Someone has wisely said, ‘All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. The funny side of change is that it strikes you when you’re least expecting it, when you are in complete sync with life. Then change slithers down jolting us from behind and somehow we are never the same again. It happened to me when the tsunami of 2004 struck our shores.
It had been my first trip away from home, representing a painting workshop for my school at Wayanad hills and we had boarded the train on Christmas day, my thirteen year old self quivering with excitement of being on my own. I bid a hasty goodbye to my anxious parents who were spending Boxing Day at Mahabalipuram beach resort with friends. Too excited to sleep, I remember waking up at the wee hours of the morning. When the clock struck eight the train began to swerve madly causing passengers to fall from their berths. In a few moments we were back to normal and the train stopped. Feeling scared I rushed to my teacher who soothed me saying it was nothing. Feeling reassured I remember spending the rest of the morning in bliss completely unaware of the damage those few moments had caused to tons of people including my parents. On reaching my workshop late in the evening I was greeted with anxious phone calls and messages from my parents who had been worried out of their minds. They had experienced a narrow brush with death and come face to face with the giant waves that hit the Marina. It was only with a stroke of luck that they managed to hold on and not get swept away unlike several of their friends who lost their lives. It was only then that I realized that trains had derailed due to the quake and I could have been in one of them, that my parents could have been one of those millions who actually got swept away by the killer wave and she raged her way up the shores. In a lot of ways the tsunami changed the way I looked at life . The beach visits I longed for were replaced by a creeping sense of dread at the chunk of human life it had sliced away in one sweeping wave. The tsunami changed me. I began to realise the value of every moment, the value of the present because tomorrows could never come and we’d never know if this was our last day left on this planet.
I took up tsunami relief as a cause in my school and we took up ventures to collect money for the ones who lost everything near and dear to them, to put ourselves in their shoes and help them to pull themselves together after the trauma. The tsunami came as a wakeup call to me , that we cannot compete with nature’s fury , and it takes only a moment for the castle that man has so painstakingly created to come crashing down like a deck of cards. !
I also realised that while we brood and fight over communal issues , hatch plans to wage wars, foster grudges among neighbour countries and device strategies of mass destruction nature is hatching her little plan too. And the tsunami taught me that we should put our differences aside and unite as a whole , because when nature raises her club and strikes we are left with only our ‘foes’ to turn to.
The fatal day of the tsunami chimes in my mind when I read up on the issues that the world is fighting over , I am reminded of that morning that started out as any other until earth ‘shook’ things up... a few moments was all it took , but sadly it took all...!
It had been my first trip away from home, representing a painting workshop for my school at Wayanad hills and we had boarded the train on Christmas day, my thirteen year old self quivering with excitement of being on my own. I bid a hasty goodbye to my anxious parents who were spending Boxing Day at Mahabalipuram beach resort with friends. Too excited to sleep, I remember waking up at the wee hours of the morning. When the clock struck eight the train began to swerve madly causing passengers to fall from their berths. In a few moments we were back to normal and the train stopped. Feeling scared I rushed to my teacher who soothed me saying it was nothing. Feeling reassured I remember spending the rest of the morning in bliss completely unaware of the damage those few moments had caused to tons of people including my parents. On reaching my workshop late in the evening I was greeted with anxious phone calls and messages from my parents who had been worried out of their minds. They had experienced a narrow brush with death and come face to face with the giant waves that hit the Marina. It was only with a stroke of luck that they managed to hold on and not get swept away unlike several of their friends who lost their lives. It was only then that I realized that trains had derailed due to the quake and I could have been in one of them, that my parents could have been one of those millions who actually got swept away by the killer wave and she raged her way up the shores. In a lot of ways the tsunami changed the way I looked at life . The beach visits I longed for were replaced by a creeping sense of dread at the chunk of human life it had sliced away in one sweeping wave. The tsunami changed me. I began to realise the value of every moment, the value of the present because tomorrows could never come and we’d never know if this was our last day left on this planet.
I took up tsunami relief as a cause in my school and we took up ventures to collect money for the ones who lost everything near and dear to them, to put ourselves in their shoes and help them to pull themselves together after the trauma. The tsunami came as a wakeup call to me , that we cannot compete with nature’s fury , and it takes only a moment for the castle that man has so painstakingly created to come crashing down like a deck of cards. !
I also realised that while we brood and fight over communal issues , hatch plans to wage wars, foster grudges among neighbour countries and device strategies of mass destruction nature is hatching her little plan too. And the tsunami taught me that we should put our differences aside and unite as a whole , because when nature raises her club and strikes we are left with only our ‘foes’ to turn to.
The fatal day of the tsunami chimes in my mind when I read up on the issues that the world is fighting over , I am reminded of that morning that started out as any other until earth ‘shook’ things up... a few moments was all it took , but sadly it took all...!
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