Sister act: Eight-yr-old saves siblings
Sanjay Pinto
Friday, December 31, 2004 (Cuddalore):
An eight-year-old girl in Cuddalore's devastated Singarathope village saved her younger brother and sister when the killer tsunami struck their home.
"I was playing when water gushed in. I just grabbed my siblings, carried my little brother, pulled my sister and kept running," Arul Mozhi recounts.
The family has lost their home, but the three children and their parents are happy to be alive and reunited.
Their mother still cannot get over the little rescue operation.
"I didn't know where they were. I had no idea they were all sitting in a corner together," said Anbarassi, Arul Mozhi's mother.
Meanwhile, the little boy now has a New Year resolution, to stop fighting with his sister.
"I won't fight with my sister. She pulled me to safety," Nivekumar said.
It will certainly take a long time for the children to pick up their books or their parents to get back to work. But in Singarathope, the little champion is the talk of the town.
Source : NDTV
Friday, December 31, 2004 (Cuddalore):
An eight-year-old girl in Cuddalore's devastated Singarathope village saved her younger brother and sister when the killer tsunami struck their home.
"I was playing when water gushed in. I just grabbed my siblings, carried my little brother, pulled my sister and kept running," Arul Mozhi recounts.
The family has lost their home, but the three children and their parents are happy to be alive and reunited.
Their mother still cannot get over the little rescue operation.
"I didn't know where they were. I had no idea they were all sitting in a corner together," said Anbarassi, Arul Mozhi's mother.
Meanwhile, the little boy now has a New Year resolution, to stop fighting with his sister.
"I won't fight with my sister. She pulled me to safety," Nivekumar said.
It will certainly take a long time for the children to pick up their books or their parents to get back to work. But in Singarathope, the little champion is the talk of the town.
Source : NDTV
Sridhar Mahadevan at 8:50:00 am |
http://greattsunami2004.blogspot.com/
Thoughts after pondering the meaning of the Great Asian Tsunami of 2004
by The Zenman (with a bow and a nod to Voltaire in 1775)
In 20 minutes, immense tidal waves, or ''tsunami'', as the Japanese call
them, wiped out over 500,000 people living or vacationing along the
seashores of the vast Indian Ocean. The Great Tsunami of 2004 will go
down in history as one of the greatest natural disasters ever
witnessed by the postmodern world, where digital cameras, videos,
websites, blogs, TV camera crews and newspapers told the tragic story.
What does it all mean? Is there a God who caused all this human
suffering? Was the Earth angry at us for the way we have treated her
the last 100 years, producing vast clouds of pollution everywhere,
cutting down her forests and depleting her coal, oil and gas reserves
for our homes, our cars, oun airplanes and our vacations in exotic
locales? Was all this predicted by Nostradamus long ago, or within the
mysterious pages of that book titled The Bible Code?
The answers to all the above questions are no, no, no and no. There is
no God, and it's time to get over it. Earth is not a concious living
thing that gets angry or smiles or lauhgs or coughs. Nostradamus was a
French poet and a quack doctor, forget about him. And as for The Bible
Code, what a bunch of crock!
This tragic event, seen worldwide this time via TV and video, the
Internet and blog websites, was just the way things happen. From time
to time, there are powerful earthquakes on Earth that do immense
damagge. From time to time, there are floods, typhoons, tsunamis,
tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, draughts. We can prepare for them,
and we can use technology to be prepared for them.
But one thing we must keep in mind, as the events of the Great Tsunami
of 2004 are replayed in our minds over and over again, is that we
humans are mere evolutionary guests here on Planet Earth. We evolved
from the earliest forms of organic life, and now we have arrived at
the point in cosmic history where we are. But we did not create Earth,
and there is no God or gods who created the Earth either. The Earth
was here long before we were ever here, and it will remain here long
after we are gone, and even after all forms of human life are gone in
the future.
I think the Buddhist teachings have it right: there is suffering in
the world, in life, and we must lean to accept it, and then get on
with our lives as best we can, working together to lessen the
suffering and the pain. That is one lesson we can all take from the
footprints left on the beaches of South Asia by the Great 2004 Tsunami
in the Indian Ocean.
I was reading the story of a young 16 year old Sri Lankan girl who
miraculously survived the tsunami in her village, but lost many
members of her own family. She said: "It's hard to bear this tragedy,"
she said softly to a CNN camera crew, "but I have to."
One of the greatest natural catastrophes in generations was just
another milestone on the trail of this shy girl's ill fortune. It's
hard for all of us to bear this tragic event, that killed nearly
500,000 people -- innocent people, young and old, black and white and
brown and yellow, from over 40 nationalities -- but we have to.
We must go on, we will go on, supporting one another in the best ways
we can, and as human history evolves, seesawing from tragedy to
tragedy, we are slowly understanding our place in the vast scheme of
things.
It is our place to be born, to live, to dream, to suffer, to
experience joy and bliss, to write and to dance and to paint and to
make music and to hold hands, watching sunsets and sunrises, and while
there is no supernatural God of the Bible or the Koran, and no Hindu
or Shinto or Taoist gods, we do have each other to rely on, and there
is where our real strength and power lie. Use it. Let us hug one
another and rise up from this indescribable natural calamity and
become one with the world we are part of. Let us endure, let us
persevere, let us move forward.