Fasi Zaka, host of Indus Music’s very popular and offbeat show On the Fringe just posted this message on the Bandbaja Orkut community and I thought I’d post it here too:

Dear All,

I am using the forum to urge everyone to donate as much as they possibly can for the earthquake’s victims.

Just a few things I hope people will consider when looking into their hearts.

This tragedy in a skewed one on many fronts, especially because the iconography of the reporting of the tragedy is fundamentally flawed, and dangerously so.

All major newspapers carried the fallen marghalla towers as the symbol of this trajedy.

Tragic as it is, it is receiving disproportionate amounts of help.

Please do not visualize Marghalla as the only source of your grief in the trajedy, we must recognize that very few of us have been obsessed with the amount of schools that have collapsed because we all internalized long ago that they are supposed to be built with inferior quality.

Marghalla was supposed to be for people like us, resistant to the tribulations of the less well off.

The danger is the “invisible” poor in the outlying areas far more affected may not catch our sympathies because they are less reported on. Secondly, the trajedy absolved us of responsibility because everyone thought it was only Marghalla that was affected, and that those people could take care of their own.

We are now seeing that much of Kashmir and the northern parts of the NWFP have been levelled.

We could be induced into a false sense of achievement with each rescue within the fallen tower because that is far from whats happening in the rest of the country.

What was once thought of nature violently exposing government corruption in the case of the towers’ building material is now emerging as a bonafide emergency.

Hopefully most of us will be pulled out of the lull caused by the incorrect reporting in the beginning caused by the “proximity effect” of having most news stations in Islamabad concentrating only on the immediately observable.

Fasi