I was outraged by what I read on concentriccircle about child traffickers preying upon children orphaned in the tsunami in Sri Lanka… I happened to mention this to my husband yesterday, and he said after a moment’s thought – but isn’t this what happens all the time -innocent children are either weaned away with guile or kidnapped and forced into these?
My initial reaction was that of dismay, how can you say this? Isn’t this – trafficking in the tsunami orphans – the depths of evil? Unimaginable…? But then I thought about it – what about the millions of children who get forced into the flesh trade every year?
Why have I never felt outraged about them – or to be utterly honest, even thought much about them…? Their plight is no worse than those of the Srilankan children… Read Sunil Laxman’s post on the documentary the day my god died… The UN estimates that one MILLION girls/women are forced into the sex-trade EVERY YEAR. Even the United States is not free of this menace, with an estimated 50-60,000 girls (minors) trafficked annually.
When it is about one million lives everyday, it becomes mundane, an everyday occurence – not newsworthy…
I remember this wonderful article Atanu Dey had written – An Entirely Avoidable Great Tragedy – about the silent everyday disasters which never make the news – We are a strange lot. We get on with our lives as if nothing is the matter with the world, when 10 million children die needlessly every year. Then a stupid large wave hits and a few thousand die and we run around like headless chickens…
In his superb book, Everybody loves a good drought, P.Sainath says abut the hoopla made about the plague of 1994 – … which in turn, gave the world an apocalyptic vision of the Black Death mowing down millions in India. Actually, the plague, or anything else you want to call it (to each his own bacilli) took fifty four lives. Tuberculosis claims over 450,000 Indian lives each year, nearly eighty thousand times as many. It would be lucky to get a couple of columns in the newspapers yearly….
Diarrhhoea claims close to 1.5 million infants each year in this country – one every three minutes. That is thrity thousand times the number of lives lost in the plague.
And so on… Plague makes for beter copy anyway
So what does this mean?
Have we become so hardened and insensitive that everyday tragedies and horrors do not affect us any longer?
The larger the numbers, the better the story…
The greater the tragedy, the better copy it makes… throw in a few photographs from the scene – or even gory ones from archives will do…. and greater the glee with which we read it… It is the same ghoulish instinct that draws people towards the scene of say, a gruesome road accident… and tut tut before we get back to whatever we were doing…
Update : Selective Amnesia has just put up these two fantastic ads – I will post them here and let them do the talking for this post above…
(A 200 km/hr wind can blow away a whole State. What’s it going to take to move a nation?)
(It’s amazing the effect a cyclone can have. The people of Orissa are dying in hundreds. The rest of the country has gone blind)
Thanks for linking to my post Charu.
It’s really true that if something is happening all the time around us, we don’t even tend to notice it.
25% of Botswana has HIV.
half a million people are infected by African Trypanosomiasis annually (something I kinda dabble on in my research), and 50-100 thousand die. Do we even know?
Malaria kills about 1.5 milllion people a year. Do we hear about that?
I don’t know how many people have been killed in the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. How often does the mainstream media (apart from Nick Kristof of the New york times) cover it?
Such is the world. People don’t like listening to bad news.
It’s interesting how these people (u have quoted above) lose sight of the main point behind all these disasters. Simply put…if tuberculosis were to kill a 100 thousand people in a single day at a single place…I am sure people will sit up and notice. If a million girls were abducted from one place in a short period of time …I am sure news companies would notice. So many people die everyday for various reasons…how is it even humanly possible to mourn all??? I mean…how else do you expect people to react if not with callousness…its a simple matter of common sense and human survival. I am surprised at the “surprise” expressed by these individuals (including Sunil Laxman). Sure I feel bad…I have a similar post up on my blog where I express the same dispair and complaints…but we are helpless after a certain extent. You can only do so much till you realize that you cannot change the world…and realize instead that the world is made to whip you into a better individual. Later.
Sunil – people love listening to bad news – but only if it is sudden and sensational enough – give it one day and it becomes stale news… one more meaningless statistic…
Yogustus, I am sorry but and in what way have these disasters made you or me into a better individual??
I am sure noone, not one of the millions who die expect you to mourn – what will your mourning achieve? but saying that it is perfectly normal to turn callous and uncaring is just not acceptable – not to me surely – nothing justifies callousness – the point here is about the way mainstream media too ignores such happenings around the world – media sources need not mourn but can highlight such things and try to make a difference – but they dont because they are not sensational enough…
there are deaths due to starvation in Murshidabad – India. And we don’t get to hear about it. But, if kareena kapoor and shaheed kapoor are caught smooching in public then there is reams of news print devoted to it.
But it is not just the media.friends of mine who work in the social sector tell me, that it is easy to raise monies for AIDS awareness. it is a glamorous cause. But, something like reproductive health is not. Breast cancer is glamourous. Cervical cancer is not. starving children is glamorous. local self governance is not.
perfectly undersrand what you are talking about, Harini – even in causes, there are the ones worth adopting and those which are not worth even thinking about – AIDS is about Richard Gere and third world messiahness (give and take a few discussions about sex and condoms) – bang! you have all the right ingredients for a CAUSE.
I read in your blog about the starvation deaths – and this in a country where there is so mcuh agricultural surplus (and food grains, not cash crops) that the government is actually burning down and throwing away “surplus grain” – you must read Sainath’s Everybody loves… for a heartwrenching insight into the utter stupidnesss of the government and what loosely passes off as policy in this country…
1 million , 10 million or more – what do these numbers mean to me?.
If i do something, that makes the life one person better after being aware of these facts – I am doing my justice on earth.
Else most of the times, the people just read and move on with their own lives…. until the same terror strikes them.
Numbers do make a big difference. For eg, when you and I want to help a Tsunami victim, the best we could do is maybe better 10 people’s lives. When you want to help 50,000 people, you need more people like you. Thats when you get into mobilizing huge numbers of people and tugging at their heart strings to help out. See a related post on my site – concentriccircle.blogspot.com
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The media sensationalizes what YOU, the public, wants…so stop blaming them. And if these many starvation deaths etc…was not reported by THE media…then how did you hear about it??? Just because it’s not on the front page doesn’t mean it doesn’t get printed. And how does the disasters help us be better individuals??? …by giving us an opportunity to serve our fellow beings…that’s how. It’s upto you to take up the challenge and do something about it. And I used the word “callousness” as a survival mechanism. Tell me…when you are joking with your friends…having a good time with your family…in the arms of your beloved…aren’t people still dying at that very moment??? Where then is your empathy??? If a person, who has just lost a family or whose child is missing, comes across you laughing and smiling with your friends…wouldn’t he think something like this thought…”Oh…how callous this world is…my child is somewhere lost and no one seems to care!!!”…that’s what i had meant by callousness.
Don’t lose sight of my point…I am not here to start a war…just a request to get real.
The South-East Asian countries are all the same. The mostly corrupted region in the earth. Anyways good job.
It is high time we do something about all this rather than sitting to watch more on the news. Each of us could make a difference! Start by cleaning up your neighborhood before thinking large scale. I know I have made a start.. thanks to Anniyan!
Acually, It’s Chicken Rules which put up those ads 🙂
Secondly, plague may or may not be good copy, but it sure kills a lot of people in a short span of time.
Like yogustus mentioned, starvation might take more people beyond than plague or a tsunami, but then, it is spread over a period of time, plus there’s always new people who are born to replace the people who die.
But when a cyclone or a tsunami kills, it kills in one fell swoop, without giving people or nature the chance to replace what’s been lost.
Not being callous. Just pragmatic
Chandru, read what I have quoted from Sainath’s book – the plague killed exactly fifty four people – it is just more exotic and third-worldly…