Six Degrees of Separation, from tragic instances to celebrity indifference

Precisely four weeks ago I burnt the ring finger of my right hand while performing a seemingly innocent act – heating a cup of tea in the microwave. Don’t ask how, these things happen very easily to me. The accident left me with a boil and two small brown spots, and shooting pain.
I would like to believe that with so many futile accidents over the course of last 30 years spent on mother earth my threshold for pain is pretty good. But this time around I actually cried and writhed in pain, over what seemed a small burn. It took about three weeks for me to heal and my finger still has a memento from this burn.
And thus my heart raced back to 2011 April when India was hosting the World Cup. A few weeks before the world a massive fire engulfed suburban Bandra in Bombay, for those who are not that accustomed to Bombay - Bandra is one of the poshest of neighborhoods and every girl in Bandra makes it to the fashion week :bowdown. Yes, the prettiest girls of Mumbai inadvertently live in Bandra :rant
21 people were severly injured and a lot of people, press reports say 2,000 residents, I’m sure there are more, have lost their homes. I could understand their pain, apart from recuperating physically a long struggle awaited them – the struggle to rebuild the lives of their families. The government offered them Rs. 25,000 as relief to families – is 25 K enough to rebuild everything from scratch? Maybe yes, maybe not….There are many of us who earn more than that as wages for the jobs we do, and we still grumble about how we are underpaid! What these people need is not just financial relief, what they need is relief from the real estate and land grabbing mafia. I’m sure there are many who will say that these people who build and live in slums deserve this – believe me I was one of them but that’s because I had heard only what people told me. That’s because I lived in the comfort of my second floor house, which probably was built on land grabbed from someone and some of it was illegal too (being in Ulhasnagar – the city of illegal constructions). Surely nobody loves living in a slum, people are forced to do so because nobody cares about them and they need a roof over their head. So they do what we as humans do – try to survive. They are the marginalized who have been left on the fringes, while the government focuses on building malls and high rises.
During the 26th July floods that gripped Mumbai, which I had the fortune of experiencing first hand we’ve all learnt that what we need most is a well-trained crisis management team. Which we still don’t have.
Another fact that’s been bothering me most and especially now is that isn’t Bandra the land of celebrities – where were the Salman’s, Shah Rukh’s, Aamir’s etc, etc, well none of them had a film releasing then so this was not the right time to come out and help. To be considerate to them, some of them expressed anguish on twitter. But what about getting out of your house and doing something…. Don’t tell me that you have secretly donated something and just don’t want to talk about it, because all of us know that’s BS.
I have a grouse with most Indian celebrities – in a country that’s crazy after filmstars and cricketers why don’t these people use their star status to do something good. Salman gets drunk and runs over slum dwellers, beats up his ex-girlfriends, kills endangered animals but he’s still being human – because he sells t-shirts and gets his best friends to walk the ramp to pay for somebody’s cancer treatment, all around the release of Dabangg and when he’s hosting Bigg Boss. Aamir joins Medha Patkar and realises that she’s protesting for something valid two weeks before the release of Rang De Basanti.
Wow, quite a journey this rambling has been from a minor fire to celebrity indifference. Six degrees of separation…
My heart goes out to everyone, who have lost more important things in the fire than Rubina Ali’s oscar trophies. And a big hug to my friend Avi Bachrani who was a volunteer in the food packets section at Bandra. It’s people like you who are the real heroes….And the real sons of soil….By the way there was a search party sent for Raj Thackeray and the other sons of soil :bonk

 

Thank you ladies....Mindian - I am not from Bandra, how I wish I did :bowdown but not anymore.
Well, it was my pathetic attempt at being sarcastic :bonk Truth of the matter is on my last trip to India, I visited Bandra and every other girl looked the same, dressed the same & thought she was a model!

Everyone of you have mentioned about the spirit of the common man, I guess that is what makes India beautiful. The feeling of community, which somehow I think our parent's generation has much more I feel like our generation is losing that maybe because we have gotten too busy...

 

Sorry to cause any ladies any offence....I thus denounce lame attempts at being sarcastic and can I just say all Indian women are beautiful

 

Well said Arunarc