When did we get this way?

-
I've been getting these forwards lately that compare the Katrina hurricane tragedy in the U.S. to the Mumbai monsoon crisis.

The comparison, in all these forwarded emails, begins with that declaration of odious originaility: 'Couldn't stop making this comparison..' (Really! Wonder what you'd have done if no-one had sent you the email.)

This mail notes, in excruciating pedantia, how Mumbai trumped New Orleans in various aspects.

An excerpt:

inches of rain in New Orleans due to hurricane Katrina... 18
inches of rain in mumbai (July 26th).... 37.1

number of people to be evacuated in new orleans... entire city..wohh
number of people evacuated in mumbai...10,000

Cases of shooting and violence in new orleans...Countless
Cases of shooting and violence in mumbai.. NONE

So on and so forth...and it ends with a sorry tongue in cheek remark:

USA...world's most developed nation
India...third world country..

oopss...did i get the last fact wrong???

Well, I don't know about the facts, but the attitude...yes, it's wrong. (And what's with 'oopss'?)

It's tragically horrid that someone should resort to alpha-male thumping in a time of grief; in anyone's time of grief.

People don't suffer any less just because it's America.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This is wrong at so many levels, its like comparing apples to watermelons. But facts aside, what gives? Next we will be comparing bomb blasts.
10:30 PM
Janaki said…
I totally agree. This mail sickened me too.
10:30 AM
Nagesh Pai said…
Your Empathy for the Pain and suffering of the Americans as much as those of our own folks, is the true fragrance of an Indian.

We must treasure this.

About the mail, my wild guess the mail has come from the desk of Vill Bill (the guy with the CM label on him) or from not-so-lil Johhny (the BMC d'comissioner), with an intent to create a feel good saying "Hey things arent so bad here :-)"
12:15 PM
oglidonkee said…
Ahh well i was glad to see that mail, every last week of the month my client allows for a dress down at work and they collect a pound for the same which would in turn be donated to some cause.

Last month they had a poster showing two images of Mumbai .. (a)one Gateway of India and the other the (b)Dharavi slum......
And wrote below it the city that has (a) also has (b). So lets collect for the mumbai floods!

These ppl need a bit of "un" learning they think they know too much about a city they have just heard of ......
so i would say kudos to that email.

OD
7:06 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more