Clicking the flood

A very tragic thing has been upon Pakistan by means of floods and while corporate culture, as it is, can never remain out in the race to market themselves, whatever may happen, they seem not to be alone. It saddens me to report and realize that many budding photographers have started seeing this as an opportunity for capturing good photographs of stricken families, specially kids.

While western world have a lot of sceneries and greenery -clean one, that is- to make those little moments special or add some natural tones in backgrounds of pictures or add green bokeh in background to contrast white skin [works with most of the skin tones, though], we desi people have a lot to pride on too. We have human in their natural habitat, many times desperate for basic necessity too, capture those thousand wrinkles of an elderly, or dirty face of a child whose eyes speaks volumes of innocence. If there pictures speaks of dreamy world, out of books, may be idealistic world at times, our portrays that of reality. Perhaps, that is why every beautiful smile of a child who lives, anywhere, in a third world country, has people flocking over to that image. 

May be I am a cynic, a pessimist and I see negativity in things a lot but I truly pray that these photographers' driving intentions are to aware people of whats happening rather than their ambition to get a photograph recognized internationally and what can guilt people more - even for a minute - than eating and living a good life while a child somewhere is getting sick of eating and drinking mud because thats all it can get.

Photographer on flickr

Irony of opportunity

Even as a child, I have always been the one who would try to find out a good thing in worst case scenarios that would happen to me. I have honor of finding a good thing in loosing my friends, of my first ever heartbreak, even my father's death - which gave someone shock when I expressed it once in front of someone. So, I really understand people who try to look for a positive thing in all the negativity that may be afflicted on them. But last night, it was my time to be shocked, perhaps horrified that would eventually lead to sadness.

I do not belong to the clan of super positive and active youth but I have my contacts with them. One of such organisation messaged me last night about how they will be having a sitting soon to decide on ways to help internally displaced people living in camps in our city. Some of their words were

"We might never get this opportunity to work with almost 21,000 lives."

It struck me as if it was a good thing, to have this opportunity and yes, lets go -gung ho - avail this opportunity. Their intentions must be good - they want to help, make a difference in 21,000 lives - but are their intentions really good - we have IDPs in our city and we may never again have them so lets go there and experience how it feels to work with them, we might even get coverage for that and even if we don't, we can say tomorrow we went to help them.

I know I am unable to express truly how I feel, specially why I feel this total sadness - happens quite a lot with me due to my ideas being abstract - but I hope I am able to tell someone what a difference in your vocabulary can make in what you want to convey. I would not try to be judgmental and let them help now, at least, they want to do something, if it has a positive effect, does it really matter -in the end - what their intention was?