Earthquake Scares !!

Surviving A Quake!!

Well, this post is quite late!! I was supposed to get this turned in on time along with 3 reviews for a magazine last month, honest, but then we had this little, creepy earthquake off the coast in Indonesia and then the subsequent Tsunami scares (especially about Japan) on the net and TV, countless twitter warnings, radio announcements,…maybe you read about it...

I was stuck in my beach front hotel room – momentarily feeling dizzy when it happened!! Seconds later, the alarms and car horns go wild, the phones start ringing, the road below is an explosion of worried people and I have this crazy neighbor – a harried American expat in my adjoining room banging my door – wanting to know if it indeed was a Bin Laden quake in action !! Apparently someone had tweeted him this!!

Anyway, apart from the typical “world spinning around you” feeling and “things falling down all over” picture, I was very lucky in that none of my stuff was damaged nor did I get hurt but it did knock me off my stride for not just that day but for about a full week. It was the first time I had felt an earthquake in full glory!! C’mon, a 6.9 on the Richter scale followed by constant tremors & aftershocks (both terrifying) puts a lot of things into a new perspective - more so especially when you are on the 38^rd floor with no electricity, alone, confused and they also switch off the lifts for I am told precautionary reasons (probably, they don't want you to run away without paying the bills! )

Well, it hasn’t changed my mind about travelling to quake prone countries or staying in beach front high rise hotels or on very high floors (a personal choice), but it did make me think some more about the role the Internet and the Media plays in my life, and how I, (and all of us) use it to help make sense of ourselves and our lives..in our own different ways. The incessant chatter on the net and on the Telly immediately after the quake was an insightful episode but that's the sort of reflective essay that's better suited for an other time or another blog...for now, let's say that it was pretty ‘nightmare of the elm street’ like scary and I am happy to be alive to tell you this story!!