Radiation Hazard
Sridhar Suresh Babu, the lost playwright
Your thoughts make your decisions. Your decisions make your actions. Your actions make you.
So by transitive property, your thoughts make you.
I was a normal kid, until that day... That fateful day...
It rained ash from the sky, we rejoiced, we played with it. We didn't know the dangers it possessed or it's origins.
We were kids after all.
The very next day, many of my friends fell sick. They vomited and had fever. The men of the village attributed it to the food we ate. They were adults, they probably knew the best. They gave us some medicines, we ate them.
I woke up the next day to the sound of sirens and loud announcements. I could sense a palpable confusion with dad and mom. Men, not from our village, in hazmat suits, entered the village. They asked us to evacuate the village as there had been any accident in the power plant nearby. We evacuated later that evening.
We are now a family without home.
For the next month we were at a camp setup by the government. At the end of the month mom and dad died. They didn't even let me see them one last time. They called it radiation poisoning. Apparently it would be harmful for me if I see them. I didn't know what it was back then.
I was a kid after all.
Now, I have cancer in my lung, liver and pancreas. The doctors tell me it is the late effect of my radiation exposure at childhood. My demon is still haunting me.
Your thoughts make you, something my father used to say.
No dad, you are wrong.
It isn't my fault that our family is shredded like this. It isn't my fault that the nuclear plant exploded. It isn't my fault that the government didn't anticipate such an incident and wasn't prepared to handle it adequately.
My thoughts didn't make me.
We are all caught in a complex web of causality. They way our lives go isn't decided just by us. Multiple factors interact to decide what happens. The pursuit of power, money and strength ruins the life of many, the expendable simpletons like us.
My life is not in my hands.
It isn't an universal dictum that good people get good things. Wake up! Life is much more complex and complicated that that!! Lots of forces interplay and screw you around....
All I wanted was a normal life with my family. My dad, my mom and me. A simple life. All of it gone to dust, over a simple negligence.
I was kid after all and I deserved better....













