Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Kedarnath calamity, warning from God?

The recent tragedy in Uttarakhand has resulted in the loss of many lives as well as severe property damage. It resulted in a lot of physical as well as emotional damage to many people and their families. I read some articles on Facebook where some so-called Swamis or Yogis are posting ridiculous comments about this tragedy. Nowadays these types of articles show up after almost any tragedy like this. They all have a similar tone, they all blame the deterioration of human values and humans drifting away from God (that too only the God of their own religion) as the main reasons for such disaster. They claim that this tragedy is a warning from God to all those who don't believe in him, are drifting away from him, or are not too sincere in following his directions. Apart from the insensitive nature of these comments, they surprise me with their poor logic and fanatic tone, I also wonder how these people can be so senseless to grab such a tragic incident to advertise their product.

Most of these disasters are either human-made (mass shootings, accidents) or natural calamities (like hurricanes, flash floods, earthquakes, etc.). All these result in heavy loss of human life and property. Whenever anything like this happens it's sad and shocking. Most of us feel sympathy towards victims of these incidents no matter where they happen. However, some people manage to look at these events in a totally ridiculous way and use it to propagate their religion or cult. For them, any tragic incident is a golden opportunity to remind everyone about the authority of their God. They do this despite knowing that many people who suffer in these incidents are very religious (some of these incidents happen at so-called holy places), but still, they go ahead with their argument shamelessly with all the knowledge and awareness that they are insulting victims and hurting survives of these tragedies. I have no objection to their attempts to advertise their God and religion, they have full right to sell their product and do marketing for it but to use such incidents for this purpose is very pathetic and insensitive. I also know that not all religious organizations do these things but most of the time they fail to criticize these types of comments in strong words.

I feel very bad after reading these types of posts. Recently it happened after the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting incident and now after this Uttarakhand tragedy. Some of these natural disasters do want to give some warning to us about our abuse of nature and its resources but they are not from any God or superpower. In many cases, it's human error or lack of proper planning that results in massive loss of human life and property damage. We need to analyze the incident, figure out where things went wrong, and make sure that those mistakes never happen again. If all of us think that it was God's will to destroy property and kill people and nothing can be done to prevent this (other than praying) then we are inviting many more disasters like this and after every disaster, we will be looking at the sky for possible answers. We need to make use of all technology that is available to us and make a reliable system of disaster prevention and management. If we miss lessons from such disasters and opportunities to improve that can help us to improve, we are missing a chance to prevent such massive losses in the future. I hope rather than blaming destiny we rectify our mistakes and be better prepared next time because every human life is important. So, please think about it. Are these tragedies a warning from God or nature or a result of our own mismanagement, and poor policies?

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)

Links:
1. Faith shaken? Pilgrims say they won't return

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