Missing Flight MH370: Families suffer in silence, on prayer

When the arrival of a child’s school bus gets delayed by a mere 30 minutes, the parents immediately go into a panic mode, trying to search for their wards’ whereabouts. 239 individuals from 15 different nations have literally vanished from the sky after they boarded the flight MH370 on March 8. One can imagine the plight of their families.

After an agonizing 12 days nobody has any answers to give to the grieving families. Imagine the trauma these loved ones are going through every nanosecond, and in every breath they take. Any small piece of information manages to raise their hopes and fears and confusion all at one time.

The globetrotting Australian couple or the flight engineer young boy or the Indian engineer, each one of them has his unique identity and a different background. In the time of tragedy all families are huddled together in the hotel lobby, with the grief bonding them to each other.

It’s not easy to handle uncertainty day-after-day. Humans by nature cannot handle anything that is unexplainable or related to the unknown. We all need a proper closure to move on or else we get stuck in the sequence of events.

The anger directed towards the Malaysian airline is totally justified, imagine the plane went missing after 41 minutes and the families got to know of it from news stories on the television. Nobody felt the need to inform them right away. There are several unanswered questions:

• Why were the phones of the passengers ringing?
• Who switched off the aircraft communication system and the flight transponder? Why?
• What were the two gentlemen from the middle east doing on the plane with stolen passports?
• Where the hell is the plane?
• Did Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53 and co-pilot Abdul Hamid, 27 go rogue?

We don’t think a grieving old father or the mother whose son was on the flight actually is bothered about a scientific solution or explanation to this incident. They just want to know if their flesh and blood is going to come back in their arms or not.

On 20^th morning there was news flash on every channel that Australians had spotted floating debris in their waters and were sending a team to verify. You know how that translates to a waiting family, it’s over. Debris means that the flight has crashed or sunk and any hopes of finding survivors drowned with it.

Hope is a very strong feeling and giving a dead man the right burial and respect of umpteen importance in many societies. After all the talk of state-of-art technology, settlements on Mars, 26 nations with their best teams and equipment have failed to find the answers for these paranoid loved ones.

To add to the already high voltage human tragedy, people are now suggesting that the plane was abducted by aliens, Isn’t that going a little too far? But there are also a few highlights to the story. Like the tweet from Liverpool to a waiting daughter of support. Or the open letter from the families who went through a similar tragedy a few years ago, offering word of sympathy and asking them to be strong.

Let’s stop for a minute and say a prayer for those experiencing the most agonizing wait of their lives. Hoping that it ends soon, on a good note.