When the world came tumbling down

Team From Kochi

Debris of buildings that were destroyed by earthquake on April 25 and 26. The pictures were taken by Babu Vipin Chandran, a former photographer of The Hindu.

loud crash and a sudden blackout and everything came crashing down!

Babu Vipin Chandran, a former photographer with The Hindu , is yet to recover from the shock of seeing people being buried underneath the rubble of buildings collapsed in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. “For a moment, the thoughts of an earthquake came to my mind. Another split second and the building where I stood seconds before disappeared behind a plummeting curtain of dust and debris’’, he recalled.

Babu, who went to Kathmandu with a 60-member pilgrim group including 40 women from Kochi, was inside a curio shop near the famous Pashupathinath temple when the first quake hit the Himalayan region. “It all started with some thunderous bangs around 11.56 a.m and the shop owner started shouting 'Bhago Bhago’. It gave way to screams and as I ran to an open ground, the brick buildings in the temple’s neighbourhood were completely demolished’’, he said.

The pilgrims, under the aegis of Bhaktha Seva Sangham in Kochi, had reached Kathmandu on April 24 midnight for a visit to the Pashupathinath temple.

Still incredulous at surviving being buried under the rubbles, 64-year-old Kanakalatha Mohan from Kochi, another member of the same group, said she could not believe it passed her over without any major damages. “I was taking a walk to the Devpuri Baba’s Ashram behind the temple. The ground was moving, things were sliding all around and I was thrown off my feet to a canal nearby, breaking my left leg in the process”, she said.

Though her fellow members rushed to a hospital nearby, the hospital authorities declined to treat her citing lack of medicines.

The team members, though scattered following the quake, regrouped later upon reaching the hotel where they had stayed. “The hotel owner did not permit us to stay indoors, fearing powerful aftershocks that have not ceased. Later, we camped in an open ground nearby, cuddling each other against the chilly Himalayan night-time temperatures’’, K.R. Krishnan, leader of the group, explained.

C.H. Ashalatha, a former professor at the Kozhikode Medical College, said she could see a whole lot of families sleeping outside in that night. “The houses are gone or they're too afraid to go back’’, she said.

The team, however, did not have to struggle for food because they had taken a cook along them and had stocked sufficient quantity of rice.

At the crack of the dawn, they left for the Kathmandu airport. But seeing the long queue of Indians there, they decided to take a road trip. “Even that was not easy as we encountered a couple of landslides mid-way while none of the hotels along the way permitted us to enter,” Subramanian, another member of the group said.