Forgotten: (From top) May 2004: protesters chant anti-US and anti-Israeli slogans in Istanbul; January 2001: earthquake victims reach for food near Bhuj; January 2002: detainees guarded at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the detention facility

A few years ago, I learned of something I had never heard of before: El Ni?o. Sure, it had affected our lives but, unfortunately, not devastatingly enough for some of the wise to understand what the Kyoto Protocol?s pledge meant for our planet. In Rio a few years later, Kyoto was shelved once again, while the wise felled millions of trees in the rainforests of Brazil and dumped nuclear waste in an African continent whose inconsequential people would starve if they didn?t allow the wise ones? garbage in. Then I learned another new word: al Qaida.

It didn?t effect a climate change and nor did it send ocean currents spinning into whirlpools. Instead, it played out a Japanese Nintendo game wherein enemy aeroplanes veered off course, startled somnambulant fighter squadrons unused to scrambling and prone to chewing sugar-free gum, and slammed into two towers called Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or so I, while toasting the Maharajkumari of Burdwan on her birthday, in my ignorance of world politics and geography, stupidly thought) and killed thousands of innocent people. The wise who had ignored the rays of knowledge that had descended upon them from heaven, through a hole in the ozone layer they had created and enlarged everyday, now reacted, with all their might, to destroy the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

Apparently the Lord, who inhabited barn houses in the grain fields of the wise and inspired bushels of hope in the lives of innocent (or rather, awesomely ignorant) farmers, had identified an axis of evil and his ?chosen? soldiers were self-appointed to annihilate it, so good might triumph over evil. In Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical Lord of the scriptures had asked his agent to tell the innocent to leave before He struck with fire and brimstone but, this time, the Lord?s army confronted an enemy that it had trained, armed and played chemical and biological tiddlywinks with and a people they had crippled with economic sanctions: therefore, in their crusade to rid the world of satanic demons of mass destruction, they were left with no choice but to kill innocent children and women along with a gallery of faces they printed on playing cards in their simplistic attempt to be simple farmers reaping a harvest in a unilaterally sponsored tournament of coalitionised stud poker in alien killing fields.

Years ago, when I was a suckling at the breast of international recognition, at a banquet in Los Angeles, in aid of the famine in Ethiopia, the cover charge was $1,500 per person. As the ?nobility? of the tinsel, celluloid, media and entertainment world pulled damask napkins over their Rodeo Drive sartorial extravagances, they stared down at silver that augured salads in a million island dressings, Fois Gras from geese in gay Paris and Game P?t? cooked in Cognac. And how fashionable it still is, in some parts, to have black waiters balance a tray over one shoulder, grin white like Satchmores sans trumpets of glory and, swaying to the music, serve. They did, that night.

The 30-piece string orchestra played Strauss? Blue Danube while the glitterati waltzed back to their tables to ponder on the tiny gilded spoon that was placed for them to perhaps explore the gulls? eggs or cockles or mussels gathered by overlooked illegal Chinese migrant labourers (many of whom die fighting the waves on rocks) along the coasts of England, a nation bending over backwards and straining its spine to please the new masters of the universe.

One by one, on each plate was heaped one spoon of rice. You were asked to eat it with that special spoon. For $1,500, that is all that was served that night. The opening bars of another Strauss? Thus Spake Zarathustra, drove home the point that a spoonful of rice was all the people of Ethiopia got to eat, per person, per day.

Geldoff was knighted (as he richly deserved) to the horror of the British aristocracy and today, Great Britain?s generous government has donated ?50 million for that Sumatran quake while over the past year, wagging their tails in the face of millions who took to the streets in protest, they spent nearly ?6 billion to clean up the deserts of Iraq that were an esoteric group?s idea of a threat to humanity.

On Boxing Day this year, I was in the foothills of Darjeeling when I received a call at 0930 from a local grower of mueslex that his other farm in the Andaman?s was reporting a terrible earthquake. Later, I spent a leisurely morning with him walking through hectares of jackfruit, vanilla, sweet lime, tea seed trees and hybrid pumpkin fields and, of course, acres of mueslex for the new generation of discerning breakfasters who would, in my opinion, benefit far more from the Ethiopian diet. The next morning, in the daak edition of a newspaper from Calcutta, I learnt a new word. Tsunami.

By the time the new year crept up on us, I was astonished at the calculated grief expressed by the media, politicians and of course the United States who had dispatched a retiring Powell, with an opportunistic Governor Bush, to investigate how much they could eat into their deficit to appear properly concerned. Back in Phuket on New Year?s Eve, the flesh trade had bounced back for the brave libido of Western hunters and gatherers and new orphans were being exported from Southeast Asia to genuinely sympathetic homes in Europe and America. The Indonesian army in Sumatra was using the wave to quell the insurgents that had plagued them and we in India were pondering the geographical significance of Indira Point that had allegedly been lost forever.

But the world had finally found a celebrity disaster that it could use to show how deeply we felt for mankind. The plunder of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in Rwanda, Sudan, Palestine and West Asia; the neglect, deprivation and humiliation of millions of starving tribal peoples in India; the hapless disaster victims in Latur, Uttarkashi, Bhuj; and the sacrilegious inhumanities perpetrated on Guantanamo Bay detainees, all paled into insignificance: and the world?s acutely immune but proficient syndrome, even our homespun glitterati?s, found an alternative to AIDS to win social accolades with. Meanwhile, to the relief of us all, Justice Banerjee declared that, in another paranormal example of spontaneous combustion, almost 60 people committed suicide within a train bogie in Gujarat and not a single man, woman or child decided to use any one of the four exits available to get out but, instead, locked themselves in to perish and find salvation in the inferno of a Ram-derived euphoria.

In Calcutta, on the heels of a tsunami catastrophe, I received an SMS, in Mirik, inviting me to a New Year?s Eve bash where all the Page 3 celebrities and a smattering of intelligentsia were gathering for a dinner and dance in a bhoomi dedicated to our traditional diversities: how apt, thought I. And around the corner from where I was, one newspaper reported that a leader held a small feast for his disciples and followers where loaves and fish were miraculously replaced by 250 kilograms of chicken, 350 kilograms of mutton, two buffalos, 5,000 kilograms of rice and 7,500 kilograms of vegetables. Is it honestly atypical of us that one hand should donateth while the other simply consumeth unashamedly?