Chennai. A city famous for its sweltering heat is now making headlines for its rampaging flood. This moment of crisis has shown us different shades of humanity. The whole nation has come together to pray for Chennai and lend a helping hand via technology. Ordinary people, extraordinary stories. The internet is brimming with these little stories that bring a lump in our throats. The teach us about love, compassion, duty, equality.
But these very stories threaten to show us the ugly side of the floods. A side that comes close to dumping all the beautiful rescue work carried out by the ordinary people down the drain.
Rumour mills churning overtime
Disasters always give birth to a breed of people who love pressing the panic button with stories freshly pressed in the imagination. While the whole of Chennai was reeling under the aftermath of unprecedented rain, there were many people who were busy scaring others around. Some of the worst rumours that emerged were ‘further rains are expected’, ‘crocodiles have escaped’ and the ‘7.1 magnitude earthquake in the Indian Ocean is going to cause a tsunami.’
Photoshop Zindabad
While photoshop is a favourite tool for many people to cover their flaws, for others it’s a way of enhancing their stuff. There was a news channel that photoshopped stills of its reporter standing in knee-deep water to waist deep water, and the result was an absolute disaster. Photoshopped images of Narendra Modi on a fake aerial survey have also earned a lot of flak.
Amma! So much attention-seeking!
Even as relief operations are slowly being channelised properly, in many parts of Chennai, there are stickers of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on packets of food being distributed to the victims. All that can be said of this situation is the fact that a disaster isn’t the time to shout from the rooftops that you’ve done something noble. The bottomline is, not every chance is a good chance to pull of a publicity stint. To add to that, she had also refused the Karnataka government’s aid towards the flood relief. Amma!
Not praying enough, are we?
The most hollow of these unpleasant discussions have been about the media, Listen up, you guys, there are several people from the media industry who are literally burning the midnight oil, wading through water to get 24*7 coverage. So, shut it, the media IS playing its part covering the floods as efficiently as possible. People who are cribbing about lack of media coverage should just sit in Assam when the annual flood festival strikes there.
So, yes, it’s a time of crisis and we need to shift our attention to things that require it, instead of seeking mileage or playing blame game. Period.