It should have been the best of times for newsrooms across the world. A gigantic, grotesque catastrophe that had readers actually reading, viewers transfixed, blogs overwhelmed by ?unique visitors?. A tragedy one could cover without being ?embedded? or facing friendly fire. A calamity that came so unencumbered with troubling ideological issues that there was not even a question of taking sides. No one complained when nature was dubbed the villain, and the human spirit the hero.

Yet, it?s been a strangely difficult week for newsmen everywhere. As the waves receded, the new year rolled in and no one was sure how exactly to marry the traditional demands of the season with the numbing, gut-wrenching reality of the time. For many, the answer lay in the ?feel good? stories of heroism, love and charity. In the celebrities who adopted villages or spent New Year?s Eve with the victims at Port Blair. In the babies born rather than in the thousands dead.

Still the bodies piled up and raised their own questions, especially for the Western media. When it comes to their own tragedies like 9/11, thundered Ashok Malik in The Indian Express last Thursday, it?s all ?respect for the dead?. But for grizzly images of bloated Asian bodies, it?s ?open season?. ?For western media,? wrote Jeremy Seabrook in Friday?s Guardian, ?it was clear the lives of the foreign tourists have a different order of importance? from the ?locals?. Others have wondered, how many dead do we need to see?

It is such a Western concern. How can one sanitize a cataclysmic event like this? How else could one have brought home to people far far away what has really happened? Especially in a part of the world where deaths and disasters are part of life? Maybe we should be just happy in the unprecedented outpouring of help that such sights and sounds have evoked.

But aid is never quite free of controversy. In America, the UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland?s comment of rich nations being ?stingy? became a hot button media issue with many weighing into The New York Times for its December 30 editorial that answered the question, ?Are we stingy?? with an emphatic ?Yes.?

Meanwhile, the cyberworld, already leaps ahead of the old media, has begun hinting at troubles to come. Sites created in response to the tragedy have begun posting notes that warn people not to donate to charities sponsored by the RSS and inadvertantly ?fund hate?.

The fury of the tsunami may have been beyond race or creed or colour. Man?s (and media?s) response to it will not be so.

Blogging unlimited

Peter Griffin doesn?t know what to say. He is of course enormously pleased at the success of the blog he and his friends started simply to do something to help (and hence called tsunamihelp.blogspot). He is equally embarrassed at the sudden celebrity status it has brought them.

They had expected, at best, a thousand visitors or so. They have had around a million in the eight days or so since they began posting news and helpline numbers and information on missing people and relief requirements and related links that so many evidently wanted but didn?t know whom to ask.

It has meant Griffin and his friends having to work round the clock, putting day jobs on hold. It has also led to so many more in different parts of the world coming to their aid that has been quite overwhelming. And it has shown the possibilities of the blog as never before.

?The Baghdad blogger showed us the way,? Griffin said in his gentle way. ?In 9/11 there were individual bloggings, people telling friends they were fine. But this is the first time that people around the world have hopped in, collaborating.? This is a movement without borders that can only grow. Something the old media, print or television, will never be able to match.