The Unkind Cold
At least 60 persons have been killed till Sunday in the cold wave now sweeping the country. This figure well hides the important fact that at least 600 lakhs are shivering insufferably not far from the point of dying. If this is not a natural disaster, what is? But very evidently we haven't prepared for it. To blame it on 'unprecedentedness' can be a good excuse. But only an excuse, nothing more.
Cold spells are not unknown here. Our northern districts lie straight on the way of the Himalayan cold draft and are specially cold-prone. Not a year passes without some people dying due to cold in that part which falls in the temperate zone. Experience of the visitation seems to have been totally lost on us. The most urgent and affordable measure like distributing clothes and blankets on a large scale and evacuating the poorer sections of the people to school and UP buildings could minimise both the suffering and the deaths.
Dhaka had a whole sunless day on Sunday and with the maximum never making beyond 16 degree Celsius was far colder than the recorded 11 degree said it was. Daytime visibility came down to meters all over the country. Navigation was impossible on the rivers affecting goods and passenger movement. More than the biting cold, soaking into the bones, the eerie atmosphere all around ran an element of panic in the mind.
The most unspecialised of all life forms, man evolved to survive all climatic upheavals. There cannot be - at least should not be - any question of man dying in droves because of temperature shifts. Our casualties to cold are but martyrs to our condition of underdevelopment and socio-economic equations ruled by inequity. They die not because of cold but because of poverty. It is as simple as that.
Shakespeare says, even an winter wind is not as unkind as man's ingratitude. There's a crueller thing. An uncaring society. Our politicians delight in bickering and quarrelling while our people die a beast's death with the third millennium and the 21st Century only two years hence. They are immune to even shaming.
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