Vain gestures

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Tsunami victims still on the streets  

The last week I read this article. And, around the same time I heard that India was sending relief supplies for Hurricane Katrina. Then came the obligatory email comparing Indian response to the Mumbai rains to US government response to Hurricane Katrina. Of course, if hadn’t guessed it, it was lot of chest thumping and how better we are. We Indians are very good at symbolic gestures and chest thumping that generate nothing more than an ego surge.

One year after the Tsunami we have loads of people still living on the streets. I could not miss the irony – the tent colony is called Kargil Nagar, after the Indo-Pak Kargil skirmish. I guess it is their way of showing their patriotism to a nation that has pretty much forgotten them. And, if this is the state of affairs in Tamilnadu, I bet things are worse in Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

So, before we use unimportant statistics to show how  better we are lets ask ourselves if we are so better why is it that in pretty much  economic/ quality of comparisons Americans  are ahead of us. And, before you send relief supplies to the US ask if there are folks back home that are in need of them. Finally, the government and the agencies here would have done a lot more for the people affected in the next year than you can expect to happen there in the next decade.