I am currently in Kathmandu and it has been terrible not because of my personal situation, but because I can see the suffering of the people and have also been hearing about the stories of the victims. Although there are countless people dead and dying in Kathmandu city, it is in the mountainous regions that there is real suffering. There are stories of overcrowded hospitals, with even spirit being used to sanitise open wounds and people being left in the corridors until hospital staff can attend to them. Before the quake struck, I had recently returned from a spiritual retreat in Yolmo, a remote mountain valley. I have heard from people I have met since the quake that whole villages have been laid to waste, food is running out and water is contaminated. A friend of mine has been making trips into the Yolmo Valley, as far as she can get, which is only to the mouth of the valley. Although she only has first aid training, she is practically acting as a doctor. In all this, it is moving to see the stoic resourcefulness and patience of the Nepali people.
Tom Greensmith,Camp: Kathmandu
India is said to be home to thousands of the super rich and the upper middle class, a class of society in which each can easily contribute a lakh of rupees to Nepal. The governments of Nepal and India alone cannot solve the problems. Prime Minister Narendra Modi should appeal to the rich to come forward with their contributions, in cash and kind.
K.S. Krishnamurthy,Bengaluru
One’s heart goes out to the thousands of Nepalis who have lost their lives and property, which shows that there is a huge task ahead of rebuilding infrastructure. All this calls for massive monetary assistance. Perhaps the cricketers from India and from across the globe, currently playing in the Indian Premier League, should come forward and make generous donations from their hefty match fees.
R. Sivakumar,Chennai
The evacuation of over 2,400 Indians by the Indian Air Force, while impressive, contributes little by way of relief to the devastated country. To put it bluntly, pleasure-seeking Indian tourists have only caused a drain of considerable government resources, time and attention. Considering the scale of destruction, massive and multisided relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction work remain to be undertaken; it is obvious that the greatest share of the work and the longest engagement in it will fall to India in view of its close multi-tiered relationship with Nepal and the long-bordered geography. India should consider this as its own calamity and throw itself into relief work on a war footing.
There must be a spirit of total identification and all political parties and sections of the public should strengthen the hands of the government.
A.N. Lakshmanan,Bengaluru
I did my schooling in Kathmandu where I spent the first 20 years of my life. I cherish memories and emotions attached to many of the heritages sites. Those were the days when every evening, a group of us used to explore the precincts of many of the structures. The visuals of many of these temples, now rubble, break me. There is no doubt that Nepal will stand again but it requires strong and continuous support of the people of India.
Imran Ahmad,New Delhi
The disaster in Nepal, after the floods in Uttarakhand, is another wake-up call for India to rethink its “one size fits all” model of urban development (“Watching a city crumble”, April 28). There is a growing tendency to transpose models that are workable in the plains to the hills by building big complexes, dams and multi-storied towers.
The consequences are evident in the fragile, disaster-prone Himalayas. Disasters cannot be averted, but with much planning can be mitigated to reduce their impact. This event raises the question how far India is equipped to tackle such disasters and what changes are to be made to planning in order to customise them to specific geographical conditions.
Thileeban C.,Hyderabad
