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The plight of the castaway caught in a desert island has always fascinated us – Robinson Crusoe was a bestseller because of that curiosity and we all avidly read the psychological exploration of group dynamics in Lord of the Flies, where schoolboys fall apart morally when shipwrecked on a lone island.
In more modern times, we have had Tom Hanks essay the role in two completely different settings – in The Castaway (a classic desert island space) and The Terminal (isolated in a busy 21st century airport).
In 2013, the theme was taken to its ultimate boundary – outer space – with the film Gravity where Sandra Bullock and George Clooney essayed their Sunita Williams-Butch Wilmore roles as American astronauts who attempt to return to Earth after the destruction of their Space Shuttle in orbit.
This horror-fascination came home to roost in June 2024 when Sunita and Butch were declared stuck in space because of a shuttle malfunction and Nasa scrambled to rescue them. The world agonised and then rejoiced when the pair made safe touchdown last week.
What keeps us riveted to such stories is the imagined sense of isolation and the possibility of no return to loved ones and the community.
That cheesy old phrase about humans being social animals is true and even introverts thrive on the emotional infrastructure that society provides for them. And you know what? You don’t have to go to outer space or into Amazonian forests to get lost or stranded. You may have a desperate migrant in your neighbourhood waiting to go back home or re-connect with his family.
Why, in the oceans around us, hundreds of abandoned ships are afloat, with abandoned seafarers.
2024 has been listed as the worst year on record for seafarer abandonment. Issues such as unpaid wages, lack of provisions and abusive working conditions persist, exacerbated by ships flying flags of convenience to evade regulations.
Just take the case of the Indian migrant population in the Gulf, which is the largest expat community in the region. It has expanded 11-fold over the last four decades, from 800,000 in 1983 to 3.3 million by 2001 and 8.8m in 2022, the latest available data.
A significant portion of these migrants are from Kerala and the migration process has deeply shaped and influenced the community, family and social set-up in that state. A similar process is currently being observed in Telengana, from where more recent unskilled and semi-skilled workers are being recruited.
In the ‘nineties when cable TV brought 24x7 content to our homes, Kerala cable news operators used to run Missing Persons reports where families of GCC migrants used to make heart-rending appeals to their family members to return home. Often these missing persons would not have connected with family for decades and simply vanished.
One community social worker says that this is because the persons who went missing were often semi-skilled blue-collar workers who migrated with dreams of settling their family, building a home and a small fortune. But the sheer grinding loneliness and monotony of their lives in their host country pushed them off the rails and after a couple of years at the most, they simply chose to abscond from their responsibilities.
And what about the returnees? There are people who fall through the cracks of the community into health issues, substance abuse, debt and mental illness. When they are unable to care for themselves, they turn to the community here for help to return.
Unfortunately, very often the abandoned families no longer want to take them back and the community workers have to find care homes for these migrants who have, in turn, been abandoned.
Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore were, in fact, the lucky ones.
They had the world cheering for their return and the richest man in the world charged with bringing them back, no expenses spared. There – that puts our bleeding hearts in perspective – does it not?
meeraresponse@gmail.com
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