Few tragedies stretch human faith to the breaking point. What happened in South and Southeast Asia must easily rank among those. Of all the shattering images of the tsunami terror what struck me the most was the sight of an Indian girl, barely 3 years old, dressed in a bright yellow dress. She seemed to be in deep sleep. Her serene face did not betray the sheer terror that ought to have seized her when a wall of water felled her. I found it hard to imagine she felt as peaceful as she looked when she was swept off along with hundreds of other children playing on the Tamil Nadu coast.

The site of bodies of children and babies being lined up for cremation even as their parents cried inconsolably was at once poignant and wrenching. What added to the cruel irony was that many of them were children of fishermen who survived on the very ocean that devoured them. One fisherman in India said he would no longer live off the sea since it took his family away. In many parts of coastal India the sea is treated with deference reserved for a pantheon of deities. Worshiping nature is recognition of its inherent unpredictability as it was so staggeringly manifest in the tsunami disaster.

We can never trade one death for another, but sometimes I do wonder whether we can make a pact with Nature that if she must consume human life, she would do so at least with those who have lived some decent length of time. I would not mind trading my life at 43 for a three-year-old girl who had the gumption to play by the seaside unaware of that death rode the waves that day.

We are all used television bringing everything inside our living rooms –– wars, murders, weddings, famines, births and deaths. Looking at the video clips one begins to understand why the death toll has turned out to be as enormous as it has. A recurring theme in many video clips out of the region was people, including children, standing on the shore waiting for waves to strike. In some clips there were young men actually making a game out of running ahead of the gushing waters. It is highly likely that many people got caught because of this. That behavior could be explained by the fact that South Asia and Southeast Asia are not very familiar with the nature of tsunamis. Many of them seriously underestimated the power of what was coming their way. One of the reasons why humans naturally tend to treat water bodies with much less suspicion is because of in everyday life we are so used to water as a life-giving element.

I have seen and reported mass deaths but never have I experienced, albeit from a distance of 10,000 miles, helplessness in the face of nature’s onslaught. I am generally satisfied with rational scientific explanations about phenomena in Nature, including in this case. It is understandable that when something of this scale happens people look for an explanation –– credible, incredible or plain bizarre. There was a news report that suggested that some people in Tamil Nadu believed that the arrest of Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati on suspicion of murder caused such divine wrath.

However pious and guileless one might be this one is hard to swallow.

The notion that the slight to the Shankaracharya’s reputation is more important than the life of a child is not just absurd but downright cruel.

People complain that human memory is short. It is just as well because were we to live with every single memory life would become unlivable.

How many of us remember that on Dec. 26, 2003, exactly a year before this tragedy, an earthquake in Bam, Iran killed over 30,000 people? Since death is inevitable, unavoidable and irrevocable, how you die is just a matter of detail. But such philosophizing is rendered ineffectual in the serene face of the 3-year-old girl.