ABSTRACT
George Harrison's 1971 anthem – penned for a benefit concert he and Ravi Shankar organized for the child refugees from Bangladesh's bloody birth – etched for ever that evocative name in the mind of my generation. Seventeen years on, I sat in a Buckinghamshire church listening to English children invoking that name again, in prayers for other children, victims of the latest tragedy to afflict that most disaster-prone land. The monsoon floods of 1988 killed over a thousand and rendered millions homeless, and in so doing had reached children the world over, in the way that few events have the biblical awfulness to do. “Something we can't neglect, something I can't forget”, as George had sung. Yet, apart from prayer and pocket money, there seems precious little the ordinary mortal can do to alleviate the lot of a people who appear to have more than their fair share of flood, famine, typhoon and tragedy. The helicopter-borne camera, bearing down upon acres of human distress, produces a god-like view of the planet, and a guiltily unspoken but comforting assurance in our ample armchairs that many, if not most, are worse off than us and deserving of our Olympian compassion. But fatalistic assumptions about Bangladesh owe more to the hyperbole of a popular press – obsessed with the bad news which makes good news – and that panoramic portrayal of disaster so beloved of television news-mongers, than to historical inevitability.
