Revati Laul, Special Correspondent, NDTV
Thursday, September,25 2008 (New Delhi)
We live in such voyeuristic times that it's often difficult to feel anything anymore. Blasts. Floods. Torture. Terror. Every news piece is a story of victims of some sort or the other and after a point it's all deafeningly similar. An endless stream of tears, loss, and above all of that, viewer and reporter fatigue.
So when I went into Bihar to report on the floods, I was carrying the enormous weight of that weariness with me. `Oh, you're going in three weeks later...huh...,' said a colleague or two. `Well, there are stories to do yaar, but it's no longer a headline. Not a sexy story.'
So it took a while for these layers to peel away and for the true horror of what I was in; actually dawn on me. Realisation came nearly two weeks into reporting in flood hit Bihar. Relief camp after camp. Tens of thousands of people queuing in long lines to get food. But it seemed like the Nitish Kumar government was doing the impossible. Moving a state machinery that had become defunct through decades of misuse and getting large relief camps into pretty decent shape.
Read the rest of the story here
So when I went into Bihar to report on the floods, I was carrying the enormous weight of that weariness with me. `Oh, you're going in three weeks later...huh...,' said a colleague or two. `Well, there are stories to do yaar, but it's no longer a headline. Not a sexy story.'
So it took a while for these layers to peel away and for the true horror of what I was in; actually dawn on me. Realisation came nearly two weeks into reporting in flood hit Bihar. Relief camp after camp. Tens of thousands of people queuing in long lines to get food. But it seemed like the Nitish Kumar government was doing the impossible. Moving a state machinery that had become defunct through decades of misuse and getting large relief camps into pretty decent shape.
Read the rest of the story here
1 comment:
This is Amita from GiveIndia. Three of our NGOs have been raising funds for Bihar and have been sending us regular updates. You can read the last one here.
http://blog.giveindia.org/2008/10/after-floods.html
However, the real challenge will lie in rebuilding villages/homes/schools and medical facilities.
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