamity?
3. How can we prevent this from happening in the future or, at least, how can we minimize the number of causalities?

While questions 1 & 2 will be debated quite a bit in the media and in the academic circles over the next few weeks, I want to focus on the 2^nd part of question 3. Although I don’t have the first hand information on the number of people that visit the holy places in this region, statistics indicate that these numbers are of the order of 6 to 7 digits. Anyone who has visited similar pilgrimage spots elsewhere will concur with me that we just don’t have the necessary infrastructure to support these such large numbers.  It’s a catch 22 situation because development of infrastructure means felling of trees, construction of dams, roads, hotels etc which will in turn cause environmental hazards resulting in calamities such as the one we are experiencing now. 

So, can the inflow of tourists be regulated to match the capacity of the destination? There is precedence of proven models such as Manasarovar visit and Haj pilgrimage among others.  I often wonder why people visit some of the shrines such as Tirupati, Vaishnav Devi, Sabarimala multiple times!  I have examples in my own circle that make trips to these places at a regular frequency. I am neither passing a judgment nor commenting on the intent behind these visits but can one not be a good citizen and allow the first-timers to have priority?  If the honor code doesn’t work, the temple boards should put a system in place to restrict the numbers.  I am sure that this will cause some corruption and favoritism for the VVIPs of this country but it will certainly help avoid such human tragedies and protect the most precious gift that humans are bestowed with, the nature.

Nature does not guarantee that it won’t wreak such havoc again but the current event is to be taken as only warning us to be prepared for the future! When I challenged my friend who made a rather cynical comment about how we are all part of the problem, he made another profound statement -” I am part of the problem and any solution will have to first start with me. My rise is because of this flawed development model and the fall will also be due to the collapse of the same flawed structure”

Do you agree with my friend? Are you ready to be a part of the solution?

Tribute to the Telegram service retiring on the 15th of July

This morning during my mundane daily routine of catching up on the headlines in the newspaper, I ran into one particular news article that caught my attention. It is about the discontinuation of Telegram service in India. Smart phones, emails and SMS seem to have pushed the humble telegram service to a quiet corner with the BSNL deciding to discontinue the 160-year-old telegraph service from July 15.Although I have not used this service even once in the last two decades, I felt sad and felt that something that was part of my childhood is being taken away from me. A sense of panic has struck me that world is moving on and I took a trip down the memory lane.

I remember while growing up in Tenali, we would dread receiving a telegram especially in the wee hours. Most of them read  "xxxx serious start immediately", "xxxx expired on xxxxx", "father not coming on Saturday", etc. And there were others that read “BSRB interview on xxxxx in Delhi”, "Aunt arriving on Saturday via Madras Mail, please receive at station", etc. There were other kinds of messages, mostly congratulatory messages from family and friends. I remembered my visits to the telegraph office to send a message and the struggles to shorten the message without losing the context as the rates were dependent on the number of words. By the time, I turned ten or twelve, memorized their entire rate chart to Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Lucknow, etc.

Now we have come quite far from Telegrams to whatsApp messages. While the modern technologies made information accessible to people at a rapid pace, I wonder will they ever be able to match the emotions of excitement, surprise, anticipation, etc created by telegrams and postal letters.

Whatever may be the reason for discontinuing, I salute this service and the people who worked to deliver the messages from one corner of the world to the other corner with the realities of poor infrastructure.