Editorial

To be absolutely honest, had someone not mentioned the river Kosi in connection with the Bihar floods to me, I wouldn’t have known where it was. With that confession off my chest, I must say that my lack of knowledge while extremely shameful is also something common among most IITians on our campus.

We live on this beautiful campus for 8 months each year, the only contact we have with the outside world is during brief visits home, when we actually read the newspaper or watch the news. The US presidential campaign, the terror in Jammu and Kashmir, the Olympics, the Bihar floods, all these pass us by with hardly a murmur, so lost are we in our own lives and problems. Such ignorance certainly doesn’t bode well for us, now or in the future. We tut tut when we hear of new violence in Kashmir or in the east, but it takes a Lehmann crash which could affect our job opportunities to jerk us out of our stupor. For a brief period of time, we follow the news avidly and talk of budget cuts and Ireland being sold on ebay. But even so, the only change we’ve made is to rewrite our resumes to aim them at consulting companies instead of finance. When the world is undergoing a fuel crisis, we still leave our comps and lights on 24 hours a day. While we hear of food prices rising, we still waste colossal amounts of it in our messes.

Of course when the news finally seeped down to us, we started a fund collecting money for the Bihar flood victims. But is that all we can do? We are after all, IITians: touted to be the most intelligent engineers in the country. Can we clear our consciences by saying we did all we could to help, seeing as we donated a 100 rupees from our mess accounts? This wasn’t always the case. In 1986 when Bihar flooded, a team of students from IITB travelled to Bihar and set up a mechanism to drain flood water from inundated fields, saving the livelihood of hundreds of farmers.  But in 2008 when Bihar floods again, we set up a donation account. When we have far more modern technology, the internet and so many more resources at hand, money certainly isn’t all we can give.

There are still, a few bright lights- people we can take inspiration from. Take Anand Mohan, an IITD graduate who went back home to Bihar to say goodbye to his parents before joining a job in an Australian mining company.  After watching people starving in relief camps, he and his friends set up a group named Aastha Volunteers to look after the flood victims. They solicit and manage donations to buy food supplies for people in the camps.

While our lack of information about the world beyond what immediately concerns us is shocking, what is more frightening is our lethargy towards even the events we know about. When people live in terror in J&K, in desolation in Bihar, in constant dread of bomb blasts all over the country, if we think that we are living in a safe cocoon with our own little concerns and minuscule problems, we’re simply kidding ourselves. We weren’t always this selfish. And now, we can’t afford to be.

- Nithya Subramanian