Living in an era of Tragedy Porn

So here we are. Living in Mumbai, India. April 2021. The country is metaphorically on fire. What this means in reality is hundreds of thousands of newly diagnosed covid sufferers every day – and that’s only their reported numbers – thousands dying, and a broken healthcare system resulting in oxygen shortages in hospitals, lack of beds, and funeral pyres lighting up car parks because the crematoriums are overwhelmed.

Yet, and I don’t want to sound flippant because these scenes you see on the international news are happening and are truly tragic, and yet…

Nothing can take away the extreme suffering of so many people here in India. It’s heartbreaking. It’s almost incomprehensible. It’s so awfully real. The yet is that we feed off this heartbreak, this death, this loss. Tragedy Porn. Addictive, destructive. Our collective consciousness feeding the beast, like rubber necks passing a car smash. We scroll. We watch. The unfolding horror of it all captivating our imaginations.

And in and amongst it all we sit, this expat family who had been inside and online for a year, a fascinating case study for our friends and family to gawk at, part of the unfolding scenes, because we are here. But we’re not here, not really. As expats, in Mumbai, living in a mid-rise apartment, we can afford to get the vaccine in a private hospital, our groceries delivered by some poor guy who is risking his life to go to the crowded markets to stock his vegetable stall to make a few rupees for every kilo sold. We, too, watch the tragedy porn, unable to go out onto the streets to help for fear of contracting the virus that is killing the thousands and thousands of people each day. The numbers are 10 to 30 times more than reported, that’s what is estimated. Instead of 350,000 a day it’s more like 3.5 million or even 10 million. In a county of 1.3 billion you could believe it. Physical distancing is not a thing here, and covid fatigue set in long ago.

Four weeks ago it was ‘post pandemic this’ and ‘out of the tunnel that’. Oh the follies of man, we who think we can control the beast. The beast of the disease that rages on. And our tragedy porn addiction rages with it. And we sit in our ivory towers, wanting to help, but impotent, like Rapunzel, the damsel in distress who is safe in her loneliness, and tragic in her distance. And our friends push their anxieties about the disease towards us, the actors, who are part of the drama just because we are here. And we absorb the anxieties into our already heightened states, thankful for the love, but at the same time wishing the comments of ‘you should come home’ would be replaced with ‘how are you?’, but perhaps not really because answering that question might open up the floodgates of emotions we are trying to contain, because we are here.

But we’re not here, not really. We are observers, just like you, watching the tragedy unfold like an addiction, unable to help, just watching, and watching, and watching.