This is India

[Guest guest]

Dear friends of Advaitin

The following mail which I received from India would be interesting to

all well-wishers of India:

This is a very interesting article about our

hindustani culture

which became evident during the recent train

accident of Punjab.

-------------------------

 

A Gurudwara and a few hundred villagers , they

made all the difference

between life and death for over two hundred of

injured passengers in one

 

of the most disastrous rail smash in recent times.

It was chill night. And pitch dark. The fateful

scene was in a village,

Khanna, 50 miles away from the industrial town of

Ludhiana in Punjab.

This was where the ghastly rail accident reported

in newspapers took

place on November 26. It was 3.15 am. The

Frontier Express had

derailed just two minutes earlier and the

derailed bogies had spilled on

 

to the adjoining railway line. The speeding

Sealdah mail from the

opposite side rammed into the derailed train. The

result of the

explosion--instant death, mutilation of the

bodies, severed limbs and

bodies hanging from the mangled train, wailing

children, women and

men. All in a matter of seconds.

 

Within minutes the loud speaker of the Khanna

Gurudwara began

announcing the gravity of the disaster, calling

upon able-bodied men and

 

women to come out to help the victims. The

loudspeakers woke up the

residents of five nearby villages. And hundreds

of them poured in a

matter of minutes, but, the Railway relief team

reached well past 5.30

am.

 

The Gurudwara, villagers had, in stages, assumed

charge of the relief

operations even as the official relief measures

joined later.

But the first to arrive were the villagers. Since

it was dark

everywhere, what was needed was light. (The

Railway searchlight came

only at 6 am even though Ludhiana was only 50 kms

away.) But the

solution was ready on hand. The villagers lined

up their tractors,

started their engines and switched on their

headlights to provide the

needed light for the relief work.

 

The next task was to extricate the survivors who

were trapped between

the broken bogies and overturned compartments.

The strong hands of the

sturdy sikhs were themselves adequate to break

open the doors and iron

grills of the bogies. This was supplemented by

axes and saws brought

later to facilitate the work of extricating the

trapped dead and injured

 

passengers.

 

The next hurdle was the bitter cold which was

freezing the dead and

alive. The healthy Punjabi women repeatedly

ferried bundles of paddy

straw from the nearest fields which they set

afire to warm up the

atmosphere to save the suffering from biting cold.

 

When the villagers found the bodies of many

injured and dead women

passengers exposed, they untied their turbans and

placed the cloth on

them. The local Gurudwara turned into a medical

camp and the famous

Langer of the Gurudwara-- which serves food for

all those who go to the

temple--began preparing and serving refreshments

to the hundreds who

were injured. And when the official relief

arrived, the villagers began

to provide refreshments to a huge turnout of

30000 people--the victims,

their near and dear, relief workers and

officials--who came everyday to

the accident site.

 

The villagers formed a 16 member Rail Durghatana

Prabhandhak Committee

(Rail disaster management committee) to oversee

the operations, raise

resources, and issue printed passes for the

volunteers to go past the

police lines for relief work. Contributions in

cash and kind kept

pouring in and kept the relief going for a week.

The committee ended the

 

relief mission with a surplus of a whole

truckload of food grains.

 

The volunteers who converged from Ludhiana swung

in to medical relief

at the accident spot and in the three Ludhiana

hospitals. Their level of

 

involvement with the victims lying in the

hospitals was intense.

 

Not a Rupee of the accident victims, dead or

alive, was misappropriated

or lost. Jaswant Singh, resident of the Bhatiyan

village, handed over to

 

the authorities a bag containing Rs 3 lakhs in

cash and jewellery valued

 

at Rs 2 lakhs to the SDM

 

This is what a living community does. Community

fosters sharing. There

is no substitute for shared living.Community

living in India ensures

that people share their suffering and happiness--

the first one is

shared without invitation and the second one

mandates invitation to

share.

That is why, in the Indian tradition,people visit

the bereaved without

invitation and go to marriages or other functions

only if invited.

It is not * social service * , which is a western

virtue. Social

service is not sharing, while a functioning

community shares. While

social

service demands indirect returns like

recognition, fame and even

religious

conversion induced by gratefulness, community

sharing which is part of

the Indian tradition mandates sharing as dharma.

This is what is

declining in modern times and what needs

reinstatement. And this is

precisely what the Punjabi villagers have

demonstrated.

 

And yet except a small English daily in Delhi, no

other major

newspaper, no English newspaper published what

the people from five

villages of Punjab volunteers have done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

..