The Hindu Business Line : Thoughts on a quake

THE RECENT terrestrial shock in the north-western part of the subcontinent is said to have taken 40,000-50,000 lives, a toll which is by no means final and could rise even higher if the view of eyewitnesses is taken into account. The loss of 40,000 lives cannot be just written off as the consequence of one more natural disaster, and particularly so when the tragedy struck so near the de facto border of our own country — and in fact had a severe impact in terms of loss of lives and material damage in Jammu and Kashmir as well.

The Prime Minister, made it a point to visit the affected areas on the Indian side and meet the people who bore the brunt of the shock.

This aspect of the tragedy was also highlighted by New Delhi's decision to offer the services of the Indian Air Force to the Pakistani authorities to distribute relief and ferry the injured to medical establishments.

It is, of course, another story that the initial response of Islamabad to this specific offer of help was not quite warm. Even so, the fact that the denouement has been favourable to the cause of humanity generally speaks volumes about the innate goodness of human beings which, having manifested itself in the charged atmosphere between India and Pakistan, can only point even more strongly to the possibility that despite all the tension between the two countries over the past half-century, the future is not entirely without hope.

To put it a bit differently, and looking at a wider canvas, the triumph of humanitarian sentiments, as witnessed in the ability of the armed forces of Pakistan and India to cooperate with each other in relief efforts, merely underscores the optimism that generally informs all discussion of the future of human civilisation, the specific inference being that despite the yawning gap between the rich and the poor, the exploiter and the exploited, the concept of "one world" (Planet Earth, that is) will perhaps ultimately win when confronted by the "mother of all crises". To say the least, this is a comforting thought, and not least because of all the doomsday predictions that the world as we know it will end in a great conflagration sparked off by a rogue nuclear assault engineered by a small but fanatical terrorist group on "the Great Satan" and his cohorts.

But to get down to brasstacks, is there much to rejoice beyond this happy thought born of the death of thousands of innocent people, kids and women included? One would think not if the initial response of the Indian corporate world to the disaster is considered, especially in view of the fact that this group in Indian society has hardly ever left a stone unturned when it has come to providing relief assistance to victims of natural disasters, etc?

It was only on Thursday that one came across the instance of a large Indian corporate entity announcing publicly the contribution of a crore of rupees as its mite in aid of relief work currently going on in full swing in the affected areas, a gesture that ought to have come earlier as the magnitude of the death and destruction was being unveiled.

True, chambers of commerce and industry have said that they would contribute a handful crores of rupees to the relief effort, but it has come as a big surprise that the corporate world has been bitten severely by the bureaucratic bug of delay and procrastination, the weak justification for which has been the plaint that no one knows where to send the assistance because the tragedy struck in the northern reaches of Kashmir.

Surely, this is not to be expected of people who pride themselves in taking quick, decisive action when they get the faintest scent of a money-making opportunity. One only hopes that the end (in this case) has not determined the means of taking action, a hope that is buoyed by the sterling performance of the same corporate world when it has come to similar natural disasters that have occurred in the past.

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Thoughts on a quake