The killer wave and its aftermath
Suresh Nambath
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First person account of the tsunami from the time this journalist was shocked out of his holiday in Sri Lanka
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TSUNAMI — 7 Hours That Shook the World: Satinder Bindra; HarperCollins Publishers, 1A, Hamilton House, Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 395.
The magnitude and spread of the 2004 tsunami overwhelmed governments and relief workers. No other disaster in recorded history took so many lives in so many countries in so short a time. For news networks too, the tsunami provided a unique challenge: to get the big picture from the small stories, and to flesh the headline out with individual sufferings.
Tsunami: 7 Hours That Shook the World is the first person account of Satinder Bindra, CNN's New Delhi Bureau chief, from the time he was shocked out of his holiday in Sri Lanka through his reporting of the destruction left behind by the tsunami.
Active agent
This is no first-to-hit-the-shelves book on the tsunami. Bindra offers, not a retelling of the tsunami events, but a narrative of his reporting. The reporter in the book is not the typical omnipresent, but passive, storyteller. Bindra is an active agent in his story. The entry-point to the biggest story of his career is a text message on the cell phone — `Please call me it's urgent' — from the CNN's representative in Sri Lanka, Iqbal Athas. From then on, he lets the reader into every detail of his life as a reporter: from his tying up with his New Delhi bureau on logistics, to his going through a `laminated checklist' attached to the outside of his bag before packing.
Unlike the usual scenario of the reporter landing safely at the scene of the disaster, Bindra was already in the thick of things. When a wave came up to the wall of his hotel, he confesses, "Journalism wasn't the priority any more."
Although the book gains immensely from the first person story-telling format, he also allows his characters to tell their story. Father Dayalan Sanders, who saved 26 children in his orphanage by cramming them into a boat and asking the boatman to turn the boat into the tsunami rather than outrun the wave, Tharesh Liyanage, who saw his mother being swept away, but managed to cling on to a metal grill in a warehouse, Gamini Sumitanayakar, whose hotel built with the money he saved as a waiter in the Gulf was destroyed by the tsunami, and Chandrasiri, who managed to get out of a train caught in the tsunami, all bring drama and emotion to the narrative.
The human angle
He also manages to convey the pressures of journalists always on the look out for a compelling story.
There is an interesting story of the excitement generated by an old man Sirisena, who was found in the debris of a neighbourhood destroyed by the tsunami. Reporters and cameramen crowded around Sirisena in the hospital waiting for him to tell his story of survival. However, when the police started speculating that he might have been a looter who got trapped inside the building he set out to rob, and some people recalled seeing him walk around after the tsunami, the news hounds quickly dropped Sirisena from their list of tsunami heroes.
Bindra also records how Peraliya in Sri Lanka became a big draw for journalists, most of who went about `stomping around' in utter disregard of the feelings of the grieving locals.
The author also makes good use of material from other CNN reporters covering Andaman and Nicobar Islands and south India to give the book a rounded look. In the final chapter, the author tries to argue that the tsunami had changed the concept of broadcasting disasters.
Journalism was no longer removed and distant, but immediate and human. The journalists were part of the story, equally vulnerable, and moved by what they were reporting.
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