The Great ’Exodus’: Doomsday scare drives labourers away from Coastal region

The Great ’Exodus’: Doomsday scare drives labourers away from Coastal region

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangalore, Mar 17, 2011: Even as the true horror of the killer tsunami that hit Japan is beginning to sink in, terrified daily wage labourers in coastal Karnataka are busy packing their bags to rush back to their native villages in North Karnataka. The reason: They are scared stiff that the end of the world has come and the Arabian Sea is going swallow the coastal region for lunch this week end!

The fact that the moon will be nearing the earth on March 19 has added to their fears. Everyday, private buses and KSRTC buses are getting packed with North Karnataka workers returning to the safety of their homes. Those who are still left behind are making frantic preparations to decamp town. Around 1000 workers are believed to have fled Udupi in the past 4 days.  As a result of this, the region is facing severe shortage of work force. 

 

 

The coastal towns of Mangalore and Udupi depend heavily on work force from North Karnataka owing to shortage of local labourers. The population of people from North Karnataka has risen in the coastal towns in the past few years. Usually, labourers from North Karnataka are spotted boarding and alighting from buses in Udupi and Malpe. However, the number of these people has declined in the past few days.

But not every labourer is as cowardly. Anneakka, from Bagalkote in North Karnataka, who works in Kodialguthu area as a house cleaner has bravely chosen to stay behind with her son Ganesha. Says she: “All our people have fled town fearing for their lives. But I am not going. If the world is going to end, then it does not matter whether I die here or in my hometown. I have decided to stay here and die with the locals if it be so.”

The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami is not the only factor that has triggered the mass hysteria among the labourers. Two years back the release of the Hollywood apocalypse movie ‘2012’ was accompanied by a viral publicity campaign postulating the end of the world in the year 2012. E-mails with ghastly photos of the impending disasters (which were actually stills from the movie) were circulated before the release of the film on 11th November, 2009. Many people who saw these mails believed the prediction to be true and fed the general scare that the world would end some day soon.

 

 

Just as the fear was beginning to fade away, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck, thereby once again rekindling the mass hysteria. Adding to the rumour mill is the impending ‘Supermoon’ phenomenon on Saturday, March 19th. This phenomenon, which is technically called ‘lunar perigee’ is an natural astronomical event that happens when the moon reaches its absolute closest point to Earth. On March 19, the moon will be only 221,567 miles away from our planet. The moon’s distance varies each month between approximately 354,000 km (220,000 miles) and 410,000 km (254,000 miles).[

There were supermoons in 1955, 1974, 1992 and 2005, and these years had their share of extreme weather conditions, too. Two days after online warnings that the Supermoon might trigger disasters, the devastating Japanese tsunami forced everyone to think - could the movement of the moon cause natural calamities? However scientists have dismissed any connection between the lunar activity and the natural calamities on earth, pointing out that the variation in the moon’s distance from the earth is negligible in scale.

 

 

The term supermoon was coined by astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979, defining it as “...a new or full moon which occurs with the Moon at or near (within 90% of) its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit (perigee). In short, Earth, Moon and Sun are all in a line, with Moon in its nearest approach to Earth.”

The term supermoon is not widely accepted or used within the astronomy or scientific community, who prefer the term perigee-syzygy.

Meanwhile astrologers and rumour mongers are doing brisk business, cashing in on this lucrative windfall. Fear of end of the world is one of Man’s deepest primordial fears. Mass hysteria over this fear surfaces with regular frequency, coinciding with ‘magic’ numbers like the year 1999, 2000 or speculation over strange sounding names like Y2K Menace and Mayan Calendar Prediction.

On October 30, 1938, a radio adaptation of ‘The War of the Worlds’ by H. G. Wells created one of the most famous occurrence of mass hysteria when listeners mistook the radio programme to be a real alarm of attack by aliens from Mars.

In 1997, the Kannada weekly ‘Taranga’ had published an article predicting Pralaya (Doomsday) and this article had triggered mass hysteria through the coastal districts.