Can we ever be ready to die?

Disaster is a part of life anywhere in the world. And as one disaster follows the other, as it will inevitably do, people learn from the first and are better prepared to face the second. Or so anyone would presume. But things are not that simple. Consider what happens in India, for instance. I am always writing about how we never seem to learn, how we fail to follow up with any degree of efficiency when we are badly hit by man or nature, and how we cannot understand what George Santayana meant when he said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

We do not remember what went wrong and why, just as we cannot remember what we did when it happened and why it did not work. And when it happens again, as it will, we are not ready to deal with it.

All this sounds obscure, right? Actually, it is very simple. And it comes back to haunt me, you, all of us each time.

Consider the recent bomb blasts in Mumbai – how much have we changed since the previous blasts just a few years earlier? And then there was a bomb that went off in a crowded location in Delhi just a couple of weeks ago; people are still dying from that one. Have we learned how to prevent this sort of attack, or do we now know how to handle the consequences of not remembering? People are still dying. People are still not willing to fix themselves and thus help fix the situation. What are they doing instead? Blaming the government for not keeping them secure, for not being able to prevent such attacks, for not seeing that our country and its citizens are safe. Where does the primary responsibility for that actually lie? I would think each one of us should be alert, aware, able to keep ourselves inviolate, as far as is possible.

But we cannot do that. Not unless we, as a nation, as a people, as a culture, are willing to change our behaviour, our perceptions and our comfort levels. Consider this: Just two short weeks before the attacks on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai in November 2008, I went in there to do some errands; my bags were thoroughly checked, my person was thoroughly checked and I was torn between indignation at the hold-up and gladness that the hotel was being so careful. The next week, I walked right in, without more than the most cursory and totally normal check. I did wonder, but without too much effort spent on the exercise. Just a few days later, all hell broke loose.

Today, no cars are allowed into the hotel porch without special reason; no one is allowed into the building itself without a thorough search. And people – even those who remember the nightmare of those three days – have already started objecting to being examined, to being stopped before they go in, to being held up for the all-important minute or so that it takes for the check.

The same sort of thing happens with natural disaster too. We all read about the tsunami of Christmas time in 2004 and its aftermath, the death toll, the number of missing, the devastation of land and families that nature brought with it. Some of the responsibility for the toll the wave took lay with man, with intemperate destruction of the shoreline, leaving it vulnerable to even the mildest attack, the lack of safety measures along a coast that could be thus destroyed, the instability of homes and the total incompetence of the authorities to deal with the situation. And then there was the great flood of 2005 in Mumbai, when the city was forced to a standstill, about 5000 people died, incalculable financial losses were incurred and innumerable homes were destroyed.

Today, we still moan about waterlogging, but we do not stop ourselves throwing garbage into the waterways and drains and clogging them. We still stay home in fear when a storm blows up, but we do not make sure that there will not be flooding through the streets of the city, there will not be delays in travel and there will not be deaths by drowning or disease.

And where it comes to earthquakes, we will never learn. True, we cannot predict when a quake will hit, but we can make sure that we do not indulge in excessive deforestation and thus make mountain slopes fragile, we do not make buildings that are earthquake proof, we do not make sure that response teams are trained and equipped to handle the movement of the earth without delay or inefficient fumbling.

From that point of view, the aftermath earthquake that struck last Sunday in Sikkim was amazingly well managed – or so it seems, perhaps because the area is not too highly populated, and getting information from there is still not the easiest task right now. That may be the cynical way of looking at it, but it is true. The 6.8 Richter earthquake has so far resulted in about 60 deaths, though another figure puts the fatalities at 98 till now. Thick fog is hampering relief and rescue operations, communications signals are not clear, if any links exist, and the terrain limits access. Landslides have caused much of the damage to life and property.

But have we learned from the previous quakes? In 2005 over 80,000 people died in northern India and Pakistan. In 2001, over 20,000 people died in Gujarat. In 1993, about 10,000 people died in Maharashtra. What comes next? That depends, I would think, on what we have learned from what has happened so far. It all depends on us…

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Ramya Sarma is a Mumbai-based writer-editor.