It has been top national news on all media for a week now, a record, albeit unpleasant, of sorts, for a Chennai ‘story’. The 11-storeyed housing complex, Faith — and what an irony — came crashing down last Saturday in seconds, but the tragedy is unfolding by the hour and dragging on for days. And long after the last corpse is dug out or the lucky survivor sees the light of day, the stench of the worst of urban tragedies in recent times will linger, and not just in the air but in our minds too.
Of course, that is no guarantee that the lessons have been learnt. The remaining one of the twin tower, Belief, also 11-storeyed and with the same sordid ‘roots’ as its fallen mate, is awaiting a bitter test, a thunderbolt probably. And God, the reported repository of both faith and belief, knows what else is in store elsewhere. Correction. The officials who are supposed to sanction and supervise such structures must surely know more than even Him, having placed their seal of approval on many such houses of cards. Deviations, thanks to their subtle sleight of official hands, in the master plan can slip through even the Maker’s divine plan. Trust the ongoing post-mortem — of buildings, not bodies — to turn up a clean chit for the high and mighty. Some ivory towers never crash.
Otherwise, all the usual suspects have been rounded up, in true letter of law. And there is much messy business in the offing, beyond the physical rubble, disease and the all round civic disarray that this tragedy has caused. The world belongs to the living, whether they like this habitat or not and it is a wicked world. Legal and financial disputes over properties that have vanished will dog bankers and buyers for quite some time. Compensation disbursal is already bringing out the worst in human nature with three ‘husbands’ turning up to claim a dead woman’s unwitting financial legacy. Those who survived this gory disaster, all poor labourers, face a traumatic future that is unimaginable. Rescue workers say they have rarely seen anything like it before, not a certificate that ‘Emerging Global Metropolitan’ Chennai will relish. Locals bemoan it will be impossible for them to live down the ghosts. And many journos/photographers, on round the clock beat, for whom deaths and disasters are no more than bytes and print, now hate their jobs.
The upheavals faced by a huge part of humanity reveals the larger picture. The boom in urban construction activity over the years has led to a high inter-State traffic of workers. All of them are from villages, having abandoned their traditional but tormenting agricultural legacy. According to a report, it is rural push, and not urban pull, that is fostering this mass mobility. Uprooted from their soil and starved of even basic necessities, they are fertile pickings for contractors and labour dealers. Their working and living conditions are often sub-human and their life vision does not extend beyond the oncoming Saturday evening when they get their weekly pay. It is difficult to fathom how and why nature and man should conspire to inflict such cruelty at that precise hour of hard-earned succour.
In a way no one is to blame. That is because all are to blame. Every section of society, business and officialdom have their fingerprint on the smoking gun. Suffice to say that even a cursory introspection should leave each denizen with a sense of guilt over his/her direct or indirect contribution to such civic miseries. A visit to that site or even a visual of the carnage is sure to make our own castles-in-air come crashing down. After all, writing this itself, from the safe (?) confines of the office has been so very unpleasant.
Praise the seers who said sand, stone and sundry possessions are all myths: Porur is physical proof of that philosophical pudding! Only that it’s difficult for us to digest.
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