When the tsunami came on 26 December 2004, I was barely touched. I worked for a large software company in Bangalore, and the only disaster I knew of was not meeting my quarterly revenue targets. The day after the tsunami, I was having coffee with a colleague in the company cafeteria, when the conversation turned to the disaster which had killed 200,000 people across Asia in a span of seconds. What a tragedy, I remarked. He took a deep puff of his cigarette and sighed, “Yeah, but what can we do?” Something about that remark made me sit up. I was 25, physically fit, had an MBA from a top business school, and was a fast-rising professional in an Indian multinational. My ambition kept pace with my confidence, and I was earning enough to say that I lacked nothing. And yet, I did not seem to have an answer to this simple question: “What can we do?”
Let’s do it
Three days later, I called up the Indian Air Force’s missing persons helpline and convinced officials to let me fly on a cargo plane to Car Nicobar, one of the southernmost islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, and the worst hit by the tsunami. A quarter of the island’s population, nearly 5,000 people, had been wiped out by the tsunami. The rest had fled into the jungles in the interior of the island. I volunteered to work with the army and paramilitary troops scouting trails in the jungle, taking count of the survivors and delivering relief supplies.
Second thoughts
This story is from the June 2020 edition of Life Positive.
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This story is from the June 2020 edition of Life Positive.
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