The Big City

I just got back from Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. One of the stories that turned up while I was out there was this one about the baby called Tsunami.

The problem with covering this disaster was that there weren’t that many developments in the story, apart from the rising casualty figures. So we had to keep finding different ways of talking about the same thing without sounding repetitive. When I heard about this baby it sounded like an interesting way of focussing in on one family’s experiences of the disaster and then maybe talking about the different ways that people try to cope with what happened to them.

We found the camp where baby Tsunami was staying fairly easily. A German tv crew with whom we had been chatting about the story at breakfast were already there filming a sequence. The set-up in the camp started to seem a bit strange to me pretty quickly. All the other camps we’d visited were quite well-organised on an infomal sort of basis. The volunteers at this one all had laminated id cards with photos and seemed very friendly with a couple of police men who were strolling around. There was no police presence at any of the other camps. Then a very charismatic man dressed all in white came over to us and started explaining that the camp was being run by his organisation, the Art of Living. He said that the baby’s mother was asleep but that we could do an interview with the father. He was also very excited about the Germans who he said were going to raise a lot of money for his organisation with a telethon. Meanwhile the father was standing nearby, looking very stressed and surrounded by three or four men who were talking to him intensely, one with a hand on his shoulder.

I told the reporter I was working with that the whole thing seemed dodgy to me and she said that she had been told that the decision to name the baby Tsunami had been made by an Art of Living committee. We decided not to do the story. I’m not sure if the Germans did or not, someone from AP certainly did.

I found a clip from Fox News on the Art of Living site which contains an out-of-vision interview with someone who sounds very like the man we talked to at the camp. What Fox didn’t ask him about was his organisation’s procedures for dealing with the people who arrive at camps like his. Professional disaster relief workers all agree on the importance of structured medical examination and record keeping in order to prevent and keep track of serious diseases, to prevent the outbreak of epidemics. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, he said people were looked at by a local doctor when they arrived. Despite his claims that Art of Living are a well established aid organisation they didn’t seem to know what they were doing to me. They are at best well-meaning and at worst dangerous. Apart from the other issues, if it’s true that they named baby Tsunami as a cynical publicity stunt then I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about them in the future.