An article on the Straits Times

Read this on the Straits Times today, an essay by Asad Latif, titled "Amid tsunami hell, a glimpse of heaven"

"THE words have all but become a signature line: Hell is other people.

Spoken by a character in No Exit, a play by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the line captures the claustrophobia and hopelessness of a banal world where people loathe one another from the shallow depths of their fickle being and false words seduce communication.

There is more to hellishness, of course.

Hellish characters have peopled history and they lurk in the dark alleys of the present.

From Nazis, fascists and perpetrators of genocide, to those who profit from slave labour, to intellectuals who rationalise injustice or are silent about it, hell is these people.

Hell is ordinary people as well: corrupt bureaucrats, black marketeers who profit from food scarcity, the denizens of Third World high-rises who sleep peacefully while, in the slums below, children cry out in malarial delirium.

Hell is anybody who glides through life, gracefully immune to the blighted reality of millions of other lives.

But such is the destiny of man that if hell is other people, so is heaven.

Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a calamity to prove this truth.

The year 2004 ended with a resounding reminder of the truth.

Like the Greek Furies, the cataclysmic tsunami fell upon its victims with the pagan force of nature gone berserk.

Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, residents, foreigners, animals, trees, homes, shops, boats, cars - whatever stood in the way of the maddened waves was snatched up and swept along with manic abandon.

Everyone and everything was dispensable. What mattered was how angry the waves were, how far inland they invaded, how long they battered human habitation before retiring, clawing screaming innocents away from life and land.

The tsunami has left in its wake an epic trail of death and destruction.

The dead are gone. It falls on the living to wail, powerless to give even decent burials to family and friends who were torn out of their lives and, sometimes, their very hands.

Mankind stands reminded: Nature is more powerful than him. Nature is supreme. Nature's hidden moods determine the Darwinian rituals of life and death.

But mankind refuses to be humbled, to bow to tyrant nature's decree and give up on itself.

Even though battered by an earthquake that may have permanently accelerated the Earth's rotation and altered the global map, humans have reached out to one another in the very midst of their collective punishment.

Heaven is such people.

Stories abound about them.

People who lost almost everything themselves offered clothes to protect the modesty of a couple whose clothes were ripped off by the ferocity of nature.

There have been reports of looting, pillaging and theft, of course. It does not take long after the waters have subsided for human nature to sink to its lowest common denominator.

But far more numerous have been uplifting stories of human solidarity.

My colleague Ben Nadarajan reports from Sri Lanka about the head monk of a Buddhist temple on a hill. The monk had looked with disdain at the people pandering to the foreigners who lazed on the beach, played in the water, and gathered around the seafood and the nightlife.

But since the calamity struck, the monk has turned host to about 1,000 of the same people, whether tourists or locals.

The stricken have found a place to stay at three temples.

Truly have houses of worship fulfilled their human mandate as well.

Over in Iran, where thousands were killed by an earthquake in Bam a year ago, an Associated Press report mentions struggling survivors thinking of the victims in this part of Asia.

'Some school kids came to me and asked how they could help people in South-east Asia,' a primary school teacher said.

Across the world, including in Singapore, the response to appeals for aid has been overwhelming.

Looking at the outpouring of human solidarity, it is impossible not to think that heaven is other people.

Heaven is other people working for the community, compassion and comradeship. These are the higher possibilities of the human condition.

People are working for them.

For me, the tsunami has brought about a rather strange conversion.

Coarsened by the hellish suffering that has become commonplace around a six billion-strong globe, I have wondered for some time whether there are not too many humans around for their own good.

Famine, pestilence, war, civil war, religious strife, inhumanity to the old, the infirm, children: these multiplying attacks on humanity are fuelled, after all, by the sheer numbers of people who are willing to kill, or are helpless to fight and are therefore ready to die.

Perhaps a world of three billion would have fewer monsters and victims, I thought. The scale of human iniquity might go down even if the propensity towards violence did not, I thought.

Then came the tsunami - and the heartbreaking images.

And this old, calloused heart of mine stirred. I saw each death for what it was - one too many.

The vile idea that there are too many humans vanished.

I looked more carefully for signs of life in the murderous epic. I found them in stories of humans holding hands and facing the ravages of chance.

I realised: Hell might be other people, but so is heaven.

And heaven is more powerful than hell."

Maybe there is hope for the human race after all. Score one for the humanist good guys.

Don. PS, Happy new year, may pure, simple humanity take the wheel this year and let compassion flow forth.