Worst part of the Nepal quake was to see people capitalising on other people’s misery
The devastating earthquake that shook large parts of Nepal and India was a major catastrophic incident that hurt us all. The death, destruction and despair were heart rending. India definitely proved to be lucky and Indians may consider themselves fortunate.
But the implications of the grim tragedy leave many lessons for all of us who did not face the impact of nature’s wrath. The first and foremost is the supremacy of the nature, that almost always gets established by incidents like these. All our sciences are but ineffective when it comes to predicting earthquakes. Talking about likelihoods of earthquakes taking place or identifying vulnerabilities of regions are only face saving mechanisms that give us some reason to pat our backs despite realising very clearly where we stand vis-à-vis nature.
This is what is the crux of the oft quotedRamayana couplet from the ‘Bal-kanda’ that says ‘Whatever is the lord’s wish will happen, logical explanations can only increase confusion.’ This is why there is a popular Indian cliché expressed poetically that ‘whatever you want to do tomorrow, do it today and now because any moment a cataclysmic event ie pralaya can strike, leaving you no chance to act.
That the quake turned atheists into believers and believers into atheists is altogether a different story, but it certainly established that luck or chance are matters that are more real than surreal. And how they distribute amongst populations cannot be explained by any degree of statistical sophistication.
That is what perhaps is providence which points at human limitations when it comes to predicting events or outcomes. Some news stories from Kathmandu tragedy suggest how some survivors saw the catastrophe as an act of nature over which God had no control and hence they negated his existence. On the other hand, some had providential escape and they thus saw God’s hand in their survival.
These incidents, thus, alter human belief because they are based on the limited rationality of the human brain. But the fact remains that these natural phenomena keep on striking humanity with impunity, only to prove that there are limits to human ingenuity and efforts. Acts of God or not, these phenomena must be inferred as something inevitable and unpatterned for which explanations cannot be offered. So the best course of action is to follow the teaching of Gita that says that fruits and actions are independent of one another and human beings have only the right to action.
You may thank God if what you desire happens, but you cannot blame God for the untoward as you do not have the means to understand the causality. In a flash everything is lost without giving you a chance to figure out why. But the worst part of the lesson from the Kathmandu quake was that amidst the tragedy the human greed stood glaringly grotesque, people capitalising on the misery of others.
Selling basic necessities at exorbitant prices, selling commodities to highest bidder, standing in ruins and thinking that you are invincible; this was the saddest of the lessons of the Kathmandu quake. The human attitude of couldn’t care-less, the false notion of invulnerability of one’s position. The greed to make the most from a tragedy. In the Mahabharata this was the central theme of Yudhisthira’s reply when Yaksha had asked him that famous question ‘What is the greatest surpriseIJ Will mankind ever learnIJ’
The writer is a professor, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad (Jharkhand). He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com